The Blacklist "Luther Braxton: Conclusion" Review: You Were There

The Blacklist S02E10: "Luther Braxton: Conclusion"

I've reached a point The Blacklist where its BIG REVEALS and SWERVE cliffhangers immediately inspire cackling fits. (Don't worry, I'm seeing a doctor). That's not exactly an indictment of the show. For 32 episodes now,The Blacklist has gotten a lot of mileage of seemingly answering important questions, only to zig away from those answers—oftentimes just a few moments later. It's a wild way to sustain a narrative over the long haul, because eventually the audience will feel like they're being jerked around, but right now, the show is doing just enough that I still enjoy moments like the last five to 10 minutes of "Luther Braxton: Conclusion."

Whereas Part 1 of the Luther Braxton story concentrated more on criminal-mastermind hijinks and Red more generally, Part 2 returned some of the focus to Liz, specifically with regard to her knowledge (or lack thereof) of the Fulcrum. Making that transition from the explosive post-Super Bowl episode to a more psychological affair produced a few bumps in the road—namely the rapid-fire beats this hour had to burn through to get Braxton, Liz, and the Memory Wipe Doctor together and everyone on the team back to safety—but there were certainly some solid moments sprinkled throughout the journey into Liz's memories. I'm a major sucker for any instance in which the show moves into weird, pseudoscience territory, so the completely straight-faced way that it just ran with the existence of memory wiping/implanting was pretty fun. The more bizarre, the better.

The sequences in Liz's mind were fairly typical in their form and function, as she was 'transported' into the night of the fire and forced to deal with and then later aid the childhood version of herself. It was clear during the early scenes in her mind that The Blacklist wasn't going to give up much information until late in the episode, depowering it a little, but Megan Boone did a fine job of playing the swirl of emotion, drugs, and confusion that Liz was faced with. It was also great to see Liz make an active choice to stick with the process, danger be damned, because she knew that, A.) the information was important, and B.) evil people are just going to keep coming for it anyway, so she needs to know. Given that I tend to think the show too often tries to make Liz out to be a pawn in a larger game, that was a cool moment of ownership and stakes that The Blacklist needs more of.

Of course, it was all lead-up to the final few minutes, when Red triumphantly arrived at Liz's side, only for her to finally remember that he was in fact present on the night of the fire—the night her father presumably burned to death because some powerful people were looking for the Fulcrum. That was big, if slightly predictable, and both Boone and James Spader played that sequence very well. We've already seen these kind of "NEVER AGAIN" moments a few times on the show, but this one was the best of them all. For the first time, I really believed that Red's attempts to deflect were falling on deaf ears; Liz outwardly acknowledging Red's interest in her as primarily connected to "some object, some thing" was one of the more powerful scenes the show has ever done. Bravo to both actors—even if we know that the characters are far from done with one another.

Nonetheless, The Blacklist couldn't walk away from a big episode without pulling the rug out from beneath its own "answers." Near the end of the hour, Liz met up with the brain-scrambling doc one more time to learn that someone else had already been in her mind some years ago, and that it's very possible that what she remembers about the fire is not quite accurate. The key wrinkle? The people in the memory are likely correct, but their roles might've been different. So, you know, Red was there, but he could've also been, I don't know, her dad. That, folks, was the kind of swerve that you just can't help but laugh at, right? Every single time I start to think there's no way that Red is Liz's father, the show manages to find a way to (purposefully) mess that all up. It's high-level TV trolling that I might not like, but that I do enjoy, if that makes sense.

To top it all off, Liz ended up finding something important in that old teddy bear bunny rabbit that we've seen a few times (I think, right?) over the first two seasons, so the memory scrambling worked better than she initially thought. Whether that object is itself the Fulcrum or just another piece of a larger puzzle that ends up being the Fulcrum once it's all put together is still unclear to me, but for once, Liz has actively pushed the manipulative Red out of her life, and she has access to the one thing that he appears to want more than anything. That's the kind of role reversal I get behind, and one that the show should be able to have some real fun with.

Though I liked big chunks of the sojourn into Liz's melon, some of the more Red-centric stuff in "Luther Braxton: Conclusion" lacked the zip of the material in Part 1. Specifically, this second half did so wrong by Braxton himself, who seemed like one of the baddest dudes on the planet in Sunday's episode but went out pretty much like a chump. Part 1 tried to plant the seeds for this by having Red continuously note that Braxton was just a great thief and out of his element, but when you hire Ron Perlman and you let him run roughshod on a top-secret prison facility, it's a disappointment to have him end up being a glorified errand boy who gets strung up in another shadowy government figure's home. While it was smart of The Blacklist to illustrate that David Strathairn's Director character had the gall to hire Braxton and put the Factory explosion at Red's feet in the press—a move that surely sets up other stories for later in the season—I couldn't help but feel bummed to see Braxton fall by the wayside so quickly.

If anything, what happened with Braxton and the Director confirmed that I prefer to see The Blacklist focus on weird and deadly criminals instead of on the intricacies of cover-ups planned by cunning government operatives, if only because there are only so many shadowy groups and conspiracies that I can take. Spader and Strathairn are unsurprisingly good together—and frankly, the latter's vibe is a significant upgrade over whatever Alan Alda was doing during his stint on the show—but those stories are always going to be there. And why build up the mythology of the Blacklisters only to strip it away so quickly? Maybe I just wanted Perlman to have the potential to return. Oh well.

Those minor annoyances aside, "Luther Braxton: Conclusion" was another solid episode of a show that had begun to grate on me a little by the end of 2014. It's too bad that The Blacklist dispatched of this two-parter's titular villain in the fashion it did, but the first hour gave us some really good action and the second one did right by the character the show needs to consistently do right by. And although these cliffhangers and twists might be getting excessively nutty, they're still nutty in a good way. For now, all that is enough to put The Blacklist on the right track in the new year, and in its new timeslot.

NOTES

– Samar and Ressler survived the explosion, but you know that. The opening moments gave Ressler a brief sequence of heroics, which is always nice. Aram was relieved to see Meera alive, so that's still happening.

– I don't know how frequently Janel Moloney's character is going to be around, but it should be at least semi-regularly, right?

– The logistics of travel during these two episodes were kind of nuts. The team made it out to the Bering Sea so quickly and easily in Part 1, and in Part 2, Braxton took Liz from that location to Alaska, while other things were happening back in D.C. Lotta miles.

—ICYMI, the show was renewed by NBC earlier in the day on Thursday.

So what'd you think of the conclusion of "Luther Braxton"? And what about the big reveal about Liz's memories?