Spoilers ahead for Episode 19 of The Blacklist Season 10, called “Room 417.”
With just weeks left before The Blacklist airs its super-sized series finale in the 2023 TV schedule, the latest episode was a game-changer with some twists from which there’s no turning back. “Room 417” dropped a huge reveal about Reddington that puts the task force in a tough position, while some spectacularly bad timing and a missed clue means that Congressman Hudson has the information he’s been looking for to expose the team. With the finale approaching, let’s look at what went down and what was missed!
The Big Reveal About Red
The case of the week started off normally enough, with Red dropping a case on the task force while being characteristically vague about who his source of the information actually was. Something was off, however, as he began to look around the headquarters as if he’d never return, and took an FBI pen with him, seemingly as a souvenir. The team began to chase down the lead, which eventually led to the reveal of how Red has been collecting his dirty little secrets for all these years: cameras planted in places to spy on some of the key figures of the United States government.
The agents eventually connected a fax number to a room full of the machines, leading Dembe to realize that it was Red’s intelligence empire, as his old friend prefers analog over digital. It was a secret that Red never let Dembe in on even before he joined the FBI as an agent. Cooper realized that Red had been more or less playing the task force for a very long time, and they protected him while he committed massive and treasonous crimes. Oops?
It was a reveal that could really only have come as the show was approaching its end, and Reddington is still being frustratingly vague about why he’s seemingly getting his affairs in order. His story to Cooper about the death of President Garfield adds some more fuel to the theories that his own death is imminent, but it seems that The Blacklist may keep us hanging until almost the very end… and the final episodes are about to get even more complicated for the task force on top of Red’s treason.
The Clue That Ressler Missed
Ressler unknowingly became Hudson’s window into the task force, as the congressman recruited Pritchard – a fellow government employee who happens to be Ressler’s sponsee in NA – to spy. Pritchard was reluctant to betray his sponsor when first asked, but learning of Ressler’s connection to Liz Keen in the previous episode convinced him. (That episode is available streaming with a Peacock Premium subscription.)
That’s not to say that he was all-in on bugging Ressler’s phone in “Room 417,” and Hudson had to push him pretty hard to get him to agree to use some NSA tech on the device. Pritchard had to lie to Ressler by playing on Ressler’s earnest efforts to keep him on the wagon, and convinced his sponsor to let him use his phone to call his wife. Pritchard stepped outside while Ressler paid their check at a cafe, plugged in the NSA tech, and faked a phone call to his wife.
And I was immediately convinced that even as Pritchard reluctantly betrayed Ressler, he also dropped a big clue for the agent to figure out that something was off. Pritchard of course wasn’t calling his wife, and even if Ressler couldn’t detect that his phone had been bugged, surely he could have glanced at his recent call history – even if only by chance – and discovered that Pritchard hadn’t called his wife at all! And for a crack FBI agent, surely that could have tipped him off that something was wrong beyond Pritchard needing some NA support.
But that didn’t happen. The tap worked, and Hudson started listening in just in time to hear Cooper establish that Red has been a criminal informant for twelve years and they protected him through acts of sedition and treason. Hudson now has what sounds like a recorded confession of some very bad deeds, without ten seasons’ worth of context.
What The Reveal And Missed Clue Mean For The Finale
All of this said, there's a chance that the show could more or less wrap up the Congressman Hudson plot ahead of the finale and use those last two installments to focus more on the Reddington situation. We can only speculate at this point, but the upcoming episode on July 6 is called "Arthur Hudson," which I'd say suggests that it could be the climax of the arc.
According to the episode description from NBC, Cooper will have to go on defense after he is summoned by the attorney general. Red will evidently be visiting "dear friends," which also supports the theory that he knows his end is nigh. It may be for the best for the task force if Red is nowhere to be found, considering all the treason and his unpredictable nature! Something tells me that Hudson and the attorney general wouldn't accept vague stories about a long-dead president as an answer to a question.
Hudson has every reason to believe that Reddington’s corruption goes even higher than Cooper’s task force, and given that this happened with only a few episodes left in the series, it’s entirely possible that Hudson really could take them down. This development may have been inevitable once Blair Foster reached out to the congressman earlier this season.
Basically, with Red's stream of information presumably drying up to stop the task force from doing their jobs, Hudson on the hunt, and Cooper being called in front of the attorney general, the agents could be in for a lot of trouble in the last episodes of the series. Keep tuning in to NBC on Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET for what remains of The Blacklist.
Only one episode is left before the two-part finale on July 13. You can also revisit earlier seasons of the long-running drama streaming with a Netflix subscription. Season 10 episodes are only available streaming via Peacock.
