What a perfectly Raymond Reddington move!
When Red decided he was in the market for a therapist on The Blacklist Season 9 Episode 6, he didn’t ask around for references. Instead, he got Harold to put a candidate on the blacklist.
Once again, he used the Task Force to do his legwork for him. You’d think they would see that coming by now.
Still, it was one of the most fascinating job interviews ever.
With Dembe crossing over to the FBI, Raymond is in dire need of a confidant. Weecha handles the muscle part of the job admirably, but she’s not much of a conversationalist.
Also, he requires someone who can check his darker impulses.
Enter Dr. Roberta Sand. After her miraculous resurrection of the once-debilitated Decanio family, she was the natural choice to become the Reddington personal therapist.
Red did a masterful job selling Sand as a blacklister to Harold. The attempted assassination of a congressman trumpeted in headlines was a hit on a preservation expert holding up a Decanio team’s mission.
That’s how you catch Cooper’s attention: Bring him someone with whom no one was familiar who was indirectly responsible for a crime about whom everyone was talking.
The problem was that Dr. Sand had fallen off the grid five years ago, so no one knew where to find her. That left the Task Force scrambling to solve the assassination instead, hoping the hitman could lead them to Sand.
They were a man down as Ressler was dealing with personal business. That’s probably a euphemism for going through withdrawal. Let’s hope that storyline dies a quick death.
No matter, thanks to the new addition, Dembe. It only made sense to use a sniper to find a sniper.
Once Dembe identified the likely sniper’s nest, they could locate a photo of the hitman. Then Dembe used his connections to find where he lived and his smarts to capture him.
Aram quickly got the assassin to turn and help set up a trap for Sand, into which she drove.
Sand turned out to be a much more sympathetic character than she appeared in session. Once Dembe got her back story out of her, she proved to be stuck between a rock and a hard place, with the crime boss protecting her son Dante in exchange for sessions for his crew.
Until Vito didn’t any longer, which made Sand much more amenable to turning on him, especially after the Task Force stopped the attempted abduction of the informant and rescued Dante from his enforced life of crime.
It was only natural that Raymond’s path would cross with Sand since he worked himself into a tizzy.
Only Reddington could blow up an unsupervised afternoon of fun with Agnes into something operatic.
Instead of hearing the nice things Liz had told Agnes about Pinky, he had to determine what Liz knew and when. Never mind that Agnes was filled with warm thoughts about him. This obsession meant breaking in and stealing the envelope containing the letter Red had given Dembe to deliver to Liz after his death.
His mind leaped to the thought that Dembe had given her the envelope on the night she died and that she had been killed because she hesitated while thinking good thoughts about him. So he blamed Dembe, then himself, for her death.
That was revisionist history since Liz was killed on The Blacklist Season 8 Episode 22 because a Townsend loyalist tracked her down and shot her. She was going down whether she had shot Raymond or not.
Hopefully, Sand can talk him off the ledge because he appeared ready to go after Dembe, who only showed Liz the letter to temper her feelings about Red.
Of course, the Task Force was oblivious to this Raymond drama and wouldn’t have known what had happened to Sand if Reddington hadn’t told Harold.
Cooper was flat-out distracted through this case as he worried about his lost night. The whole problem is that while Harold is great at keeping secrets as part of his job, he’s lousy at lying.
Also, the person who is framing him has the resources to drug him, steal his gun to kill Doug Coster, shadow him, and now threaten him with the secrets he’s attempting to keep.
Also, with all the criminals that the Task Force has put away over the past eight seasons, there are far too many suspects for him to sort through by himself. Maybe it’s time to loop in Aram, the only Task Force member without his own drama with which to deal currently.
Besides Ressler’s addiction, there’s Park’s marriage that is falling apart. Much of that is on her for not telling Peter something about her work on the Task Force.
Sure, she can’t come right out and say that she has a dangerous job working with Public Enemy Number 1 to capture criminals. But neither should she have lied and left Peter so totally in the dark about from where her increasing war wounds are coming.
Peter is right to feel hurt, but at least he seems willing to give her another chance.
To revisit Liz’s death, watch The Blacklist online.
Is Red right to blame Dembe?
Who is after Harold?
Can Park salvage her marriage?
Comment below.
Dale McGarrigle is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter.
