The Blacklist Review: Who’s Really In Control? (Season 2 Episode 10)

The mind is the main character of “Luther Braxton: Conclusion,” an episode so strong that I almost can dismiss the blatant circles we’re running in regarding Red and Liz’s relationship. Almost. Unlike “Anslo Garrick: Conclusion,” the conclusion of this villainous arc wasn’t bloody or terrifying in the traditional sense. A few bodies dropped, but those were mainly at the beginning of the episode within the blown-up detention facility.

No, the majority of “Luther Braxton: Conclusion” wasn’t even focused on the thief and villain of the arc himself. It was focused on Elizabeth Keen.

The detention facility is bombed, with Ressler, Samar, Liz, and Red inside – along with a whole host of prisoners including Luther Braxton. Somehow during the attack, Braxton escapes with Liz, because he realizes she is key in knowing the whereabouts of the Fulcrum. As Braxton and his cronies hop onto a medivac, Ressler and Samar escape from their captor and meet up with Red, who is preparing to send out a signal so that the task force could locate them before, you know, the entire facility either goes up in flames or falls into the ocean.

Meanwhile, in Alaska, Braxton threatens some doctors and nurses at a hospital in order to get a bunch of medical equipment. His final stop? Kidnapping a woman and her son – a trained psychologist, therapist, or something of the sort named Dr. Selma Orchard, who managed to help him repress a lot of memories. Braxton’s theory? If Dr. Orchard could help him do that, then she can help get Liz to remember where the Fulcrum is.

Liz, as it turns out, has a lot of repressed memories. So much so that an ordinary trained psychologist told Braxton that the events of Liz’s childhood were buried so far deep within herself that even he couldn’t extract them. (If this is beginning to sound very Inception-y to you, that’s because it is. And that’s probably why I loved the episode so much.)

Elizabeth Keen has always been an interesting character on The Blacklist, because she doesn’t really know who she is – she doesn’t know (or remember) much of her childhood. She lived a lie when married to Tom. She’s kind of shuffling through life, trying to piece together what happened to her in the past in order to make sense of her present. In “Luther Braxton: Conclusion,” we get really intense pieces of Elizabeth’s childhood through the eyes of her younger self. She’s hiding in a closet, clutching a rabbit, listening to arguing from just outside of the door. Her father tells her to stay in the closet, but she doesn’t listen.

Everything after that is fuzzy – there’s a fire, and her father is lying on the floor, face-down. There is screaming and gunshots and someone pulling her out of the burning home. And when all of these elements resurface, Liz’s brain starts to put together the fragmented memories until she comes to a conclusion: Red was in the house the night of the fire. He was there, looking for the Fulcrum, with a group of other people.

Before I discuss the emotional moment at the end of the episode, let’s backtrack a bit: Red does his own digging and locating and manages to determine where Liz is being held before anyone else does. He confronts Braxton about mid-way through the episode, which I thought was odd, as I checked the time.

The villain was already being apprehended and we still had a half-hour in the episode left? It seemed like an odd choice at the time but it was actually pretty brilliant. “Luther Braxton: Conclusion” was never about Braxton himself. It was always about Liz. This whole arc has been about what people are willing to do for Liz, for the information that she has apparently repressed, and the secrets she knows but cannot remember.

I thought it was a great move on the part of The Blacklist to structure this arc around the protagonist rather than create another bloody, dramatic, action-packed hour of television. The quiet intensity with which Elizabeth strains to remember and simultaneously forget her memories from the night of the fire was so much more interesting to me than any shoot-out would have been.

As we learn in the episode, though, Luther Braxton isn’t working alone. Remember that shady guy named The Director from Sunday night’s episode? Yeah, he’s back. And he made a deal with Braxton to find the Fulcrum and steal it. The only dilemma, of course, is that when you make a deal with a criminal, you have to deal with the criminal, and Braxton’s price hiked for the Fulcrum.

At the end of the episode, Red – who, by the way, is the only person on this show who seems to know anything the vast majority of the time – kills Luther Braxton and confronts The Director, warning him that he’s in way over his head and that he, Red, has the Fulcrum already. The Director accuses Red of bluffing and Red challenges him right back. Which, in a nutshell, is why I love Red.

Liz’s memories resurface for a moment as she remembers seeing Red the night of the fire and then appropriately recoils in horror. The reason he was there twenty-six years ago was to get the Fulcrum. The reason, Liz claims, Red does anything for her – protect her, seek her out, keep her in his life – is not because he cares about her, but because he cares about what she KNOWS and what she has.

That whole scene is really fine acting from Megan Boone and James Spader who have played their respective characters with poise and pain throughout the past few seasons. When Liz recoils and yells, Ressler leads her away from Red. And as Dr. Orchard reunites with her son who was kidnapped and held as collateral by Braxton, you can see the pain and torment on Red’s face. Which leads us to…

At the end of the episode, Liz meets with Dr. Orchard again, and she tells the FBI agent that she wasn’t the first person to ever tap into her memories. Orchard believes that someone else has manipulated Liz’s memories from the night of the fire and blocked parts of them. We’re a bit baffled, as is Liz, as to why someone would do that or – more importantly – who would do that.

And then, at the very end of the episode, as Liz is contemplating the conversation and playing with that stuffed bunny she had as a child… she notices something and opens the stuffed animal, revealing a tiny Fulcrum-like chip inside.

Because lest we forget who truly holds all of the power in this show, it’s not Raymond Reddington (as I often like to think). It’s Elizabeth Keen.

Other thoughts:

• I’ll compliment the music director for this show every week. I really will, because they’re that good. Also worth mentioning this week is that this is a really well-directed episode. Seriously.
• Megan Boone is an all-star in this episode. Her acting during her flashback/memory scenes and the scenes when she is under psychological extraction are so raw and wonderful.
• Aram’s hug upon seeing that Samar is alive is the actual sweetest thing I’ve seen on this show thus far. And then, hilariously, his hug to Ressler so that no one would figure out his crush on Samar (which EVERYONE KNOWS, ARAM) is adorable. Also, they are totally having a moment at the end of the episode, which Ressler interrupts.
• “What’s in it for us?” “Life.”
• “Oh, what the hell? I told you so!” I love Raymond Reddington so much. No one can play this role like James Spader does. No one.
• I’m a bit disappointed that we don’t know what Luther Braxton repressed, memory-wise. Whatever it is, it seems to have been really important and it’s unfortunate that we will never know. (Or, well, not at this point anyway.) Also: Ron Perlman is a great villain.
• Ressler is really protective of Liz throughout the entire episode, and I cannot lie – I do kind of ship it. I just love how much Ressler has grown from utterly detesting Liz and thinking her incompetent to like, going full-on protector in order to keep Red from hurting her. That’s some lovely character development right there. Also, the parallels with him wrapping Liz in the shock blanket and steering her away like he did in “The Stewmaker” are lovely.
• The one thing that this show continues to do is the one thing that frustrates me most of all: We all pretty much knew Red was there the night of the fire anyway (hence the scars on his back), but now it’s looking like Red might be Liz’s father, since she says that her father was face-down on the floor? WHO KNOWS. IS HE HER FATHER OR ISN’T HE? I feel like this question will never be answered, even though the answer – at this point, given the evidence – should be “yes.”

How did you all like the conclusion of “Luther Braxton”? Did it answer your questions or were you left unsatisfied? And, now that Liz knows she has the Fulcrum, what do you think will happen to her?

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The Blacklist airs Thursdays at 9/8c on NBC.

Jennifer Stasak

Jennifer is a writer living in Central Florida. Her work has been previously published in The Anemone Sidecar, Epiphany Magazine, Bone Parade, and Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, among others. She currently serves as an Assistant Editor for Narrative Magazine, and this marks the fourth literary journal she has served alongside. Jennifer's additionally passionate about television and blogs about it weekly at her website Just About Write. When she's not writing, Jennifer enjoys binge-watching shows on Netflix, distance-running, and volunteering.