Why are people still confused about Raymond Reddington?
Being a big fan of James Spader when he was on Boston Legal, I was quite excited when he started a brand new series over a decade ago, The Blacklist. Put Spader in a suit and let him mug for the camera, and I’m there. I watched the show’s first three seasons and really enjoyed them, but after Season 3, I ended up cutting the cord on my satellite TV, and I fell out of watching many of my favorite shows regularly, including The Blacklist.
But then earlier this year, the tenth and final season of The Blacklist arrived on Netflix. It took me a while to get around to it, but after so many years, I had forgotten many of the details of the show I had seen. So my wife and I started at the beginning and for about three straight months watched every Blacklist episode.
On the whole, I think the show is fantastic, but there is one part that has become one of my favorite TV moments ever. The solution to the mystery of Raymond Reddington’s identity is a masterstroke. This made me very confused when, looking over articles from the time of the episode, as well as many more recent comments about the show, it seems many believe The Blacklist never resolved one major mystery that seemed pretty clearly answered to me.
The Real Identity Of Raymond Redington Was A Major Blacklist Mystery
The broader storyline of The Blacklist Season 5 was primarily concerned with the identity of a set of human remains. FBI informant and “Concierge of Crime” Raymond “Red” Reddington had been in possession of them, but he lost them in a power struggle with his associate Mr. Kaplan.
Red insists the bones are his property and that their identity is his business and nobody else’s. Following a long drawn-out fight which results in the death of the husband of FBI Agent Elizabeth Keen, our show’s other main character, who believes at this point she is Red’s daughter, we discover the truth. The bones belong to Raymond Reddington, meaning the man using that name for the entirety of the series is somebody else.
As the show progresses from there, we learn important details. The person claiming to be Red had extensive plastic surgery. Also, a woman almost certainly Liz’s biological mother whom she never knew, KGB Agent Katarina Rostova, was aware of the person’s transformation and intimately involved in making it happen.
