The Blacklist Review: “The Major” (Season 2, Episode 15)

The titular Blacklister, “The Major,” is the codename for Lance Henriksen’s character, who was introduced last week as Tom’s handler. You could say that The Major majors in finding talented young delinquents and turning them into deep cover operatives, which is how he and the artist currently known as Tom Keen got together (as we learned in the young Tom Keen flashback that no one asked for this week).

Finding a major player like The Major seems a little on the ridiculously easy side this week. Red gets the FBI to kidnap a Mexican diplomat with the U.N., who was another student of The Major, and arranges a meeting under penalty articulated by another well-phrased Reddington threat. The meeting is set, The Major shows up and Red demands to know the location of Tom Keen, who at the moment is trying to ingratiate himself on a group of weapons procuring neo-Nazis, who hang out in their local skinhead dungeon bar. All that was missing to sell the cliche was some German death metal.

Honestly, I get the impression that we’re reaching the end of Tom Keen’s arc, whatever that is. If Liz isn’t going to jail, and the idea of someone paying for the murder of Officer Ames is so important, then someone’s going to have to write the cheque, and it might as well be the guy who actually did the killing in the first place. If this is the end of Tom Keen, who it turns out is next week’s titular Blacklister, then I’m not sure what value the writers got out of keeping him around this long. Did they feel if they kept Tom around long enough his usefulness as a character would just present itself?

In the end, there’s only one real mystery left to figure out about Tom anyway, and that’s what he was doing for Red and for how long? It sounded like The Major was the one that supplied Red with Tom’s services and then turned on Red when Berlin made a better offer. Presumably, he hired Tom to keep an eye on Liz, to make sure outside forces couldn’t get to her, which would explain Red’s persistence in getting Tom. But then again, why let him go in the first place? Why not wring his neck when he paid Tom off after Berlin was killed?

The most interesting moment of the hour came courtesy of Dembe, who tells Red that the time has come to tell Liz everything, starting with the reasons why Tom was in her life in the first place. Nice of Dembe to say what we’re all thinking, even if Red knows that being completely honest about his relationship with Lizzie would totally undermine his image of an international man of mystery. But if the hour-long recap proved one thing, it’s that the time has come for a lot of these gaps to be filled in by the man who knows all the answers. Lest some other judge be forced to consider the preponderance of insane contrivances that brought us here.