Liz and Red just can’t stay on the same page.
They teamed up to take down an immoral gun manufacturer on The Blacklist Season 7 Episode 15.
But Liz’s curiosity keeps getting in the way of their relationship.
She can’t let go of who Raymond is and just accept him as he is.
Rather than go away with Cassandra on The Blacklist Season 7 Episode 12, Red stayed with Liz and Agnes.
Then Liz hired a private eye to track down Ilya on The Blacklist Season 7 Episode 13, to find out what he knows about who Raymond really is.
Is the man known as Raymond Reddington Liz’s biological father? Does it really matter since they have a father-daughter relationship in any event?
Liz apparently thinks so, since she keeps torpedoing that relationship just to pin down the specifics of Red’s identity.
It’s getting old, though.
Red may be an invented character, but he’s one we’ve been coming back for for seven seasons.
It’s his world and we’re all just living in it. That includes Liz’s Task Force, which wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for Raymond.
Liz, just leave well enough alone.
Unfortunately, that ship has sailed.
Even worse, she caused one of Red’s oldest friends to go away for his mental health.
Couldn’t an FBI agent have done a better job when lining up an investigator for a sensitive job?
What was Liz thinking sending an at-best semi-competent PI after a man suffering from PTSD, after his imprisonment by Katarina?
Of course Ilya was going to be paranoid after what he had been through in recent months.
The PI moved her car often enough that Ilya’s wife just thought he was imagining things.
But she couldn’t rent a car and rotate surveillance vehicles so Ilya wouldn’t be as likely to notice her?
When Red saw the same car, it was just a matter of time until Liz’s plan fell apart, especially as easily as Dembe got the drop on the PI.
It was great how Teddy used board games as an interrogation tool to get the PI to spill everything she knew. We all know how painful those can be.
Now Raymond knows what she was up to and that’s not good. That’s going to kill the good feelings they’ve had going.
Right after she chose him over the Task Force as they worked together to get Gordon Kemp.
The episode did an admirable job looking at different sides of the gun issue.
Red admitting that he respected the old-school gun manufacturers who took pride in the weapons they made for sportsmen and gun aficienados.
But Kemp just made cheap handguns for thugs and gloated about it.
It was sad in the beginning when Sofia was shot with just such a cheap gun after receiving word that she had gotten into college.
Naturally that makes you question how such a punk could have gotten his hands on a gun so easily.
(It would have been great to have seen the party to which they were headed, but that wouldn’t have gone with the tenor of the episode.)
Raymond is getting more emotional as he ages, feeling all the innocents that have gotten killed around him through the years.
That was what set him on a quixotic quest to stop the flow of such weapons into criminals’ hands.
The Task Force members were right to question pursuing Kemp as a blacklister. Thanks to the NRA, there was no way they were going to be able to stop him legally.
Nothing Kemp did was illegal, just totally immoral.
The judge was afraid to take on the gun lobby so of course Kemp’s case got kicked.
So Red decided to hurt Kemp in the pocketbook by stealing his next big shipment. Unfortunately, Harold just wouldn’t look the other way and took over the planning of the shipment to make sure it wasn’t stolen.
That was another case of when doing the right thing legally wasn’t the right thing morally. Thousands of handguns not landing in the wrong hands would have been a good start.
Harold also knew that Liz was more likely to follow her principles rather than the letter of the law.
This was a good example of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons so I hardly think Liz cooperating with Raymond in this instance qualifies as her dark side coming out.
Everyone on the Task Force has their psychological burdens to bear and need to cut each other some slack, which is what Harold was doing for Liz, even though she didn’t seem to realize that.
Aram and Alina rightfully slipped into the background after their traumas on The Blacklist Season 7 Episode 14.
In the end, Red shooting Kemp with one of his cheap handguns certainly qualifies as karmic justice if not the letter of the law. The man was a monster, his hands weren’t clean, and the world is better off without him.
It was lovely to see Raymond on the side of the angels, trying to right a wrong for Sofia instead of taking out a blacklister just to benefit himself.
To revisit the quickly ending season, watch The Blacklist online.
Did Raymond do the right thing?
Did Liz make the right choice?
Should Harold not have gotten in Red’s way?
Comment below.
Dale McGarrigle is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter.