The Blacklist Review: 2×20 “Quon Zhang”

The Blacklist hasn’t lost its edge one bit. The lies and level of corruption swirling around everyone will undoubtedly have deadly consequences when all is said and done.

The Blacklist — A recovering Red (James Spader) sets Liz (Megan Boone) on the trail of the mysterious smuggler Quon Zhang (Guest Star Rob Yuan, Blacklister No. 87) in order to put pressure on the Cabal. As the Task Force digs into Quon Zhang’s odd shipments of stolen bodies shipped back to China, Red uses all means necessary to drive Kenneth Jasper (James A. Stephens) into the spotlight and into Red’s hands. As the Task Force closes in on Quon Zhang, Liz and Tom (Ryan Eggold) reach a roadblock trying to uncover secrets from Red’s flat and in frustration Liz finally calls Red out. While Red does admit that the woman in the picture is Liz’s mother and a former KGB agent, he says little else leading a frustrated Liz on her own to find answers.

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In the mean time, Red enlists the help of Samar Navabi (Mozhan Maranò) to extract information from the captured Jasper but is betrayal afoot? Harold Cooper (Harry J. Lennix) certainly seems to think as much when he is pressured to take deeper and deeper elicit actions as “favors” for Tom Connolly (Reed Birney). When he refuses, things take an unexpected turn and the capture of Quon Zhang reveals that danger has already been smuggled into the country. With so many twists, ruses and new players entering the fray, things may be unraveling quickly for the Task Force and in the end, secrets held on the tongues of those involved may ultimately be everyone’s undoing after this episode of The Blacklist!

The dead really do haunt the living—if the answers you seek never measure up.

Quon Zhang, one of the more unique but less important Blacklisters to date turned out to be completely clean of connections to the Cabal in the bodies he was shipping out of the US to China. That’s not to say that a litany of crimes hadn’t been committed, they just weren’t committed in the name of the Cabal. As his story unfolded and his service of “mail-order corpse brides” was unraveled, it was his final story of the dead haunting the living that seemed to parallel Liz’s biggest frustration.

To say that she’s not entirely happy with Red at the moment would be an understatement of considerable magnitude. She’s met a brick wall every time she tries to open up her past and learn more about the night she lost her parents. But Dembe (Hisham Tawfiq) is the one that opened the floodgates by sending her to Red’s flat. Liz’s curiosity is at an all time high and with no record of the woman in the photograph existing anywhere, Tom was right. Confronting Red was the only way to get answers. Ransacking the flat for the telltale camera was the best play she could have made to force his hand.

“The girl is you. And the woman is your mother.” ~ Red

“What was her name?” ~ Liz

“I knew her as Katarina Rostova. One of her many names. She was a KGB agent.” ~ Red

“The girl The night of the fire, they called her Masha.” ~ Liz

“You were born in Moscow. Your parents-father and-they were both in foreign intelligence.” ~ Red

Finding out her mother’s name, at least one of them, and Liz’s on Russian decent only spurred her on. As Liz continued to press for answers, Red had to know that giving her a little would lead to her begging for a lot. But admitting he suppressed her memory would have to be a huge sign to her that he’d never tell her the truth unless forced to do so. He would never have gone to all that trouble to hide what happened, even from her own mind, if it weren’t something that he planned to take to his grave.

Liz’s frustration was completely understandable and both Spader and Boone were emotionally magnificent opposite each other. She’s fought so hard to find shreds of truth and he’s fought equally hard to keep them hidden. The cat and mouse game between them has been both enjoyable and frustrating to watch. As an audience we know the writing team can’t let the cat out of the bag this early. All the same, we also know that we are dying to find out and every road block she hits, we feel too.

She’s haunted by the dead. Just as Quon Zhang was his brother. Her life has been shambles since Red entered it and the dead have littered the morgues since he arrived. But it’s the loss of her family that has had her most distraught and understandably so. Unlike the dead however, the one person Zhang smuggled into the country for the Cabal, could turn out to be the scariest of all to both Red and Liz before everything is done.

It’s not so good having low friends in high places.

Harold, who in his heart is a good person, is in a definite pickle. Though he’s certainly made mistakes, we get the sense that he’s a man of honor and one that takes his job seriously. His wife admitted as much to Liz when Harold was in the hospital. His job is everything. But Harold is playing in a much deeper pool now than ever before. Tom’s words to Liz ring true for everyone. Anyone caught in Red’s net and who gets involved in Red’s world is in a danger that they can’t ignore. Red’s world is a dangerous one.

Harry Lennix disappeared on us for a bit this season and we’re glad to see him in the middle of a juicy side story that’s certainly going to come full circle and impact both Liz and Red eventually. He’s played both sides of his dilemma well and we’re certain that this episode’s events will lead to some serious soul-searching for Harold. The heart to heart with Charlene (Valarie Pettiford) over what to do didn’t go as planned. What did Harold expect her to say? There’s no doubt she loves him and the selfish part of her simply wants her husband with her longer.

But Smiling Tommy Connolly has become one of the more fascinating characters on this show and the deeper into the mess he gets, and the more he asks Harold to compromise his principles, the more interesting he becomes. Reed Birney was perfectly cast as Connolly. If there’s anyone on this show that’s having as much fun as Spader, it might be Birney. Every slimy line he delivers with that deviously innocent smile is simply a joy to watch. We have no doubt that Connolly is on a collision course with something not so pleasant, but we also wouldn’t put it past him to somehow slither his way out of it. After all, he’s just too much fun to watch, especially when he’s laying down the law.

“What matters now is that you realize one key thing. That you understand it and internalize it with every fiber of your being.” ~ Connolly

“And that is?” ~ Cooper

“We own you. You perjured yourself to protect Agent Keen. You broke federal law by disclosing the time-line of a pending indictment. If that weren’t enough, a classified document was leaked today to The Post.” ~ Connolly

“I told you I won’t do it.” ~ Cooper

“You’re not understanding me, Harold. It’s already done. It seems your wife doesn’t share your ethical principles. You wouldn’t do it, so Charlene made the hard decision for you. That’s how much she loves you. God knows my wife wouldn’t commit any felonies for my behalf.” ~ Connolly

There’s a diabolical side to Connolly. He knew what he was talking about earlier in the season when he outright admitted he’s got no morals to corrupt. Birney has played Connolly perfectly and just for pure entertainment value, we certainly hope he stays around for a while. Unfortunately enemies of Red tend to meet a sour demise so we’ll just have to see how this all plays out over the end of this season and into the next—provided Connolly survives that long.

What did you say? We couldn’t hear you for your lack of tongue.

We’ll give Red his due. He certainly knows how to get information from people when he needs to and if he can’t, well, he still doesn’t pass up the opportunity to make a point to those that he’s working against. We didn’t believe for a second that Navabi had turned and was working for the Director. Put simply, Dembe wouldn’t leave this show without it meaning a lot more than his seemingly throw away demise. Granted, the ruse wasn’t really for us, but I’m sure Writers J.R. Orci and Lukas Reiter enjoyed the idea that some people would be freaking out.

No, the ruse was for Jasper and he fell for it hook, line and sinker. We’re certain he wasn’t thinking about Dembe’s importance to the series. After all, if Jasper had been watching all along, he’d have realized just like we did that he was being played. He’d also have known he was in much bigger trouble than he knew. It was a rather clever way of getting information that went much deeper than the teeth extraction method we were all squirming in preparation to see. We’d have been squirming a bit more had we not been giddy watching Red enjoy the moment. He does seem to relish delivering someone their comeuppance and Spader’s regaling of Marathon Man was classic Red at his best.

“Olivier drilling into Hoffman’s teeth right down into the nerve. Oh, God, I can just feel it! The screaming and writhing, the sound of the drill. And of course, Hoffman delirious with pain, saying anything, true or not, just to stop the excruciating nightmare. ‘Is it safe?’ ‘Yes, it’s safe.’ ’Is it safe?’ ‘No, no, it’s not safe!’ You know, he’d say anything. And then that, uh, guy comes in What’s his name? The With the great teeth and that hair-Anyway, nothing much comes of it. Hoffman doesn’t know anything, but what a scene. Unfortunately, nothing quite so dramatic today. We’re gonna be a little more businesslike.” ~ Red

There are few heroes or villains on television today as fascinating as Red and we doubt there are many that are as much fun to write for just the same. Spader is such a dynamic personality that it’s hard to imagine him not reading these scripts with glee at times knowing he’s going to have opportunities to be deeply emotional, deadly serious and then turn right around and extol the merits of a pop culture reference with such fervor. And as if that wasn’t enough fun, we also got the round the block and back again treatment of Jasper by Navabi giving Red yet another classic as Jasper realized he’d been masterfully duped.

“Don’t look so glum, Kenneth. You just spent 10 minutes being ridden hard by Agent Navabi. I’d die for five.” ~ Red

She smiled and so did we. Of course, reality did hit with the part we didn’t see coming, and that was the delivery of Jasper’s tongue to the Director (David Strathairn). Red, for all his fun, can also be pretty damned ruthless.

FINAL VERDICT: In an episode with shocking surprise twists, we get a small taste of the limits everyone will go to in order to win the game that is afoot. This is going to get bloody good before it’s done.

In an episode that at first seemed to have multiple converging threads that were completely unrelated, The Blacklist writing team once again proves that they certainly know how to bring things together in unexpected ways. We certainly had no clue how Quon Zhang played into the bigger picture other than his former involvement with the Cabal in crimes of the past. As his current smuggling operation of female bodies back to China to “wed” them to deceased men in the afterlife unfolded and seemed far to bizarre to be connected, we should have known things would come full circle as he revealed his involvement of accelerating the Director’s timeline with the smuggling of Karakurt, who we’ll see next week, into the country.

Writers J.R. Orci and Lukas Reiter certainly did a fantastic job of connecting the dots. The final touch being Zhang’s warning that by preventing him from fulfilling his task to bring the bride and groom together in the afterlife will bear consequences to Liz and those around her. We’d wager that she’s seen her fair share of bad luck already but if worse is coming that’s unsettling. The two writers brought together an emotional episode for Liz that paralleled the grueling task of finding information from Jasper by Red. Those two elements of this episode couldn’t be further apart in tone, but through it all, the well-balanced script made it work. That’s certainly something The Blacklist does exceptionally well—blend the heartfelt with the heartless in ways that surprisingly feel just right.

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Veteran Director Karen Gaviola, put the pieces together quite nicely for an episode with a lot of moving parts that seemed completely unrelated at first. That’s not surprising as she’s directed more episodes of more shows than we can count. What is interesting is her ability to shift genres so effortlessly and capture the vision of a show so well. It wasn’t lost on us that she directed a recent episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. with equal flair. She’s got the gift of finding the core thread of an episode and weaving all the things that don’t seem related back to the central focus of an episode’s main drive.

Certainly that was the case here as so many unrelated things all converged in the end with Harold’s illness, Tom’s swearing in, Zhang’s smuggling and Jasper’s tie to Red and The Director. The bombshell that an agent has hit the shores of the U.S. with ill intent connected everything and as always set us up with more questions and a need to see where things go in the next episode.

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We’d be remiss if we didn’t tip our cap to Hisham Tawfiq. We officially want more deep and moving speeches from Dembe. Tawfiq has proven himself a fine actor and Dembe’s plea for Liz to visit Red’s flat was both a revealing and emotional moment. He’s deeply committed to Red and the bond the two share is special. Dembe’s insistence Liz never tell Red meant the flat contained secrets. We can only surmise that the picture of the woman and the information on the Fulcrum itself are things Red never meant for Liz to see. Time will tell what difficulties arise from that decision.

Several scenes stood out, in particular the interrogation of Jasper with it’s references to Marathon Man and the ruse used to gather information by Navabi. That’s clever writing and the results were highly entertaining. Spader was at his best and the twists left us wanting to know what will happen next week with both the intel Red gathered and the different bits of information Liz and Harold were each left stunned by as the episode closed. We see a huge finale building and with this show would expect no less. Things are about to get crazy and we can’t wait to see what happens next on The Blacklist!

Questions, Comments, Concerns and My Reaction on Twitter…

• Nobody is ever up at any good digging in a cemetery at night.
• You’re going to be so pretty. This is staring out really weird.
• Wow. More connections to Berlin. This gets weirder and weirder.
• The detente is over Lizzy. I’d say Red is right. Lizzy, you’re a target.
• Okay, that loving on the body thing is simply creepy.
• Red’s quick thinking is vicious. Boom!
• Wow. Fabricating and leaking docs. This is getting sticky Harold.
• I’m with Tom. Who IS Bill Kershaw?
• Lizzy playing hardball. I like it, but still, who is Kershaw?
• You want to know. There’s a difference. Oh for the love of all that’s holy!
• You know my opinion. What did you think she’d say Harold?
• Wow. Usually people don’t get their teeth fixed AFTER they die!
• Not the interview you had planned Kenneth? Red does that kinda thing.
• Mail order corps brides. Okay. Now I’ve seen it all. (I think) lol
• Well, the road not taken. #ThingsRedSays
• Now we’re killing brides to marry after death. (I hadn’t seen it all)
• Lord. I was just thinking about Marathon Man. Damn Red!
• You don’t understand my loyalty. Because you have nothing in your life worth staying loyal to.. William Devane! It was William Devane. #ThingsRedSays in the heat of interrogation! lol
• You have orders from who?? Oh hell no Navabi!!
• Ooohh. I think this interrogation is still going on. Hmm.
• You just spent 10 minutes ridden hard by Agent Navabi, I’d die for five! #ThingsRedSays that crack me up.
• And no airbag deployed. I’m disappointed. lol
• That haunting and bad luck will include you and your fellow agents. Say what??
• Karakurt? Uh oh. I think shit just got real here.
• Smiling Tommy Connolly has some ginormous brass balls.
• Seems your wife made the call you wouldn’t. Wow.
• What’s the matter Director? Red got your friend’s tongue? Ick.
• We don’t want any pizza today Red. o.O