Megan Boone, playing FBI agent Elizabeth Keen, has had enough in Season 8.
She’s been shot, blown up, stabbed, tortured, betrayed, and told so many fibs even the writers can’t keep them all straight. Certainly, you can’t blame the viewer for entering a passive state while things continue to fall apart for everyone on the Netflix-produced show. The Blacklist, to use a still serviceable cliche, is an acquired taste. By the time you reach season 8, you have most likely gone from wondering about the main characters to caring about them to becoming cynical about them and just waiting around, like vultures, to see what rottenness is coming up next. Or you could just watch the Cuphead Show.
Bad show Season 8, good show?
Does that mean it’s now a bad show? Not at all. Things move. Location shots abound. One senses that the cast, Boone, Spader, and Amir Arison, among others, are so loose now that they’re up for any insanity. Such as being turned into cartoon characters. Which happened earlier in the season when the show shut down. At the beginning of Covid.
So Liz, after seeing her surrogate father murder her mother, flips her lid. She quits the FBI, steals plastic explosives, and goes after James Spader, who plays the nefarious yet lovable Raymond Reddington. She tries to blow him up in the hospital, where he’s recuperating from chikungunya fever. When that doesn’t pan out, she starts planning some other elaborate deadfalls for him. Like maybe placing commercials on all Netflix shows to drive Reddington to suicide.
Lie and the world lies with you
But what’s really behind her nascent and determined criminality is the search for truth.
“I just want the truth!” She cries out several times in this episode.
Indeed, all of the main characters in The Blacklist during Season 8 are so caught up in finding out the truth, or hiding it, that the show has become a sort of Greek tragedy version of an old game show – To Tell The Truth. Who’s lying? And why? And who’s telling the truth? As the King of Siam says in the Broadway play: “Is a puzzle!”
But since everything is a conspiracy anyway, from elections to cryptocurrency, we might as well all sink into our overstuffed recliners, gorge on Skittles, and watch Gilligan’s Island until global warming drowns us in rising oceans.
