The Blacklist Season 2 Premiere Review: Family Matters

The Blacklist S02E01: "Lord Baltimore"

Welcome to Season 2 of The Blacklist, Red-heads. In its debut season, The Blacklist quickly became one of the more popular shows on all of television, raising NBC's sails, reminding us of James Spader's constant goodness, and introducing us to Megan Boone's really terrible wig. The show closed out its first 22 episodes with a two-part extravaganza that put Red's life in danger thanks to the mysterious and resourceful Berlin (Peter Stormare) and wrapped up Lizzie's long and nightmarish relationship with her spy husband Tom... or did it?

Point is, as these things tend to go, The Blacklist suggested a major shakeup at the end of Season 1; various characters ended up dead (R.I.P. Agent Malik, you were utterly disposable), emotionally broken, in hiding, or some combination of the three. But as these things also tend to go, especially when you're a massively popular TV series, The Blacklist needed to reestablish some kind of new normal in its Season 2 premiere, "Lord Baltimore." Consequently, while this opening episode had some really solid moments peppered throughout, it also fell victim to rushed storytelling and choppy editing, and I generally felt as if the show was trying to stuff a couple of episodes into one 42-minute package.

Last season, The Blacklist did some fun things with pseduoscience-y villains; sometimes it even approached sci-fi territory. Similarly, the show sometimes told good procedural stories that eventually dovetailed with the various ongoing plots (Tom spying on Lizzie, her dad's identity, Red's cavalcade of enemies). "Lord Baltimore" tried to do both of those things, and with some fairly prominent guest stars, on top of all the work necessary to reintroduce the core characters and their problems of varying import. That's simply a lot to do in such a short time, even for a show that's become efficient in its storytelling protocols.

In particular, the first half of this premiere felt noticeably spastic to me. The Blacklist is a fast-cutting show, no doubt, but it was really churning through the material early on just to get to the set-up of the titular Lord Baltimore and eventually the introduction of Red's ex-wife (played by the lovely but a little underused Mary Louise Parker). By the second commercial break, we'd seen Red in Cameroon, New York City, and Washington, D.C., seemingly in a day's time. His extraction from a hotel by the Mossad agent (Mozhan Marnò, in another fine guest-casting get) was an extremely pointless detour, present mostly to serve as a misdirect and to allow the show to illustrate that it can still do sloppy-ish action sequences on a weekly TV budget. At least the opening sequence—with Red getting himself kidnapped by a murderous rebel group so that he could obtain more info about the people Berlin sent after him—included a more enjoyable ineffectual action moment. Hellfire missiles are cool enough, right?

Along with all that, "Lord Baltimore" hit the ground running with the so-called Blacklister of the week, which put a bit of a damper on its attempts to also remind us that Lizzie, Ressler, and Cooper are in pretty dark places. To be fair, it's not always easy to condense the previous season's character arcs into a few lines of dialogue or a brief montage, but the conversations between Lizzie and Ressler about her paranoia of being followed and his inability to handle the emotional fallout of his lady's death and everything else that happened last spring were pretty rough nonetheless. Worst of all were the forced-in reference to Agent Malik's death, as if any of the characters could recite two interesting things that she added to the equation last season.

Thankfully, the case itself was more compelling, even though that's not too surprising given The Blacklist's track record last season. I liked the discussion about how BIG DATA could be used nefariously by much more villainous parties than the government—Red's luddite criticisms of the internet notwithstanding—and all the admittedly half-baked ideas of using the social graph and all that stuff to predict behaviors and track your marks. Also, big ups to the show for working in a reference to THE DEEP WEB, that mythical and dangerous place that keeps popping up on TV shows once writers' rooms get ahold of those articles about Silk Road.

Best of all was the appearance by Krysten Ritter—who, like Mary Louise Parker, doesn't really need to be doing spots on network action procedurals but also did some cool stuff with what could have been a dumb (or perhaps a dumber) character. Dissociative identity disorder is in itself challenging to pull off in a procedural framework, and to blow that out by having Ritter play a woman who takes on the identity of her dead sister (whom she murdered) was a bit convoluted. Yet, because the disorder can reportedly be caused by trauma, The Blacklist had some latitude to let Ritter shift from 'innocent sister' to 'murderer and criminal mastermind' in as believable a manner as possible. She was good, and given how busy this episode was, that's worth acknowledging.

Finally, Parker made her debut as Red's ex-wife Naomi, which is yet another wrinkle in the show's attempts to display the human consequences of Red's multi-decade run as one of the world's most wanted criminals. Naomi was quickly captured by the still-lingering Berlin, who frankly enjoyed more character shading in the episodes that aired before we actually met him than he's had since is introduction as a dude who looks like Peter Stormare. By the end of the hour, Berlin had sent Naomi's finger to Red as a form of payback for Berlin's daughter's demise all those years ago, but I'm not sure that this character is the uber-villain that The Blacklist seems to be positioning him as.

At times "Lord Baltimore" felt weirdly light on Red, particularly in the second half of the episode, and maybe that's just the result of the case and The Blacklist's need to remind us that there are people on the task force we're supposed to care about too. Nevertheless, I'm very curious to see how the Red/Berlin feud continues, particularly because I actually enjoyed the early parts of Season 1 that emphasized how terrible and evil Red can be; I don't need the show to humanize him too much so quickly. With so many good, veteran performers involved, you'd think that the show could turn this Berlin-Red story into something special—and violent.

I don't really fault The Blacklist for handling its premiere this way. If anything, "Lord Baltimore" was just Part 3 or Part 4 of the extended Berlin arc; when viewed that way, the episode seems a smidgen more successful. However, it's important that the show doesn't forget that its first season thrived with sturdy, efficient standalone episodes that didn't try to jam so much stuff into the proceedings. I'm sure it'll level out sooner rather than later, so let's just hope the conclusion (however temporary) of the Berlin arc is satisfying in the coming weeks.

NOTES

– LIZZIE CUT HER HAIR. Our long national nightmare with the wig is over. Even better, The Blacklist made it out to be a half-assed character moment. I also appreciate the show's attempts to throw a little sex appeal into the episode with Megan Boone randomly clad in only her underwear.

– So, Tom's alive, right? Somebody is watching Lizzie, and that someone has some cool Warby Parker-esque glasses. I hope Ryan Eggold isn't gone quite yet.

– Red visited Cooper to "bribe" him back into returning to the task force, a conversation that included a mention of some event in Kuwait and Red's knowledge of a diagnosis that Cooper received while in the hospital recovering from last season's injuries. I think we've heard about the former before, but the latter sounded foreign to me. Is that right? We don't know anything else about Cooper yet do we?

– You cannot get Donald Ressler to do a psych eval. Come on, everyone in the FBI knows that. Nevermind that he's asking himself questions and immediately answering "yeah, of course" as part of a long monologue about emotional stability. That's just Ress being Ress.

What did you think of The Blacklist's Season 2 premiere?