Blacklist season 8 episode 21 watch now

Arthouse Blacklist wouldn't have the same impact if they rolled the genre out all the time. These black-and-white flashback episodes are a once-every-few-seasons kind of affair. First there was "Cape May" for Katarina, then "Requiem" for Mr. Kaplan, and finally "Rassvet" for Ilya Koslov and Dom. [After that, Elizabeth Keen may have stopped believing in other people's memories as a reliable source for the truth of her own life.] But a flashback episode that brings all those prior episodes together, seamlessly interweaving former flashbacks, new flashbacks, and an entirely new lens through which to view the past, present, and maybe the future - that's a once-in-a-series kind of affair.

Sorry, let me rephrase that: a two-part once-in-a-series kind of affair.

This penultimate episode of season 8 is titled "Nachalo," which means beginning in Russian. Next week's season finale is "Konets": the end. And for a series that so often takes the most circuitous route possible to finally get to the point, this week The Blacklist invited us to start from the very beginning -a very fine place to start.

The episode opens with Liz entering the bunker that Reddington described to her last week as "the epicenter part of a machine that has been my life's work for decades." The interior looks like your fairly average criminal workplace inside a Cold War-era bunker. People are typing, shuffling papers, moving boxes around. As Reddington tells it, this is all the result of the Sikorsky Archive: those 13 packets of intel given to him all those years ago, which he traded, leveraged, and sold in an effort to acquire "more information, more protection, more authority." All of it comes together to power Reddington's enterprise, to create the Blacklist, and to protect Elizabeth Keen.

But it's that last bit Liz has the most trouble with. She doesn't want any part in Red's enterprise, or his alleged protection.All she's ever wanted is to know the story of her own life, to learn what really happened to her mother. Reddington says he didn't kill Katarina Rostova, but Elizabeth saw him do it -so once again Red tells Liz she needs to forget everything she thinks she knows.