The Blacklist

No Liz.

There was only a handful of passing references to the rogue agent on The Blacklist Season 8 Episode 8.

And yet, the episode still worked.

Instead, it was the Harold-and-Red show as they debate shades of gray versus black-and-white situations.

For the briefest of times, Harold pondered a world in which he could be more than the good angel on Red's shoulder. 

Who's Reddington's bad angel? Raymond doesn't need one anymore, considering the life he's lived.

Senator Cooper does have a nice ring to it. Only Harold was correct to look this gift horse in the mouth.

He was also right to consult with Red about the offer. That man has made a very good living weighing all the alternatives.

Naturally, a group of morally flexible politicians would assume Harold also leaned that way based on the Task Force's connection to Raymond.

When the sleazy retiring Senator Warwick told Ha...
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This marked the third consecutive episode without a sighting of Liz.

And yet, she was all over The Blacklist Season 8 Episode 7.

Liz had Red and his entire criminal network and the Task Force going in multiple directions to intercept the players that she set in motion.

And no one was any closer to finding her or determining what she is planning.

As Dembe pointed out, her multi-step operation sounded like something Raymond himself would have schemed up.

Most importantly, Liz kept everyone in the dark, with each knowing only a tiny portion of the plan.

Scooter, the lawyer who got The Freelancer released, couldn't believe his luck, having such an expensive case with great exposure just handed to him.

Of course, that was before he met Reddington, whose stolen money paid for Scooter's services. 

That was Red at his finest, making himself at home in a place to which he wasn't invited, th...
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The series mostly took time out from the hunt for Liz to say goodbye to an old friend.

The late, bizarre little man Glen Carter was at the heart of The Blacklist Season 8 Episode 6.

This approach was necessitated by Clark Middleton's death, who portrayed Glen, on Oct. 4, 2020.

Middleton's death could have been addressed with Red just saying, "Too bad about Glen, huh?" to Dembe and let that be the end of it.

But the way it was handled was so much better. Glen, Raymond's favorite tracker, returned the favor and made him do the tracking instead.

It was glorious to watch Glen infuriate Reddington one more time with his outlandish final requests as Dembe tried to stifle a smirk if this is it, indeed.

Of course, Glen proudly boasted to his mother and his friends that he was Huey Lewis's muse. He always struck me as a "Hip to be Square" kind of guy.

Kudos to Huey for having anything to do with this ...
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A whole episode without an appearance by Liz, and it was better for it.

That doesn't mean she didn't hover over The Blacklist Season 8 Episode 5.

Liz still managed to cause headaches not just for Red but also for the Task Force as part of her master plan to bring down Raymond.

She has been strategizing like Reddington, so naturally, it took him to determine what she was up to.

It really did appear to be a coincidence that Red's safe-deposit box was broken into by a trio of robbers around the same time that the conviction of the first Blacklister, The Freelancer, was being appealed by a new attorney.

It was just bad timing that the task force was being pulled in a couple of different directions.

Or was it?

No, it turned out that there was just a whole lot of misdirection by Liz going on to keep everyone from putting together the pieces of this puzzle.

She left just enough clues to k...
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So it appeared that Liz has been paying attention to Red through the years.

She applied what she's learned on The Blacklist Season 8 Episode 4, tricking both him and the task force members.

By episode's end, Liz ended up on more even footing with Raymond, at least financially.

That still doesn't mean her vendetta against Reddington isn't ridiculous. 

Poor Marvin summed it up best, scoffing at her, defending the honor of a woman who abandoned her as a child and killed her grandfather.

There's no way Liz should be coming down on Katarina's side. But for some incomprehensible reason, she is.

I think Dembe is onto something. Something in Red's subconscious acknowledges his failing health. So he shot Katarina in front of Liz to bring her over to the dark side.

Still, he honestly seemed dumbfounded when Dembe proposed this notion. 

Can this be a happy coincidence that Red has accomplishe...
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Shouldn't Liz be more conflicted?

Instead, she seemed hellbent on killing Red on The Blacklist Season 8 Episode 3.

She sought revenge for his executing Katarina on The Blacklist Season 8 Episode 2.

So Katarina, the woman she has only known for a few months, is more important to her than the man who has been there for her throughout her life?

This storyline hasn't made sense since it began on The Blacklist Season 7, and it still doesn't. And yet it continues ... and continues.

Granted, people important to Liz have dropped dead around Raymond throughout the series. So she could definitely blame him for that.

Still, he made Liz, pulling her from FBI obscurity and creating the Blacklist Task Force around her, which she seems to forget with regularity.

And the task force has done good work, taking hundreds of high-level criminals off the street. All they had to do was look the other way from whate...
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This wasn't a horrible point for an early-season cliffhanger.

Red racked up a body count on The Blacklist Season 8 Episode 2 that may forever change his relationship with Liz. 

Or maybe not, despite what the trailer for the eventual next episode in late January seemed to suggest.

First, let's address why bother launching a new season for two episodes, only to go on a holiday hiatus for two months? What was the point?

Why not just re-air the final two episodes from The Blacklist Season 7 to whet viewers' appetites, then come back with The Blacklist Season 8, with more episodes in the can, in the new year?

That would feel a whole lot less disjointed than NBC's actual approach.

Next, let's give the show's powers that be credit for writing off Dominic as absolutely soon as possible.

Dom has been dying a slow death even by TV standards, seemingly for seasons.

Dom unfortunately couldn't ...
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Dembe got saved from making the hard choice once again.

He did actually choose on The Blacklist Season 7 Episode 18.

Red's timely intervention just stopped Dembe from having to follow through.

Yes, after a side trip with the Ressler Brothers to Detroit on The Blacklist Season 7 Episode 17, it was a return to the Raymond-Liz-Katarina triangle on this 150th episode.

And, as often happens, poor, loyal Dembe got caught right in the middle of everything.

He really deserves better. He's too righteous a man to keep protecting someone such as Raymond.

Perhaps he's insane, saving Red over and over and expecting him to change.

It was a disappointment that Raymond's medical condition got glossed over at the beginning after his dramatic collapse at the end of The Blacklist Season 7 Episode 16.

His fainting, following by the doctor's warning, did have an effect.

But instead of him ch...
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It only took most of seven seasons, but we finally were given a Donald Ressler origin story.

And the Ressler spotlight on The Blacklist Season 7 Episode 17 took an unexpected twist.

Sure, even though Ressler is the most straightlaced of the Task Force members, he's colored outside the lines.

Just ask Laurel Hitchin, who, frankly, had it coming.

But compared to Harold, Samar, Aram, and Liz (especially Liz), he's a really straight arrow. (Alina, while relatively new, has real loose-cannon potential.)

So learning that young Donny Ressler was a stoner and a drinker was quite a shocker, as was the big secret that he'd been keeping to himself for 25 years.

Granted, in a typical season, you wouldn't be getting a focus on Ressler as the penultimate episode (no offense to him).

It would have been that breather episode before the monthlong sprint to the finish.

But, in these challenging time...
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Red must be playing the long game.

Liz still came out largely unscathed even though Raymond had flipped her private eye on The Blacklist Season 7 Episode 16.

He just dropped enough hints to let Liz know he was onto her and let it go, with Ilya safely spirited away out of town.

So the big explosion that seemed to be coming at the end of The Blacklist Season 7 Episode 15 hasn't happened ... yet.

Sorry about that to all the Liz haters out there. And with The Blacklist season being cut short, who knows if that showdown will even happen this spring?

Instead, they both just went their own way with their own investigations.

Liz and the Task Force got the more immediately intriguing case of the so-called Boneyard Killer, who would have been a good fit on Criminal Minds.

It wasn't enough that Nyle Hatcher, a creepy mortician (I know, oxymoron), was burying sex workers alive in existing gravesites.