The Blacklist season 4 episode 19 review: Liz’s memories; Ressler’s crisis

blacklistThe Blacklist is a show that with its colorful array of villains, it loves to play around with the concept of reality. “Dr. Bogdan Krilov” on Thursday night proved to be a fine example of that very thing. The title character was a Blacklister with a history of wiping away and altering memories.

After we met him, all of a sudden it started to become clear that this is a man who may have connections to Elizabeth Keen’s past. Meanwhile, he has had a pretty important connection to the show’s present. Dr. Krilov was hired by Mr. Kaplan to manipulate the memory of a certain Agent Ressler, sending him on a false mission with one goal in mind — ensuring at all costs that the Task Force gets dismantled piece by piece. If Kate can do that, then Reddington is exposed and nobody’s around to protect him anymore. That’s great news for her. Given that she couldn’t convince Liz to willingly separate from Reddington, he may have decided that this was her only option.

Eventually, Liz was able to track down Ressler, and in the process of that was able to convince Ressler that he had been manipulated in order to take down Laurel Hitchin. There were two great things about this storyline — the performance of Diego Klattenhoff (who was pretty incredible) and then using Liz in order to stop him from doing something that he would later regret. While Hitchin may be a terrible human being and a murder, that doesn’t mean that Ressler needs to throw away his own career in the process of doing so.

Unfortunately, it’s not like sparing Hitchin saved Ressler from any and all consequences. After all, at the end of the story Donald still ended up being arrested. Hopefully, the evidence ends up clearing his name.

Here is your potential cliffhanger…

As Liz held Dr. Krilov in the interrogation room, another truth came out — he apparently injected her two years ago in order to forget some key information about Reddington. He promised that he would tell her the truth in exchange for immunity, but she wouldn’t bite on it. Reddington insisted that he hired the doctor more than twenty years before, but he’d done nothing of the sort two years prior.

Oh, and Gale is sniffing around Liz and the FBI Task Force like nobody’s business. He’s a very different adversary in some ways, mostly because he’s looking towards the Task Force as a way to make a case against James Spader’s character.

Overall take

We do think that the show started off a little bit slow, but “Dr. Bogdan Krilov” got better and better as the episode went along. We saw a more aggressive side of Megan Boone as an actor than we’ve seen as of late, and the same goes for the aforementioned Klattenhoff. Great episode all around. Grade: A-.

(Photo: NBC.)