Warning: many spoilers ahead for the midseason premiere of The Blacklist Season 5, called "Ruin."
The Blacklist ended the first half of Season 5 on a terribly tragic note as Liz learned that her husband had been killed. Even worse, the midseason finale revealed that Liz had been left seriously injured and comatose for ten months, which meant that Tom's death would still be fresh for her while everybody else would have had time to deal with it. We've known for a while that Liz would be looking for payback in the back half of the season, but we could only wonder how The Blacklist would start that particular story. "Ruin" finally answered how Liz would kick off her quest for revenge, and it was totally badass.
Okay, it was a combination of badass and emotionally unhealthy, but we can enjoy the badass for now and deal with the inevitable emotional trauma later on. In "Ruin," we watched a standalone episode of sorts as Liz retreated to a remote cabin under an assumed name with only a dog for company to mourn Tom's death. She passed young Agnes to Tom's mom (who presumably has plenty of free time after the cancellation of the spinoff) and asked Red to promise not to try and find her. In turn, she promised to try to not look for trouble and avoid falling into an abyss of grief and anger. Unfortunately for any attempts at recovery in the aftermath of Tom's death, trouble found Liz, and she wreaked all kinds of havoc on it.
As an ice storm descended on the mountain where she was living, Liz discovered a terribly injured man half frozen to death on the edge of the woods. A group of mysterious men showed up next, telling a sketchy story about a crashed plane that went down when they were on a trip to fish/hunt/shoot a bear. It was pretty clear that they were lying, and Liz didn't have anything in the way of backup except for her dog Kate and a forest ranger. With the injured person bleeding to death, one of the men and the ranger decided to try and brave an ice storm and reach help. The plot thickened when the man returned without the ranger, and Liz made a terrible discovery when she went to her barn to look for her dog. Both Kate and the ranger had been violently killed, and Liz was not happy about it.
Unfortunately for the bad guys, the woman they had found and intended to kill was a former FBI agent whose knowledge of her surroundings gave her a distinct edge. Outnumbered and faced with the reality that the injured man would die sooner rather than later if left behind, Liz set events in motion that killed off the bad guys in some brutal ways. Interestingly (and awesomely), she actually set the events in motion before she discovered her dead dog and friend, freezing shards of glass into ice cubs for one of the men to chomp on.
Liz drugged another of the men by slipping a mickey into the peanut butter he was eating. Another bit the dust after she tricked him down into a cellar filled with gasoline, and she locked him in before tossing a lit lighter down an exhaust pipe. Although we didn't see that particular death, we did hear the screams. She finally managed to take the last one out for good after dousing him in gasoline and then shooting him with a flare from a flare gun. The whole fiasco ended with Liz dropping the injured man off at a hospital for treatment, returning to the cabin to wipe away all traces of her fingerprints and DNA, and heading back to civilization to reunite with Red.
The reunion did not go as Red had hoped as Liz matter-of-factly informed him that she was all the way back to health after her injuries, had just killed a group of men, and wasn't losing any sleep over it. She acknowledged that she'll probably lose sleep later on, but only after she "crossed the abyss." Killing the men enabled her to realize that she's all the way back and ready to go after the people who had killed Tom. She's a deadly force to be reckoned with, and I would not want to get in her way any time soon.
All things considered, I'd say we're in for an intense rest of Season 5. While it was certainly a bummer to discover that The Blacklist wasn't messing around with the Season 5 premiere hint that Tom would be dying sooner rather than later, it's pretty exciting that we'll get to see a whole new side of Liz on her path for revenge. New episodes of The Blacklist air on Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET on NBC. The 100th episode is coming up, and we should be in for an exciting ride moving forward. For your other viewing options, take a look at our midseason TV premiere guide and our 2018 Netflix schedule. Be sure to check out our breakdown of the biggest and wildest TV deaths of 2017.
