The Blacklist's Hunt For Reddington Just Took Its First Casualty Before The Series Finale, And It Hit Me Hard

Spoilers ahead for Episode 20 of The Blacklist Season 10, called “Arthur Hudson.”

Only days are left before the final credits roll on The Blacklist in the 2023 TV schedule, and the show didn’t wait until the super-sized finale to raise the stakes sky-high for the task force. In “Arthur Hudson,” Congressman Hudson used the information he’d gathered thanks to Pritchard to move on Cooper and Co. Reddington was in the wind, however, prompting the attorney general to pull the agents off the bench and start a hunt for their longtime criminal informant. By the end of the hour, the characters experienced their first casualty of the final hunt for Red, and it was rough to watch.

The casualty was none other than Pritchard himself, who was overcome with guilt for tricking Ressler and taking advantage of his trust to bug his phone. He fell off the wagon at the end of the previous week’s episode (which will be available streaming via Peacock Premium subscription), and Ressler got a frantic call from Pritchard’s wife that he was missing and his credit cards were being used at bars. Pritchard was still alive when Ressler found him at a motel, but certainly not alive and well, as his NA sponsor found a stash of alcohol, drugs, and pills.

Pritchard was barely coherent when Ressler started putting him to bed, but he strung together enough words that the agent realized that his phone was bugged. He immediately called Cooper from a landline, and was at least able to give his boss a heads up that the attorney general had recordings of Cooper discussing high treason before the meeting began.

And it would have been great if that was the end of Pritchard’s story in “Arthur Hudson,” but that wasn’t the case. Ressler and the rest of the task force were being held and questioned in their headquarters after having to surrender their cell phones, so Ressler had no idea that his sponsee tried to call him over and over and over again. When he finally got his phone back to get the message, it was too late. Ressler rushed back to the motel, where he found Pritchard dead on the bed from an overdose.

Now, The Blacklist went a long way to set up that Pritchard wasn’t far enough along in his sobriety journey that he was guaranteed to stay on the straight and narrow in the face of great stress, and falling off the wagon at the end of last week’s episode wasn’t a good sign. Even Ressler finding him looking near death early in “Arthur Hudson” made me suspicious that worse would happen before the end of the hour. Nevertheless, despite kinda seeing it coming, this death hit me hard.

Of all the characters mixed up in Hudson’s quest to shut down the task force and expose their involvement with Reddington, Pritchard was dragged into it by the congressman when his only connection to the potential scandal was a friendship with Ressler based on absolute trust. He wanted nothing to do with bugging his NA sponsor, even after learning about his love for Liz Keen. He was used as a pawn by Hudson, and he certainly didn’t deserve the fate he got. Will he get some justice in the finale?

There are plenty of much bigger characters who I don’t want to see killed off before the end of The Blacklist, but this one hurt. He just wanted to get better, and Ressler couldn’t have been more sincere in wanting to help him. Damn it, Hudson! Pritchard dying also raises the stakes for the series finale, which were already plenty high. On top of Red and Cooper’s meeting at the end of “Arthur Hudson,” I’m wondering if the feds will figure out that Dembe was the one who called Red with a warning, not too long after they shared a beautiful moment.

See who makes it to the very end of the show with the bigger-than-expected series finale of The Blacklist, which will run for two hours on July 13, starting at 8 p.m. ET on NBC. If you want to revisit earlier days of the hit drama, you can find the first nine seasons of The Blacklist streaming via Netflix subscription.