The Blacklist - Season Finale 2014 - Recap: Ich Bin Ein Berliner

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However, I don't buy for one second that Red is actually Liz's father, nor do I feel like I'm really expected to. Sure, the show might want us to momentarily question the certainty we have that the solution to Red and Liz's relationship can't be THAT obvious. Yet I don't think The Blacklist wants us to truly commit to believing Red and Liz are father and daughter. It's just an idea it wants viewers to have in the back of their minds, so that they can get the benefit of all the tension that possibility creates. "Berlin (Conclusion)" is a hell of a season finale, even while I took issue with a number of the choices that were made, from a storytelling standpoint. For instance, what was the point of Agent Meera Malik (Parminder Nagra) if that was going to be her end? Was she ever going to be anything more than a warm body to cool in the finale? At the very least, the show might have given her death some weight by revealing at some point over the last twenty-two episodes that she had children, or some kind of life outside of her work. Or maybe by digging deeper into her guilt over being a mole within the task force. Instead, she spends the entire back half of the season as a virtual non-entity, only to be disposed of within the first twenty minutes of the finale, without hardly ever being mourned or having her death felt in any meaningful way whatsoever (we return from break with Liz passively revealing that Meera has died as the result of getting her throat slit by Berlin's agents, and then we get a brief coda towards the end of the episode in which Liz cleans out Meera's desk and remarks that her kids are only eight- and five-years-old, respectively). Of course, Meera's death does serve two narrative functions, I suppose: 1) it thins out the cast so we can tell some more focused stories in Season 2, and 2) it lulls us into believing the show is really going to kill off Director Cooper (Harry Lennix). On that latter point, I guess the show got me, since I truly expected Cooper was a goner after getting copper-wired in a car by one of Berlin's men. But this is still network TV.

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So the main thrust of the episode is twofold: Ressler (Diego Klattenhoff) interrogates the surviving passengers of the plane that crashed at the end of last week's episode in an attempt to ascertain the identity of Berlin, who is still at large; meanwhile, Red continues his crazed search for Berlin, with the hopes of solving the mystery of who this man is and why he wants to make his life a living hell. And, caught in the middle, is everyone else on the task force, as Tom (Ryan Eggold) has obtained a list of the five primary task force operatives (Liz, Ressler, Meera, Cooper, and Aram). It's kind of a neat inversion of the premise for the bad guys to suddenly have a "Blacklist" of their own, populated with the names of our protagonists, all of whom are earmarked for elimination. As mentioned, Meera is the first to go after having her throat slit at a nightclub while searching for Berlin's cohorts, and Cooper is nearly the next to go, getting garroted in a surprise attack inside his car. Cooper is able to pull through, but this still doesn't exactly bode well for the task force, as Ressler's interrogations get him nowhere. All he learns is that the mysterious Berlin was handcuffed to a guard on the plane. In the panic, "he cut his hand off" and escaped, leaving the guard at the hospital. Once there, Liz and Ressler interrogate this handless guard, who goes into a haunting tale of rumors he heard about Berlin's true identity...

According to this raggedy, disheveled guard (probably should have been a clue, actually, because what guard looks like that?), Berlin was a colonel in the Red Army back in Russia whose daughter was imprisoned for falling in love with a "dissident". Berlin is able to use his power as a high-ranking official to help his daughter escape, only for his deception to be discovered, resulting in his own imprisonment. Over the course of several years, Berlin's daughter is mailed to him in prison...piece by piece. First, he receives her pocket watch along with a photo of what looks to be her corpse. Then he gets an ear, an eye, bones, all of it. He's slowly driven mad, to the point that he fashions a crude knife out of one of his daughter's bones and uses the weapon to escape. It's a positively insane story, the kind of origin you'd expect for a villain in a comic book, but it's so utterly ridiculous that it actually enhances the bombast of the entire episode. The Blacklist has never really trafficked in subtlety, so why start now? Just go balls-to-the-wall! It is the season finale, after all. If now isn't the time for over-the-top, tragic origin stories worthy of Kafka, then I don't know what to tell ya. As origin stories go, this was pretty much the best thing ever. For Berlin to work without us ever meeting him, his legend has to supersede whatever we might think we know about the real person. His reputation must literally precede him. And that's what this does. That the tale is actually true is just the icing on the cake.

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Red tracks down Berlin and takes him captive, tying him up and torturing him by shooting him repeatedly -- first in the hand, then in the ribs, and then threatening to kneecap the guy before Tom storms in, holding Liz at gunpoint and commanding Red to drop the gun. Red was on his way to getting the answers he wanted from Berlin, as the terrorist reveals that the source of his animus against him is a botched operation in Beirut in 2010. We learn later that this is the moment at which Red knew this "Berlin" wasn't the real Berlin, but only a decoy, since the real Berlin had been targeting him long before 2010. So what does Red do, now that he knows this is just some other schmuck? He shoots him in the head to remove him from the equation altogether. Tom threatens to do the same to Liz, but a brawl breaks out in which Tom shoots Red in the shoulder, and Liz retaliated by shooting Tom repeatedly in the torso. Red wants to finish the job, but Liz pleads for the opportunity to do it herself. Left alone for their final moments together, Tom looks genuinely remorseful for all that's happened. And Liz's body language seems to suggest the same, at least for a moment, as she immediately checks Tom's wounds. With his dying breaths, Tom tells Liz he's sorry, and then -- according to Liz later -- reveals that her father is still alive. He then dies, although I suppose there's evidence he survives. For one, when the FBI storms the apartment building in which Fake Berlin was hiding, Tom's body is no longer there, which would be suspicious enough, except we also got an update of the Ryan Eggold Ford commercial during one of the earlier ad breaks that includes an additional bit at the end in which Eggold promises that Tom Keen's true nature would be revealed. And that seems like a strange thing to go out of your way to promise if this was how it was going to end. Either way, I found myself hoping for more out of the resolution to the Tom arc, although I'll be the first to admit that I didn't really know what I was expecting, in all honesty. Nor do I know what I would have wanted out of the story, ideally. I just know I wanted something more than this.

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So, in the coup de grace of silly reveals, Aram (Amir Arison) deduces that the real Berlin was actually the guard whose hand was cut off. Apparently, "he cut his hand off" was a matter of semantics, "a lexical ambiguity." When the witnesses say "he cut his his hand off," the agents assumed "he" and "his" specified two separate people, with Berlin cutting off the guard's hand in order to free himself from the handcuffs. However, "he" and "his" were referencing the same person. Berlin cut off his own hand to free himself, meaning that the men who told the story about being imprisoned in Serbia and having his daughter sent to him piece by piece? THAT was Berlin. And now he's on the run, leaving Liz and Red to get their team back together to go on the hunt. And I suppose it's as worthy a twist as any, as it shakes the status quo of the series while also allowing us to return next season for more of what we liked about the show in the first place (or at least what I liked about it, as the premise itself allowed for different colorful villains to weave in and out of the show each week under the pretense of being on the titular "Blacklist"). But there's still the unresolved issue of Liz and Red's relationship. As Red explains to her, fighting back tears in one of James Spader's most beautifully pained performances, murdering Sam will haunt him for the rest of his days, more so than any difficult thing he's ever done.

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Liz seems to recognize that Red isn't lying when he tells her he killed her father because his friend was suffering, and because, in his senile state, he was about to reveal information that could have gotten her killed: information that still could, actually. By simply knowing the identity of her biological father, Liz could be put in harm's way, which is why her father had her dropped off at Sam's house in the first place after rescuing her from the fire that claimed their house (being pulled out of the flames of this fire is, of course, the only memory Liz has of her birth father, and throughout all of this, I find myself wondering why the subject of a mother is never brought up. But then, the last thing I need any show to force me to do ever again is wonder about who The Mother is). Of course, if Liz's birth father dropped her off at Sam's house, why does Red tell her at the end of the episode that Tom's dying words were a lie, and that her biological father, with "no uncertainty," died in that fire? As the episode comes to a close, we see Red treating the gunshot wound he sustained in the standoff with Tom, and on his bareback, we see burn scars. In effect, Red is likely telling the truth about Liz's father dying in the fire, but lying about who pulled her out of the flames and dropped her off at Sam's. In all likelihood, it was Red who did these things.

Credit: NBC

However, this then begs the question of who Liz's biological father is, why that information would get her killed, what Red's association with the man was, and why Red has a photo of Berlin's daughter with the number #79 written on the margins? Was she a Blacklister too? If so, did Red take her down? Was he the one who mailed Berlin's daughter to him, piece by piece? And if Red did do these things, why the hell would he act as if he has no idea who could possibly be holding a grudge against him for all these years? This finale left a multitude of questions, but dammit, I'm pumped for the fall. And I was not expecting the mysteries to have me this jazzed, especially since I doubt we're going to get any answers right away. But hey, The Blacklist is benefiting from a higher profile for the 2014-2015 season, such as a potentially game-changing move to Thursday nights, as well as the coveted post-Super Bowl timeslot. So maybe increased attention will prompt Bokenkamp to start making with the answers? Of course, I say this, but I only really mean it superficially. I don't particularly care all that much about the answers when I have as much fun with the show built around the mysteries. For all its faults, The Blacklist is still one of TV's most exciting procedurals, particularly among any on network television. All in all, I felt this was a pretty damn successful first season.