The Blacklist recap: Red puts the hat in hat trick
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The Blacklist opens on Red (James Spader) outside Washington Square Park, spotting a penny in the middle of the street. When he pauses there, a truck barreling down Washington Street North hits the horn but Red doesn't react. In fact, facing the vehicle speeding towards him, he looks almost curious.
At the last second, the truck swerves around him. Red picks up the penny and tells a concerned onlooker, "Heads. Good fortune."
The Red we know doesn't believe in luck and is obsessively concerned with survival, so all of this is deeply concerning.
But before we can get to figuring out what's going on underneath that fedora, we have a hat trick to get through. This week, Cooper (Harry Lennix) finally gets Red to give him some cases. Three, in fact. Let's take these one at a time.
Case #1: A Thieving Lawyer
Ressler (Diego Klattenhoff) starts by investigating Rebecca Anders (Tara Westwood), a personal injury attorney who Red believes is stealing from her clients and possibly funding something nefarious.
Will Hart/NBC 'The Blacklist' season 10, episode 15
A former client of Anders' sings her praises about his million-dollar settlement, but Cooper figures out that the company actually paid out over $3 million. The lawyer made the settlement private, including non-disclosure agreements, so she could make two separate sets of paperwork.
In interrogation, Ressler tries get Anders to confess to a larger criminal conspiracy that is worthy of a true Blacklister, but this case isn't that complex. Just an ethically challenged lawyer funding her lavish lifestyle.
Case solved!
Case #2: The Fertility Clinic
A clinic has lost all of their embryos in a power outage, a loss so massive that the company happily accepts the FBI's help. Malik (Anya Banerjee) and Dembe (Hisham Tawfiq) head to investigate whether this was, as Red suggests, foul play.
The clinic runs their systems through a company called Addabbo CommTech. Their representative, Todd Wagner (Jordan Bridges), can't figure out why the multiple alarm systems and backup generators failed, but Malik also wants to figure out why the attack happened in the first place. She asks for the client list.
FBI techies discover that someone hacked the security system internally, and once Malik sees the client list, she has a good guess who: among those who lost embryos were Aimee and Alexander Addabbo (Leigh DeLollis and Steve Blanchard), owners of the same security company used by the clinic.
At their company headquarters, Malik and Dembe interview the owner and his much younger wife. They seem legitimately devastated by the loss of their embryos, especially since Alex is now sterile from cancer treatment.
Malik explains the hack was most likely internal, and Aimee immediately knows who's to blame. She shoots down Alex's objections with a terse, "You always protect him," and summons the employee to the conference room.
The mystery employee is no other than Todd Wagner — Alex's son, Aimee's stepson, and resentful eldest boy. Rather than share an eventual inheritance with a potential sibling and disdainful of a stepmother younger than himself, Todd destroyed every embryo in the clinic.
Malik, disgusted, is terrifying in interrogation. She tells him that he's lucky to have been arrested by her and not the original Agent Malik who sacrificed everything for family. "You should be glad you're talking to me and not my mother because she would have left you broken and bleeding." Not gonna lie, it was awesome.
Another case solved!
Case #3: Angel of Mercy
The last case involves three suspicious heart attack deaths at the same hospital. Herbie (Alex Brightman) looks over the medical data and discovers that there were no underlying medical reasons for any of these patients to die from heart attack.
Will Hart/NBC 'The Blacklist' season 10, episode 15
There were large amounts of potassium in their systems that could have caused the fatal attacks, but during death red blood cells burst and flood the system with potassium naturally. While coroners attributed the excess potassium to those natural causes, Herbie hypothesizes that potassium would be an ideal weapon of choice for a murdering "angel."
Herbie — MVP of this episode — also deduces who had access to all three patients: a traveling nurse named Dawn Jacobus (Marceline Hugot). When we see Dawn starting her shift at the hospital, she's asking about a specific patient.
Ressler rushes in and arrests Dawn before she can finish attaching the IV. In interrogation, the nurse protests her innocence. Lucky for her, Herbie's been testing IV bags from Dawn's hospital. I told you he was the MVP.
Among the normal bags, he's also found factory sealed IVs with fatal amounts of potassium. As Cooper declares, "It's not an Angel of Mercy after all — it's a manufacturing error." He sends Malik and Ressler to find out who is responsible.
The CEO of Kolbeck Medical Solutions is not happy to be speaking to the FBI and stonewalls the team. He also calls Malik "young lady," which immediately makes him arrestable in my book. On their way out of the meeting, Ressler promises to prosecute anyone who knew about the tainted medical supplies.
This freaks out the head of product safety, who asks for immunity in exchange for information. It turns out less than 1% of their IV bags were incorrectly manufactured, so the CEO decided against a recall and just hoped no one would connect the dots.
Case solved! Hat trick achieved!
Wait, That's It?
These cases seem almost too simple to the Task Force, so much so that Cooper amusingly refuses to even call them Blacklisters. The team looks over the files again, and Ressler catches a photo from a charity event hosted by Wildsociety, a non-profit that protects biodiversity.
The picture is of Wildsociety's board of directors, including the three familiar non-Blacklisters: Todd Wagner, Rebecca Anders, and the CEO of Kolbeck Medical. That's right! Bonus case!
By the time Cooper meets with the director of Wildsociety, they've already fired the three arrested board members and prepared a binder of information for the FBI. In the donor lists, Cooper finds an anonymous donation for $52.5 million. A little probing reveals a name: Steven Holman.
As we watchers of the Blacklist know, Steven Holman (or any variant of the name) is one of Red's favorite aliases. I think the last time we saw Steve was when Red and Cassandra went after a valuable necklace. Now, he's the main benefactor of Wildsociety.
Bonus case solved!
Ressler is aghast that, once again, the Task Force was doing an errand for Red — in this case, rooting out corruption in the organization before he gave them a metric ton of cash. I am aghast that, once again, Ressler has forgotten doing Red's bidding has been his literal job for 10 years.
When Dembe later visits Red, the criminal is in a retrospective mood. The massive donation is to try to leave a better world for Agnes — after all, what's the point of making sure she's safe if there's not a decent world for her to live in?
Dembe admires the gift but questions the rest of the giveaways Red has been doing of late. Red insists he's done holding on to material wealth for the sake of it, like the people they just finished arresting.
"But is everything alright?" Dembe presses.
"Everything's fine, Dembe," Red insists. "I'm fine."
Once again, that answer doesn't seem entirely true. I remain deeply concerned.
The Back-list:
Red spends the day trying to find dirt on Arthur Hudson (Toby Leonard Moore), but the Congressperson turns out to be a good person. Red is deeply disappointed but may vote for him next time.
Herbie explains he's got pathologist friends in low places. "Creepy basements. That's where they hide pathologists. It's so you don't see a bunch of dead bodies and the creeps who work on them on your way in the door."
Ressler continues his sponsorship of Jonathan Pritchard (Mackenzie Astin), this week guiding him through the amends process. This story has been quietly percolating all season in the background, and I'm getting excited to see it come to a boil.
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