The Blacklist - Recap: Men in Glass Houses

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The episode gets underway pretty quickly, as Ressler (Diego Klattenhoff) picks up Red (James Spader) at a bar with news that his life may be in danger. So Ressler orders Red to come with him to be placed in protective custody. However, it becomes immediately apparent to Red that this is all a setup perpetrated by Garrick, who planted misinformation in order to get the FBI to bring the normally-elusive Red to a secure, inescapable location. Despite Red's desperate, urgent warnings, the FBI refuses to listen until it's suddenly too late to stop the invasion of Garrick's forces. And so we enter lockdown, with Ressler taking Red to his special containment cell, Cooper (Harry Lennix) and Malik (Parminder Nagra) heading off to deal with Garrick's men, Agent Aram Mojtabai (Amir Arison) attempting to reestablish the communications signal to order reinforcements, and Elizabeth (Megan Boone) flying solo, having been caught in an elevator during the lockdown. And so we have our various pieces on the proverbial chess board, but it doesn't take terribly long before several pieces get moved out of play.

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Cooper and Malik are quickly captured by Garrick's forces and marches away at gunpoint, while Aram finds the signals jammed beyond repair. Luckily, Liz is on hand to subdue several guards with her quick-thinking, utilizing her training to catch several mercenaries unaware. She kills at least two, and knocks a third unconscious, tying him up with a pair of zipties to prevent him from gathering the C4 necessary to blow Red's cell open. She then meets up with Aram, and together they destroy several of the signal jammers before splitting up to cover more ground. Yet things go south once again when the merc Liz spared catches her off-guard and knocks her unconscious. Of course, this all takes up loads of screentime, but it plays out onscreen much better than it reads. Megan Boone is a surprisingly convincing action heroine, and director Joe Carnahan keeps the pace frenetic, and the action purposeful, so that never feels extraneous or unnecessary to the storytelling. Each person has his or her objective, and a set amount of time to accomplish it, and it's that sort of narrative economy that propels the episode through its weaker, non-Red moments.

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The lion's share of the episode centers on Red coming to terms with his past in a more direct way than through the flashes of images we've seen in the past several weeks (or the random series of images Liz sees tonight of a burning house, as if recalled from some distant memory. It's peculiar the show would go there, since these visions are never mentioned again at any point in the episode, but I suppose it's a necessary bit of table-setting for Part 2, or even later). Here, Red is faced with the specter of former partner-in-crime Anslo Garrick (Ritchie Coster), a man with whom Red had a falling out. Of course, when you "fall out" with Raymond Reddington, it often entails a bullet to the skull at point-blank range. Yet somehow, Garrick survived the gunshot, and spent five years recovering, planning for the day when he would get to take his revenge. And the day has come. It's a compelling enough motivation, but the show goes a bit overboard in making Garrick garishly distinctive, as he not only bears a gnarly-looking scar on the right side of his face, his right eye is also little more than a milk-colored orb. One side of his face also appears to be paralyzed, presumably as a result of Red's actions in the past, and all these elements come together with Coster's scenery-chewing delivery to make Anslo Garrick a villain who is, somehow, inexplicably, equal parts terrifying and ridiculous. He's the kind of over-the-top villain you'd see an 80s action movie, so he feels right at home here, since this episode has a lot more in common with Die Hard than with a TV thriller like 24.

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Ressler takes a bullet to his leg, prompting Red to display his previously unseen fighting skills, as he quickly disables one of the soldiers, finishes him off with a few point-blank rounds, punctures a coolant tank to give them time to escape from the oncoming mercenaries, and tossing a grenade their way, for good measure. Red then hauls a confused Ressler away to the containment cell for safe-keeping, with Ressler confusedly wondering why Red would bother to save his life, given how much of his own life he's dedicated to bringing Red to justice. But Red is a man with a code, and although he might not particularly like Ressler, nor have any particular use for him, it's a matter of principle that he can't allow the man to die if it's within his power to prevent it from happening. And so the two men make it to safety as Ressler bleeds all over the place inside the cell, with Garrick trying his damndest to breech the impenetrable cell to finally have his revenge.

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There are several key moments within the cell, all of them interesting. Right off the bat, he puts one theory behind the Blacklist to bed when he tells Ressler that the Blacklist isn't about revenge (since it's "over so quickly"). Red then goes on to reveal that he knows all about Ressler's attempts to bring him to justice, even going so far as to bring up the painful subject of Ressler's fiance, who left him over his obsession with advancing his career through hunting Red. But none of this is as substantial as his attempts to keep Ressler alive. It's a further summation of Red's code that he sets aside his differences with Ressler in service of trying to save his life. Ressler is slowly bleeding out from the wound to his leg, prompting Red to go full MacGuyver, performing a field blood transfusion, and cauterizing the wound with gunpowder, of all things.

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As Red explains, he's doing this because this is what you do when you see a person dying in front of your eyes, and although the two men remain at odds, Red isn't about to let Anslo win. Red goes into a fairly protracted monologue about all the things he has left to do in this life before he can allow himself to die, and it's a stunningly poignant piece of acting from Spader, who really brings out more in the monologue than was likely on the page, simply through sheer force of his characterization. It's gutwrenching when he explains that, above all the things left in life to do, and all the places he'd like to visit again, what he really wants is to sleep again, like he did when he was a boy. Intercut with this is the pale, teary-eyed Ressler, looking for all the world like the all-American version of a little boy in those moments. It's a fittingly effective moment that deepens the bond between two characters who've had no meaningful points of connection before now.

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But the episode isn't done unleashing the chaos, as Garrick brings Cooper and Malik before Red and threatens to kill them if they don't open the door. When Cooper refuses to budge, he brings out Red's own personal entourage, Dembe (Hisham Tawfiq) and Luli (Deborah S. Craig). He murders the crying, terrified Luli in short order as Red pleads with him to reconsider. He then provides Red with a countdown to the murder of Dembe, one of his dearest friends. This scene would have carried a lot more weight if we'd gotten to know these ancillary characters better over the course of the previous eight episodes, yet Spader and Tawfiq are largely able to make up the difference by imbuing their relationship with a more lived-in quality. We never see them together onscreen that much in any meaningful capacity, yet they feel like two friends who have been together a very long time.

Credit: NBC

Credit: NBC

And so it is here, as Dembe goes to his end with dignity, telling Red that theirs was a friendship forged in this life that will continue in the next. They pray together as Garrick puts Dembe on his knees in front of the impenetrable glass of the cell, forcing Red to watch one of his closest friends meet his end. It's not only enough to get the audience to truly hate the artless, brutish Garrick, but also to pose the question of just how desperate Red will become next week when it's Liz who will likely be paraded in front of the glass. Will this newfound friendship with Ressler amount to anything, or will he and Red become like the Lebanese partner in Red's anecdote: a friend one week and an enemy who needs to be taken out the next?

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"Anslo Garrick, Part 1" is my favorite episode of the season so far, and it's inconceivable to me that part 2 won't deliver at the same capacity, assuming that it maintains the pace of this week's episode, and brings the cumulative story arc to a satisfying conclusion. There's a lot of story to tell here, but the series has shown remarkable focus in telling it, and this has been The Blacklist's key strength aside from Spader, its one-track focus on its individual cases, and how those cases both warp and inform the characters of its world.