The Blacklist Review: Leonard Caul (Season 2 Episode 19)

When we last left Raymond Reddington on The Blacklist, his life was hanging in the balance after he was shot by people who sought the Fulcrum.

Liz had walked away from Red in anger (she tends to do that a lot on this show. Like, a LOT. Like, if we turned it into a drinking game, we would all get alcohol poisoning.) after discovering that he was the one who hired Tom to be in her life. And she had every right to be furious with Red – to believe that the only reason he kept her around for so long was to manipulate her and control her. He was the one who brought Tom in and Tom was the one who caused her life to spiral into chaos and darkness.

In “Leonard Caul,” we focus a lot on The Fulcrum and a lot more on Liz and the name on Red’s list this week. When Red is shot, Dembe and Liz fight back with the latter trying to call the task force and a hospital for assistance. Dembe hilariously throws Liz’s cell phone out of the car and tells her instead to use a phone, press a button and make a call.

The call is to Mr. Kaplan who apparently had – under Red’s instructions – set up a contingency plan, should Red ever be in a life-threatening emergency situation which, let’s face it, given how many enemies Red has is a very good plan. While Mr. Kaplan calls The Avengers to assemble (oh, wait, sorry, just a bunch of surgeons, medical assistants, nurses, and paramedics), Red – on the verge of death – tells Liz that she needs to find Leonard Caul.

So Liz, being the good FBI agent that she is, tells the task force to help her out.

Problems arise at the warehouse that Mr. Kaplan has set up as an operating room/recovery room for Red – men who are impersonating FBI burst in and kill a doctor and nearly kill Red. That’s when Liz realizes that the hit on Red is bigger and more complex than she imagined and that they’re all in real danger.

The problem with finding Leonard Caul is that people don’t find this master tracker – he finds THEM. I mean, sidebar: why would Red tell her to find him then? He should have just said: “Signal your presence and Leonard will come.” And he does make his presence known to Liz after she does something that Dembe instructs her to do.

Dembe is really fantastic in “Leonard Caul.” Not only does he prove his loyalty and devotion to Red, but he also proves that he can really step up if Red is incapacitated. He instructs Liz to visit an apartment to get a key and a case. Once she has that key, the silver case, the Fulcrum, and Leonard Caul, she needs to return all these things to Raymond Reddington so that he can undo the spell he cast on her family.

(Okay, admittedly that last part was from Into the Woods, but everything else is on point.)

Dembe’s loyalty and his protection of Liz and Red in this episode reminded me of why he’s such a great character to begin with. He cares a lot about people and he’s one of the few people in the world that Red inherently trusts. It’s great to see him take a more active role in “Leonard Caul.”

Meanwhile, Liz follows Dembe’s instructions and meets Leonard Caul when he shows up at the apartment (seriously, he magically appears because he just knows when he’s being sought after) and reveals to Liz that he’s the one who wrote the cypher for the Fulcrum. He knows how it works. And so, coupled with his knowledge and the case, key, and piece hidden in Liz’s old stuffed bunny, Liz and Leonard watch as the Fulcrum comes to life and projects all of the horrible blackmail files onto the apartment wall.

Elsewhere, Red’s still mostly unconscious but has been moved to a new facility – a safe-house where, shocker, Tom resides – in order to be operated on further and kept secure. There, Liz’s ex-fiance operates on Red, has an awkward run-in with Tom, and is on his way. But it’s also there that Liz and Leonard drive past and realize something important: the warehouse is surrounded. Their location has been compromised again and the only common thread is that Liz keeps telling Cooper where they are.

Someone from the FBI must be leaking their location to the men who want to kill Red. What happens next is a shoot-out (really nicely done from a stylistic standpoint) where Red instructs Mr. Kaplan to find a way out and leave him with a gun. She begrudgingly leaves because we need Mr. Kaplan to continue living. She’s the actual best. With Red still recovering from, you know, MASSIVE surgery, he struggles as much as possible to sit up and protect himself when the assassins arrive. And he does well, for a while, until his gun runs out of bullets and he’s then forced to crawl to safety. Ouch.

Luckily for Red, while she’s in the car, Liz realizes exactly who is behind the hits on Red’s life and why – The Director wants Red dead because he believes he doesn’t possesses the Fulcrum. If Liz can prove that the Fulcrum was in his possession, she can save Red’s life. And she manages to, just in the nick of time because Red was about to be taken out by some of the bad guys at the warehouse.

Funny thing is that “Leonard Caul” opened with Liz ready to leave Red’s life completely and ends with her saving it in a pretty massive way. Liz just made a lot of enemies and if the attack on the warehouse is any indication of what The Director is capable of, she made a lot of enemies with high-powered weapons and tactical skills. But she doesn’t care. She stands her ground against The Director and she saves Red’s life.

Because for as many times as he has ruined hers, as many lies and half-truths (a lot of them in this episode) as he has told her about how he knows her, why he cares about her, etc… Liz stays around. She keeps repeating the same pattern over and over again: she threatens to walk away, but she never really does. In “Vanessa Cruz,” Vanessa’s mother told Ressler and Liz that “some women make the same mistakes with men over and over again.”

And that’s what Elizabeth Keen keeps doing. Because every little thing that brings her closer to discovering the truth about her past also brings her closer to Red and Tom, two men who provide more questions than answers, more ambiguity than clarity, and more darkness than goodness.

More thoughts:

• This episode had far too little Ressler, Aram, Cooper, and Samar. I’ve grown to love them.
• Skeevy Attorney General Tom is the one who’s been divulging secrets to The Director. Shocker: he did it for a seat at the table. Does Tom realize yet that being at that table means that you’ll be dead if you make one wrong move? Guess not.
• Kaplan: “Shall we continue?”
• Turns out that Liz was fooling around with Tom while she was engaged to a doctor. Of course.
• Tom Connolly [to Cooper]: “What if Reddington doesn’t care about Agent Keen and it’s all been a manipulation?” Well, Tom, what if you’re the worst? Wait, you already are.
• It’s 2015 and Agent Elizabeth Keen still uses a flip phone. I don’t know why, exactly, but this offended me more than anything that has ever aired on The Blacklist
• Liz: “Is that all of it [the truth]?” Red: “… Some of it.”
• Dembe always refers to Liz as “Elizabeth,” and I don’t know why but it’s one of my favorite, simple things in this show.
• The promo for next week shows Samar shooting Dembe and all I tweeted afterward was: “PROTECT DEMBE AT ALL COSTS.”

What did you all think of The Blacklist’s return? Do you think Liz is in more danger than ever now that she possesses the Fulcrum and its secrets? Let us know your thoughts!

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