The following contains major spoilers for The Blacklist.
It’s been just over a year since the final episodes of The Blacklist debuted, but it’s only been a few months since I finished a massive binge of the entire 10-season series. While I have already written about the fact that The Blacklist’s biggest mystery is no mystery at all, that doesn’t mean that the show ended for me with no open questions. I have several, and most of them have to do not with how The Blacklist ended, but with how it might have ended.
A lot of people have issues with the way The Blacklist ended for Raymond Reddington. It was a somewhat anti-climactic finale for a character who seemed capable of anything. But I’m not thinking just of how things could have ended for Red, but how things could have ended for Elizabeth Keen if The Blacklist had ended two years earlier.
Season 8 Of The Blacklist Was A Major Endpoint, Even Though The Series Continued
The Blacklist was officially renewed for Season 9 in January 2021, just after Season 8 premiered. This means the showrunner and the writers knew for most of the season, and almost certainly before the final episodes of Season 8 were written, that the show would need to go on.
However, they also knew the show would go on without one of its major characters. Megan Boone, who had played The Blacklist’s co-lead, FBI Agent Elizabeth Keene, had reportedly given her notice long before the show’s renewal that Season 8 would be her last. This meant that season would be an end for a major character, and the show would need to figure out how to go on without her.
Boone’s exit would be followed by The Blacklist creator Jon Bokencamp deciding to step down as showrunner. While he would remain as an executive producer, he was no longer managing the day-to-day of the series. Whatever story he had been telling ended with Liz’s death.
Seasons 9 And 10 Of The Blacklist Almost Feel Like A Different Show
After Elizabeth Keene is killed off in the literal final moments of Season 8, Season 9 picks up two years later. Raymond Reddington is in the wind, and the task force that existed to capture criminals that he informed the FBI about had been disbanded. The various characters we’d come to love are in very different places in their lives. They've moved on.
In many ways, the final two seasons of The Blacklist don’t feel like they followed almost immediately from what came before them. They feel like a modern “legacy sequel.” When a movie sequel or a new season of a TV series follows decades after the original, the new story often accepts the passage of time and picks up after a great deal has happened off-screen. That’s what the final two seasons of The Blacklist do.
While it’s difficult to argue that the final two seasons of The Blacklist are as good as what came before, I don’t dislike them. They’re fine for what they are, but this jump forward in time to separate the last two seasons from the previous eight only reinforces the idea that the real story had ended.
I have a lot of opinions about The Blacklist, but the cynic in me feels like fans were robbed of the real ending of The Blacklist due to the curse of a successful TV show. Few who have a hit series ever want to see it end, and we know that sometimes that need to keep the story going impacts the storytelling. The show feels like it was supposed to end after Season 8, but if it had, would it have ended the same way?
How Would The Blacklist Have Ended If Season 8 Had Been The Last?
What if there had been no Seasons 9 and 10 of The Blacklist? What if the show had the total freedom that comes with ending a story at that point? Would we have gotten a different ending?
It seems almost impossible to believe that The Blacklist would have ended as it did if with the episode where Liz died had been the final episode of the series. Ending as it did two years later, with a rather anti-climactic fate for Red, is one thing, but ending on a heartbreaker, with no resolution at all, seems, while certainly not impossible, highly unlikely.
But then, if that wasn’t how things would have ended, then what would have happened? Would the plan that Liz and Red had have been completed as they had devised? Such an ending certainly wouldn’t have been happy, but it would have been an ending.
Perhaps The Blacklist Could Have Ended The Way red Wanted It To End
Imagine that Liz shoots and kills Red. She’s heartbroken in doing it, but Red is strangely at peace with it. In a final scene, Dembe gives Liz the letter that Red had promised her, and it reveals what we as the audience already knows: that Red was not Liz’s father, as she had previously believed, but her mother, Katarina Rostova, having transformed herself into the concierge of crime in order to make sure her family was safe.
Now, in her death, she has completed that mission. Liz is now the head of Raymond Redington’s criminal empire, having killed the man that so many others had tried and failed to assassinate. From that position, Liz is as close to untouchable by the criminal underworld as possible, both Liza and her daughter will now be safe.
This is just one possibility of how things could have ended, of course. It assumes that every episode of Season 8 would have still happened as written, save the very end. Had the show planned for Season 8 to be the end from the beginning, the entire season could have been drastically different.
Perhaps we could have seen a season that progressed not unlike Season 10 eventually did, with Red using the task force to systematically dismantle his empire for him, in a way that prevents anybody else from taking it but also protects all the people who supported Red for all these years. But in this version, he does this with Liz by his side, free of the past. Perhaps the family could have had something like a happy ending. It’s unlikely, but that’s the beauty of considering these scenarios. Theoretically, if things had gone differently, anything could have happened.
