My beautiful wife and I have been watching the James Spader television show The Blacklist since almost the beginning. We have been recording it from the beginning, but I think we started watching it after a whole season had elapsed as we don’t tend to watch 3.5 hours of television a day.
We’ve stuck through it even though its internal intrigues have often sounded like they were not planning any sort of arc across the seasons, but rather came up with something after each renewal. So we’ve had lots of crazy things going on, the story line turning on itself, mysteries resolving into new intrigues that, in total, won’t stand up to scrutiny.
We’ve stuck through it through poor police procedures, most notably how lackadaisical the police are at setting a perimeter when busting in on bad guys, often skipping any sort of perimeter if the bad guys need to escape or setting the perimeter appropriately at 46 minutes after the hour when they need to wrap the episode up. I’ve forgiven other television-driven decisions and tactics as well, not to mention the intrigues and characters who are important for a while and then are not.
But in the current season, I’m having a hard time with the absurd hard-left story lines and moralizing.
Spoilers below the fold.
I mean, I can overlook and forgive a little liberal talking points dropping out of the mouths of characters, sometimes out of character, because it is television in the 21st century, and if you don’t agree, clearly you need to be educated by an amoral anti-hero.
This season, we’ve had:
- A shady group of surgeons and medical professionals who have been kidnapping men who run pro-life organizations or are politicians who don’t support abortion up to the first birthday only to transplant uteri and then embryos so that the men who oppose abortion either have to get an abortion or, um, deliver? a baby.
Pardon my French here, but are you baisant kidding me? I’m going to go with that’s physically impossible, but I am not a medical doctor. Maybe it is possible. But what an absurd premise. I mean, out there, man.
Oh, and I forget: The ringleader was raped and impregnated but could not get an abortion. So she’s got the rapist chained up in her basement and the embryos she’s implanting are using the rapist’s sperm. Because of course. When you’ve gone to the absurd, why not layer it up to maybe make two absurds make a seems legit.
- A madman who was driven mad by sound pollution kidnaps and kills people responsible for allowing a server farm to be built near his home. And he uses sound waves to do it!
- When Reddington and Dembe stop at a gas station or liquor store, Reddington charms the girl behind the counter who just got accepted to college (the Wikipedia summary says “liquor store” but someone in high school who might have just been accepted to college is too young to run the counter at a liquor store, but that could just be a mistake by someone who plinks on Wikipedia). A malcreant comes in and pulls a gun on the clerk and shoots her before the two trained and really skilled thugs in the building know what’s happening. They shoot the thug after he kills the optimistic young clerk who just got accepted to college, and Reddington adds to the Blacklist the CEO of the gun company who favors obvious straw purchases of his guns at gun shows that he himself attends just to give the go ahead to the straw purchase. A couple of set pieces later, and Reddington meets the gun CEO in his house, delivers a speech about cheap guns in cities are bad, and then shoots the gun CEO.
It’s not lost on me that the bad guys in the program, from the stick-up man to the guy selling the straw-purchased guns in the hood, are white and the victim, the clerk, is a minority. Because white on minority crime is a thing. Somewhere. A little. And Reddington talks about buying a straw-purchased semi-automatic for a hundred dollars. Which seems a little low for a new gun on the street. Unless it’s stolen. But that breaks the facile chain-of-custody from greedy CEOs to street criminals, and we cannot have that in our juvenile morality play.
So that’s 38% of the last eight episodes that is, basically, a juvenile morality play with liberal political values as the good guys and a couple of otherwise derivative episodes amid Series Intrigue for the Season going on. I’m trying to remember what I like about the series.
Oh, yes, James Spader chewing the scenery, basically. But if the scenery chewing is going to be replaced with political sermons, I’ll pass.
I don’t think the show has much left in the tank anyway. And Brian Dennehy has passed away, so I guess his character will disappear without a word. Or he will be beaten to death in the distance by college conservatives that don’t like his accent or something.
But it’s this close to abandonment on my part. And I suspect that its current writers would wear this as a badge of honor.
(Other show’s I’ve given up on include Downton Abbey and Sleepy Hollow.)
