Who is Andrew Patterson on blacklist?

I don't know why I've spent years recapping The Blacklist when Aram could have just been doing it this whole time. He sums it up nicely right from the jump when he tells Ressler, "Mr. Reddington's a traitor, Agent Keen's thrown in with a man who abducts human rights activists, and we're hunting for a pirate who buries people alive sometimes I think I never should have left the circus."

Oh, did you notice that one of those clauses is not like the others? And yet, the reveal that Aram was briefly a member of a traveling circus is worth noting, because that tale proves to be about as complicated and unproductive as this episode's entry into the ongoing search and hopeful salvation of Elizabeth Keen. I'll let Aram explains his circus tenure first: "I was hired as a roadie on Monday, lost my virginity to a trapeze artist on Tuesday, she left me for the strongman on Wednesday, and I was back at home eating matzo ball soup on Thursday it was quite the whirlwind."

Indeed, this episode's journey to track down a tech-bro-wannabe middleman, in order to track down Neville Townsend, in order to track down Elizabeth Keen while hopefully saving the life and limbs of a civil rights activist in the process could also be described as quite a whirlwind. It could also also be described as quite fruitless, due to Reddington and Cooper's inability to just tell one another the full truth and work together. But as Cooper is telling it now, he's taken his side, and it's with Keen. And yet, his best hope of finding her is still through Reddington's Blacklist

Given where we ended, I truly cannot believe where we started; there was a brief moment when I thought we might be dealing with an actual child-Blacklister, or at the very least, a sort of Orphan situation.

But no, the cold open was just your classic creepy kid reading an excerpt of "The Tell-Tale Heart" as part of a Poe Society initiation that accidentally turned into another child overdosing after inhaling a bunch of fentanyl that was hidden inside the abandoned house where the boys were playing. (As of our last update, the child was n the ICU, which I will take to mean he recovers and goes on to live a prosperous life with a wild story to tell once he's, y'know, worked past the tell-tale trauma of it all.)