The midseason finale of The Blacklist ended on a couple of very tragic twists. Not only was Tom Keen really, truly, 100% killed, but Liz was stuck in a coma for ten months, completely unaware of her husband's death. Red broke the terrible news after she finally woke up, and Liz will have to find a way to deal with moving on after losing Tom. As this is The Blacklist, we won't exactly see Liz just attending therapy and/or having heart-to-hearts to recover. Liz will have another kind of moving on in mind, as actress Megan Boone revealed:
She's really driven by this anger and resentment and yes, she wants revenge for the people who ruined her family. That's the only thing that gets her up in the morning and it's what drives her through the day. I don't really think that there's any going back from that.
Liz will be moving on for the express purpose of getting revenge on the people who murdered her husband, injured her to the point of spending the better part of a year, and ruining their home. Who knows? Maybe Liz will even have a grudge over the fact that she missed ten months of her young daughter's life. Basically, Liz was wronged in some very big ways, and the people responsible will want to watch out. Judging by Megan Boone's comments to EW, Liz will move on as a woman with a mission.
Luckily for Red, he won't be one of her targets. The cliffhanger from the Season 5 premiere indicated that Tom was going to be shot to death by Red in his own apartment, and that would be the way that he would die. Of course, fans of The Blacklist are no strangers to misdirects from the show, and there was every possibility that Tom wouldn't be killed by Red and the shooting was actually a dream or hallucination. The midseason finale revealed that Tom really was going to die, although not how the premiere had teased.
Red did storm into the apartment and fire a gun at somebody in a kill shot did receive fatal injuries, but the two were not directly connected. Red shot one of the bad guys who had harmed Tom and Liz, and Tom died from the injuries inflicted by the bad guys before Red came to the rescue. Despite attempts at a hospital to bring him back, Tom died, and Liz woke up to the terrible news that will go on to drive her in the second half of the season.
The executive producers have revealed why they made the decision to finally kill off Tom, despite his many near-death experiences and even a detour to a failed spinoff. Fans may or may not disagree with the decision, but it should be interesting to see the next leg of Liz's journey now that she's on a mission of revenge.
The Blacklist will return for the second half of Season 5 on Wednesday, January 3 at 8 p.m. ET on NBC. Check out our midseason TV premiere for other important dates in the new year, and don't forget to swing by our list of 2017 TV cancellations for all the shows that weren't lucky enough to score renewals for 2018.
