When a present usually operates from inside an ethical morass, it is onerous to take extra overtly moralizing episodes or plotlines critically. That’s very true when real-life controversies are in the end used as a cudgel to make a well-recognized level about that present morass.
That is all to say that it is fairly uncommon to look at an episode of The Blacklist nominally concerning the mass manufacturing and distribution of low cost semi-automatic handguns in America’s interior cities. And it is equally uncommon to see Reddington (James Spader) take an aggressive stance towards these weapons, partially after watching a teenage comfort retailer clerk murdered throughout a robbery-gone-wrong. “Gordon Kemp” tried to bundle the morass and the politics and the novelty of all this collectively, however the contradictions did not fairly gel into one thing significant.
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The core stress between “legally proper” and “morally proper” is one thing The Blacklist offers with on a regular basis. The duty pressure works with the world’s most harmful legal. They break the legislation in a single option to uphold extra vital legal guidelines in different methods. And Reddington has demonstrated his personal sort of code over time. He may be unsympathetic and violent, and he may be deeply compassionate and sort. However there’s one thing further tough about wading into what can most kindly be referred to as “the gun debate.”
There have been compelling moments to be discovered right here because the present tried to pivot round, and even into, the plain challenges. The duty pressure’s preliminary suspicion that Reddington would solely go after a mass producer of weapons as a result of he, too, sells weapons was nice. As have been the debates between Liz (Megan Boone), Harold (Harry Lennix), and Ressler (Diego Klattenhoff) about who’s responsible for widespread entry to weapons; Ressler brazenly declaring himself a member of the NRA whereas additionally decrying Kemp’s position in mass demise labored effectively for that character, regardless of the each sides-ism of all of it.
Megan Boone, The Blacklist
And that is the place the episode actually faltered. There’s house to debate if this can be a “crime drawback” or “gun drawback.” But, by shifting Kemp (Jim True-Frost) into an evil caricature prepared to promote 30 weapons to somebody basically sporting a shirt that claims “I Love To Promote Weapons To Murderers,” after which burning by way of a closed-door case with a decide hemming and hawing about burden of proof, the present by no means took that debate critically. All of the complexity was sanded away after which handed off as a type of authorized quandary that, effectively, simply cannot be solved too simply. Private beliefs apart, this strategy simply made for a type of banal episode pretending to take care of one thing extra evocative.
By the 40-minute mark, the episode was really about Liz’s willingness to “betray” the duty pressure and her job to align with Reddington, which might be a superb sufficient level to make if A) the present did not make that assertion 10 occasions a season and B) Liz and Reddington weren’t, frankly, nearer to ethical readability than the remainder of the staff. Speeches from Harold about upholding the legislation aren’t compelling when the episode began from the premise that these folks bend and break the legislation on a regular basis. All of it felt so pat, only a cowl to make the identical level we have heard earlier than.
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The ethical alignment between Liz and Reddington was, after all, short-term. Within the episode’s different plotline, Dembe and Purple found that somebody was tailing the more and more distraught Iyla (Brett Cullen). It did not take lengthy to disclose that the tail was certainly Liz’s personal investigator. Pretend father and daughter could be on the identical web page about gun manufacturing however cannot maintain mendacity to at least one one other, who would have guessed?!
Kudos to The Blacklist for taking up one thing so charged, and there have been quite a lot of compelling, if contradictory, concepts on this hour. However these contradictions and total busy-ness solely underlined {that a} weekly procedural a couple of legal mastermind might be not the place for compelling takes on gun management — particularly when these takes are getting used to ahead a degree of interpersonal rivalry the viewers knew was coming anyway.
The Blacklist airs Fridays at 8/7c on NBC.