The Blacklist. Season 9.
How many funerals does it take to make a binge-worthy Netflix series?
Quite a few, as it turns out. Elizabeth Keen, actress Megan Boone, is unceremoniously bumped off, buried, mourned, and avenged throughout season nine of The Blacklist.
The body count just goes through the roof as the season progresses, with massacres, explosions, and torture-gone-bad.
Ingmar Bergman meets Dick Tracy
There is not just over-the-top bloodshed in season nine of The Blacklist. If that were the case, it would be nothing more than another knockoff of Kill Bill 1 and 2. But this series uses all the mayhem to allow James Spade and others in the show to proclaim elegies about death and corruption; the fleeting joy of life, and the infinite anxiety of a possible afterlife. Each major character comes very close to pushing up daisies, and each one thus gets a crack at a soliloquy a la Hamlet doing “To be or not to be . . .”
Raymond Reddington continues to play puppet master. Sending out the FBI task force created to take advantage of his criminal knowledge on snipe hunts and other alarums and excursions. But now, each time he sends them hunting a monster he has to pause while on his private jet. Or in some swanky European hotel suite. To ponder out loud the vagaries of his life as ‘The Concierge of Crime.’ He’s tired of it all. And once his protege Elizabeth Keen is out of life he visibly deflates. At the continued warfare his criminal empire exacts from colleagues and foes. There’s little doubt that he’ll don a black hooded robe in season ten and start carrying around a scythe like the grim reaper.
Marvin Gerard, part of the binge
Actor Fisher Stevens, playing Reddington’s slippery mouthpiece Marvin Gerard shines at the end of season nine. Moreover, like Shakespeare’s Iago, he has bottled up his hatred of his superior until it escapes in full spate. He takes everything from Reddington. Confesses his scheme that murders Liz Keen. And mutters his astute resentment like a Greek chorus. However, Gerard appears to have triumphed over Reddington, he crumbles. He implodes. And kills himself. So Reddington and company are back in the saddle for season ten.
