The Blacklist - Recap: Trust in Red...Or Don't, Whatever
Recap and review of The Blacklist - Episode 6 - Gina Zanetakos:
For as often as The Blacklist is compelling, it's often just as frustrating. "Gina Zanetakos" is a fairly decent episode, yet it involves a lot of narrative hemming and hawing, as the plot is basically one turnaround after another, all leading to a fairly obvious conclusion: Red (James Spader) is pretty much lying to Elizabeth (Megan Boone) throughout the entire episode about the nature of her husband's business dealings -- or at least, that's the way it's presented. We essentially learn that Tom (Ryan Eggold) is no James Bond, and that Red has been framing him for reasons that go unexplained. He continues to imply that there are still things about Tom that Liz refuses to see, but it's all too little, too late. What little trust was there has been broken, the partnership is back to square one, and "Gina Zanetakos" basically feels like an hour spent running on the world's longest treadmill.
So the episode centers on the hunt for the eponymous Gina Zanetakos (Margarita Levieva), who is intending to detonate a "dirty bomb" at some point in the next 36 hours. This mission is clear enough, but it's complicated by developments on the homefront for Liz and Tom, who get into an argument over the box of passports, money, and the telltale gun. Tom claims he's never seen the box before, and demands to know what it's doing in their house. However, Liz doesn't buy Tom's innocent act, leading to a blow-up in which Tom accuses her of being the cause of everything "evil" that comes into their lives. Ultimately, they decide that the only way to clear the air is to go directly to the FBI to be vetted. And so Liz brings Tom into the FBI for questioning, knowing full well she'll be subjected to questioning herself, since she had to conceal her independent investigation into the matter from her superiors. Even if it was a Russian defector, a person was still killed, and someone needs to answer for it.
Credit: NBC
FBI Director Cooper (Harry Lennix) puts Liz on leave, suspicious of what she might still be hiding, given her developing partnership with Red. Feeling lost, Liz meets with Red, who assures her that he's someone she can trust, which is a heavy-handed bit of foreshadowing for later. But thankfully, the episode is diverted a bit from the business with Tom in order to deal with the more interesting pursuit of Gina Zanetakos, a Blacklister specializing in corporate espionage. They're already on borrowed time in catching her, yet Red gives Liz an added incentive to track the woman down: he tells her that Gina is Tom’s lover. It's hard to know what Red's angle is here, particularly later in the episode, when he threatens Director Cooper with nebulous threats about Cooper's past in Kuwait, an instance of blackmail that prompts Cooper to reinstate Liz to aid in the search for Gina. As the investigation rolls on, Liz begins to suspect that Tom is innocent, and that Gina may have killed the man at Angel Station, since the woman was clearly there at the same weekend as her and Tom. Yet Liz's certainty is shaken when the FBI raids Gina's apparent and find not only evidence that she is, in fact, the assassin, but also a picture of Tom. This implies that Red's story is true, or, at the very least, that Tom and Gina know one another.
Credit: NBC
Ultimately, Red is able to get Gina's bombmaker to flip on her, and they're able to track her down, prompting a fairly exciting action sequence in which Liz goes toe-to-toe with Gina in a restroom. Liz loses the upper hand, and Agent Ressler (Diego Klattenhoff) arrives just in the nick of time, shooting Gina and preventing her from possibly killing Liz. But Ressler has inadvertently committed more harm than good, as he may have just killed the one person who knows the location of the dirty bomb, so they rush her to the hospital in a desperate bid to save her life. Yet, in one of the more confounding plot turns, they end up not really needing her. Red and Liz are able to ascertain that the bomb is at a port in Houston. Essentially, Gina's entire scheme is to shut down the port in Houston in order to allow a company controlling ports in New Orleans to control access to resources, and turn a sizable profit in the process. It's a weirdly esoteric plan, not terribly unlike Lex Luthor deciding that the best way to create a real estate boom is to destroy California, for some reason.
Credit: NBC
With that said, there were clever elements to Gina's plan, such as her use of a Turkish diplomat to transport the bomb as diplomatic cargo. But the cleverness mostly ends there, as the conclusion to the storyline becomes a standard "defuse the bomb before it blows up" action plot. However, I have to give the show credit for not simply having it coming down to which wire to cut. The agents discover the bomb in a car, but find that they can't deactivate it, and so Ressler simply drives the car into the water, diving out just before the vehicle plunges into the water. The bomb safely detonates in the water, although apparently no one seems to care that nuclear material is now in the water supply. But it's just as well, as there are other matters to attend to before the hour is through.
Credit: Barbara Nitke/NBC
The FBI interrogates Gina on her hospital bed and offers her a plea deal in exchange for her testimony. In turn, she admits having killed the Russian spy at Angel Station...revealing that it was Red who hired her to commit the act. She also has no idea how the photo of Tom got into her apartment, since she's never seen him before in her life. And so Tom is exonerated, and is quickly released by the FBI. However, as they're leaving the FBI "blacksite," Tom recognizes a photo on the wall. He claims it's the man who pretended to be the school principal interviewing him for a job during that weekend in Boston at Angel Station. And who's in the photo? None other than Red's right-hand man, Grey (Charles Baker). In short order, Liz confronts Red and tells him to go to Hell, saying she's sick of being manipulated by his twisted lies. For his part, Red insists that Tom still isn't innocent, but Liz isn't interested in hearing it. Of course, there's still a lot that Liz doesn't know about -- namely, the mysterious men who have cameras planted all over her house. We still don't know who they are or what their motives are, but one of the men discusses Tom, observing that he clearly doesn't work for Red. Though Liz has put the issue to bed, the show still wants us to believe, at some level, that Tom isn't the man he appears to be. It's an interesting plot, if a little derivative of season one Homeland (although I don't really see that as a bad thing at all). It could make for a decent character arc for Liz, who continues to have unsettlingly ambiguous relationships with the men in her life, founded as they are in distrust.
Credit: NBC
"Gina Zanetakos" is a decent enough episode, yet I was hoping for a lot more. It could simply bet that I hold the show to a higher standard, given the relative strength of previous weeks. Yet something about "Gina Zanetakos" felt strangely hollow. The Blacklist should have a chance to rebound from this, though, given the narrative boost that Liz and Red's internal conflict should provide. It could be an interesting way to really kick the show into high gear.