The Blacklist Declassified

🔴 Season 7 Unanswered Questions

 
Last Updated: 5/22/2020
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Season 7 Unanswered ?s: ⇊ Page Down ⇊
Season 6 Unanswered ?s: (with comments)
Season 5 Unanswered ?s: (with comments)
Season 4 Unanswered ?s: (with comments)
Season 3 Unanswered ?s: (original version)
Season 2 Unanswered ?s: (original version)
Season 1 (I did not start watching until Season 2)
 

 
🔻Major Themes❗️⋘ Go to Discussion

1. Lizzie’s Choice
2. Red’s Illness
3. Dembe’s Loyalty
4. Red’s True Identity
5. Dom’s Fate
6. Red and Katarina Love/Hate Relationship
7. The Sikorsky Archive
8. Ressler and Liz’s Vulnerabilities and Relationship
9. Red’s Family
10. The Night of the Fire

🔴 Questions:

1. What is Red’s mysterious illness?
2. At the end of 7:18, Red talks with Dembe’s imam and said there would be “no encore” when it came to Dembe’s loyalty. Is Dembe safe?
3. Why does Red plan to give his assets to Liz? Why did he tell Marvin Gerard she wasn’t just a cop but the “daughter of Katarina Rostova.” Why would that be a qualification?
4. Red tells Cooper he won’t kill ‘Liz’s mother,’ yet he seems ready to kill Katarina. At least Liz thinks so. If not, why is he trying to get to her? Is Katarina really Liz’s mother?
5. Why did Katarina kiss Red at the end of Season 6? Why did Red fall for it? What was Red’s relationship with Katarina? Why did Katarina help Red in the Season 7 Finale?
6. Is Red Russian or American? Why is he so close to Dom? Was Red a double agent?
7. What were the men looking for on the night of the fire? The Fulcrum (interface unit) or the Sikorsky archive? Are they related? Both are described as blackmail files.
8. What happened to the Cabal, anyway? Red supposedly joined it, but it hasn’t referred to it much lately. Is Katarina still involved?
9. Red told Liz he was there the night of the fire. In what capacity?
10. Why did Red blow up the house? What “family” did he “raise” there that he was trying to expunge the memory of? Lilly/Jennifer is not his daughter, nor is Liz … Who was the little girl blowing bubbles?
11. What memories of Liz did Dr Krilov expunge (apparently at Red’s instruction) about three years ago?
12. Will Liz and Ressler have shared secrets and a hug. Will they become romantically involved?
13. Pasha Kazanjian asked Dembe:
      Pasha: [ Russian accent ] Does Townsend know that you faked Katarina’s death?
      Dembe: No, he does not.
    Dembe faked Katarina’s death? No, the Kazanjians did, right? I can’t make sense of this so assume it’s a goof-up, like a mistake in the script. Is it?
14. Liz can’t wait for Dom to wake up to confront him with his story about Red being Ilya being false. Will Red try to keep Dom from telling Liz the truth?
15. At the end of Season 7, Liz chooses to side with Katarina, to find out Red’s true identity: Who was it who had the plastic surgery to “become” Raymond Reddington?
16. The imam told Dembe, “Some lives are built on secrets. And when they are revealed – the life they’re built on ends as well.” Will Red’s life be over if his secret is revealed?
17. Why “The Blacklist”? Is this Red’s plan for redemption, turning over bad guys to pay for his own sins? And yet, if there’s anything we (at least I) have learned from this series is that no one is pure and that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the hearts of all of us.”

 
🔴 Loose Ends
 

1. What did Red whisper to Kirk that so disarmed him?
2. Was the story Red told to Madeline (“all there was was blood”) just a fabrication?
3. What there any meaning to the date on the Swan Lake program? Who was the little dancer?
4. What did Red ‘do to Katarina’ that Dembe thinks Liz would never understand?
5. Why did Ian Garvey tell Jennifer, “Everything you believed for the last 30 years has been a lie. You’ve spent a lifetime hiding for no reason”?
6. What is the story behind Red’s “weird little apartment”? Why a photo of Russian General Zhukov? Did Katarina live there? What happened to the flat?
7. How did Red’s back get so badly burned? A flashback re-enactment of the night of the fire would be very helpful.

🔴 Looking forward to Season 8: Major Themes

 
1. Lizzie’s Choice – At the end of Season 7, after trying to stay in the middle, Liz chooses to side with Katarina, in the search for the truth about Red’s identity. She embraces her “dark side.” She feels liberated, embracing her “destiny.” Yet Red has suggested Liz may be projecting her need for a mother onto Katarina. Is Katarina someone not to be trusted, or even an imposter, as Red seemed to suggest?
 
2. Red’s Illness – Red has a mysterious illness, causing his hand to tremble, forcing him to double over in pain and twice to lose consciousness. He was treated by a brilliant researcher, a pharmacist named Spalding Stark, but the treatment Stark devised was unsuccessful. Red is planning to transfer his assets to Liz. She says she’s not interested, but she is interested in finding out what is wrong with him, which he refuses to share. What’s his diagnosis? His prognosis? Why keep it a secret?
 
3. Dembe’s Loyalty – Red demands absolute loyalty, except from Liz, who is “off-limits.” Yet, when forced to choose between his imam’s life and Red’s secrets, Dembe chose his imam’s life. Red interrupted the scene before Dembe could divulge anything, but when Red talked to the imam about it, Red says, “Dembe and I have done this dance before. I made clear there wouldn’t be an encore.” Is Dembe in danger?
 
4. Red’s True Identity – In counseling’s Dembe over being confronted with his choice between the imam’s life and Red’s secrets, the imam observed: “Some people’s lives are built on secrets and when they are revealed, the life they are built on ends as well.” Did Imam mean this figuratively or literally? Will this turn out to be prophetic?
 
5. Dom’s Fate – The actor who played Dominic Wilkinson (Liz’s grandather and Katarina’s father), Brian Dennehy, has sadly died, so it is inevitable that the character he played will die as well. Dom has been in an induced coma for months after being shot in the chest in a gunfight with Katarina’s operatives. At the end of Season 7, the doctor is ready to bring him out of his coma and Liz can’t wait to confront him over to made-up story that Red Ilya Koslov, an entirely different person, who has known Red since childhood. Having been interrogated and spied on relentlessly by Katarina to get information on Red, Ilya has gone into hiding, but questions about the relationship between them and of both of them to Dom, remain to be answered. Who will get to Dom first ~ Liz, Red, or Katarina?
 
6. Red and Katarina Love/Hate Relationship – At the end of Season 6, Red tracked Katarina down on a Paris street. They shared a passionate kiss, then another. Granted, Katarina then injected Red with Ketamine and abducted him, but clearly they have a past. Then, at the end of Season 7, after Red collapsed, Katarina helped Liz rush Red to his secret hospital. When Liz asked her why she helped, Katarina answered, “Because he’s important to you and because he was once important to me. I don’t want him to die.” As Ressler puts the question to Liz, “… [Y]ou got to decide between the two of them, and I’m just wondering, does the fact that she rescued him tip the scales any?”
 
7. The Sikorsky Archive – The new McGuffin sounds a lot like the old one, the Fulcrum: described as a “blackmail file” containing information about “very powerful people.” Are the two (the Fulcrum and the Archive) related? Katarina now believes the Townsend Directive puts a price on her head because people believe she has the archive. She tells Liz she doesn’t have it and that Red can call off the hunt because he knows she doesn’t have it but that he “won’t life a finger to save [my life].” Does Red have it or does he know who does? And what, by the way, happened to the Cabal?
 
8. Ressler and Liz’s Vulnerabilities and Relationship – We’ve known both Ressler and Liz have on occasion crossed the line into criminality (though the murder of his father’s police officer partner as a teenager added a new layer to Ressler’s story). In the Season 7 Finale, though, a vague threat to look into their pasts came from a detained “forensic accountant,” Frank Merwin, who seems to have connections up-and-down the food chain. Will he return and delve into Liz and Ressler’s pasts? Covering for each other and sharing secrets have brought the Liz and Ressler closer together over time. With Tom gone, Liz is “free,” and with her relationship with Red appearing to be heading into an antagonistic phase, will she and Ressler become involved?
 
9. Red’s Family – Both Liz (by Katarina Rostova) and Jennifer (by Carla Reddington aka Naomi Hyland) are supposedly the daughters of the “real” Raymond Reddington, yet Red once told Liz he once had a family (“It may be hard for you to imagine, but I once had a relatively normal life – bills to pay, playdates, family, some friends, people to care about. Lost all that.”). To expunge memories of his past life, Red bought a house which he visited. There was a child’s growth chart on a wall and looking outside, Red imagined a girl of three or four playing with super-bubbles. Leaving the house, Red said, “I spend every day trying to forget what happened here. This should help.” [The💥house explodes💥] Did Red have a daughter who was neither Liz nor Jennifer? And why is Red so devoted to Liz while he has no apparent feelings toward Jennifer?
 
10. The Night of the Fire – Scenes from the night that Liz remembers in which she shot her father as he was fighting with her mother, figured heavily in the first few seasons. Liz’s father (the real) Raymond Reddington had taken Liz from Moscow to the States (“He thinks she’s his”). Men entered the house and there was an argument between a man and a woman, then a gunshot. The house caught fire and Liz remembers seeing her father “dying on the floor of a burning house.” Red told Liz he was there that night, but why would he have been there? Three times Liz has had her memories of that night interfered with, twice by Red and once by Luther Braxton.

In the tale Dom told to Liz, Ilya Koslov and Katarina buried Raymond Reddington’s body, but this could be fictitious. The bones of Raymond Reddington were later exhumed by Mr Kaplan at Tansi Farms (“Sorry, Katarina”) and delivered to Tom, triggered by her suicide. The suitcase was intended for Liz, but Tom intervened and he, too, died for the secret of the bones. Red subsequently got his hands on on the bones and incinerated them, but not before Liz and Jennifer ID’d them as having belonged to their father, proving Red to be an imposter. But questions remain: Why was Red there the night of the fire? What was his relationship with Katarina? Who led Liz out of the closet? And why, at the end of Season One were we shown a glimpse of Red with a badly burned back?

 
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