Spoiler warning for anyone who has yet to watch the Season 4 premiere of The Blacklist.
It has been an extremely long summer for fans of The Blacklist still reeling from the insanity of Season 3's later episodes. But the NBC drama didn't act like it, picking up its Season 4 premiere "Esteban" quite soon after that bonkers finale capped off, with Liz in the company of her possible father Alexander Kirk and an emotional Red experiencing the rare feeling of someone duping him instead of the other way around. Though it's great Liz will be back on the show a lot more now, the character is going through some heavy stuff now.
Let's start with that potential familiar connection, shall we? While keeping Liz hostage in a fairly comfortable manner, Kirk tries to win over Liz's trust by divulging a bit more information about his role in her past. Kirk claims many years ago, he was happily married to Katarina Rostova, but it all went sour when she had an affair, and it was Red that she had the affair with! In fact, Kirk was quite fearful that Liz was actually Red's child - something that viewers have been guessing at since the beginning - but Kirk is now absolutely sure that she is his own, and he blames the "evil" Red for taking Liz (or Masha) away from him all those years ago. And if he's telling the truth, that was some cold-hearted shit Red pulled.
Understandably, the show didn't then show us a bunch of DNA tests and birth certificates, because we're meant to continue wondering about whether or not Kirk is telling Liz the truth or whether he is distorting facts to sway her. In any case, it's a nice new wrinkle for Liz's already complex viewpoint about Red, and I cannot wait to see how she ends up confronting him about it. Especially because he calls Kirk by his "Constantine" name, making it look like Kirk is telling the truth.
Of course, Liz has to actually get free long enough to confront Red. An escape happened, mind you, and Tom even dropped a major threat on Kirk that he'll be hunted down. ("An army, you hear me? AN ARMY IS COMING FOR YOU!") But in the end, before Red can arrive to save Liz, that bastard Kirk swooped in and took Liz away once again, this time on a plane. And to make matters worse, Red ended the episode knocked unconscious during a brutal car wreck put into motion by Kirk's men. Not a great day for Red by any stretch, but Liz might have it worse.
While there were definitely other things happening in the episode, particularly those referring to the blacklister mentioned in the episode name, this premiere definitely got Liz back into the center of the show's narrative, and it was all the better for it. Will next week bring any answers or just more questions? And can somebody please put Agnes in some kind of a 24-hour daycare whenever she's safe again?
With a season's worth of twists and turns left to go,The Blacklist airs Thursday nights on NBC at 10 p.m. ET. To see when all of the daddy and mommy issues from your other favorite shows will set in, check out our fall TV schedule.
