The Blacklist Season 1 Finale: Meets Keyser Soze

A superb Season One final for The Blacklist tonight, which leaves us with -

• Meera is dead.
• Tom is very likely dead.  Why just likely?  Lizzie tells Red that Tom is dead, but she asked him to leave the room after she shot Tom, and she has some reason to want to keep Tom alive.   Also, though Tom was shot a bunch of times, it wasn't in the head.  Still, he's likely dead.  Just not definitely.
• Either Berlin or Red is Lizzie's father.   They both have a picture of someone who almost definitely is her, when she was a girl.  I guess it's more likely Berlin who's her father, but Red has shown he's more than willing to dissemble when he sees that as protecting Lizzie.   Red also assured Lizzie that her father is dead - died in the fire.  Which means either that Berlin isn't Lizzie's father, or Red is lying.  But if neither Berlin nor Red are Lizzie's father, then who? Someone we haven't met before?   That wouldn't be as good a solution as either Berlin or Red being Lizzie's father, and since both of those possibilities require Red lying to Lizzie, I still prefer thinking that Red his lying to her along about not being her father.  I mean, why else would he be so devoted to her?  The very last scene clearly shows Red with scars from being burned.   So either he's the devoted friend who brought her to Sam, or he's Lizzie's father, who was burned but didn't die in the fire.  We'll see in the seasons ahead.
• Berlin is a great Keyser Soze character, the best I've seen so far on television.   But Red is a Keyser Soze kind of character, too.   They both run constant circles around the best police and their efforts.   As I was watching the season finale tonight, I realized that The Blacklist has both been inspired by The Usual Suspects - one of my all-time favorite movies - and has taken some of its cues from that movie, not easy at all to do on television, especially network TV.  And come to think of it, James Spader and Kevin Spacey both have that quirky, irrepressible power on any screen they're on.

See you back here in the Fall, with Season 2.

See also The Blacklist Debuts: Alias Meets Jay Z ... The Blacklist 1.2: Mysteries ... The Blacklist 1.3: Construction Site Heights ... The Blacklist 1.6: Truth and Enigma ... The Blacklist 1.7: Natural Immunity ... The Blacklist 1.8: The Father and the Husband ... The Blacklist 1.9: Field Transfusion ... The Blacklist 1.10: Those Words ... The Blacklist 1.11: Red's Retribution ... The Blacklist 1.12: The DNA Meister ...  The Blacklist 1.13: Red Writ Large ... The Blacklist 1.15: The Husband's Other Shoe ... The Blacklist 1.16: True Colors ... The Blacklist 1.19: Leveling the Scales? ... The Blacklist 1.20: Unanswered Questions

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