‘The Blacklist’ season 4, episode 3 review: Is Mr. Kaplan alive? Alexander Kirk’s intentions
At the end of this past episode of “The Blacklist,” we were lift on a cliffhanger about the fate of a beloved character in Mr. Kaplan. At the time, it was fair to say that things were not looking all too great for the character. Yet, the writers did clearly give you the smallest glimmer of hope: The character clutching a handful of grass in the closing minutes.
Through most of Thursday’s episode entitled “Miles McGrath,” the series did a clever job of giving us a few scenes here and there of her fighting for her life, and eventually being found seemingly by someone with a dog. While it may not be the most substantial character update in recent history, it was enough to make us clear that she will probably make it through this alive.
As for everyone else, tonight’s main story revolved around the title character, a clever man who trades money for crime and was so intuitive to have a secret train hangar where a shipment of deadly disease cultures was sent to arrive from the CDC. Red and Dembe went it alone in order to find him, and when they did, they wanted to leverage that information in order to get to Alexander Kirk. Once again, he was the source of the entire mission, and the connection that bound everything together. Kirk specifically wanted the disease culture, and Red wanted Kirk. In theory, it felt like an ideal trade — it just didn’t work out that way, thanks to reasons we will be explaining in the next paragraph.
For Liz Keen, the good news is that she and Tom are alive, but that may be the extent of it. After all, she uncovered through reading her mother’s diary the full nature of her affair with Reddington, and how he was once for her similar to what Tom was to her during the early days of the show. She and Tom eventually met up with Red, and they connected all of the dots: Kirk was dying, and he needed the culture in his attempts to try to turn things around in terms of his health. Meanwhile, Red argued to her that the sole reason why Kirk wanted her, or by extension Agnes, was to figure out a way to get himself a few more years of life.
On a slightly lighter note, apparently Amar and Samar’s relationship may be on hold for a little while. Also, Amar likes to cook for the ladies!
As a whole, this was a pretty strong episode of the show in between the train sequences, seeing Liz do some crafty undercover work in the early going, and the brief return of Lotte Verbeek — which gave us a wonderful reminder of “Cape May,” one of our favorite episodes of the entire series. Grade: B. (Photo: NBC)