The Blacklist season 5: What to do next with James Spader’s Reddington

If you love The Blacklist and read CarterMatt often, odds are that you are familiar with our Raymond Reddington appreciation already. James Spader plays an iconic character on the NBC series, but he is now clearly a man on the brink. While he may be alive, he’s lost much of what he found stable to him: His criminal organization is in tatters, many of his contacts are gone, and one of his longtime confidants in Mr. Kaplan is now seemingly gone for good. He’s a man without his tools, and in some ways without his identity.

The interesting thing that he has is, ironically, the one thing that he tried to keep buried: The truth about his relationship with Liz Keen. Or, this is what we’re being led to believe is the truth. For now, there’s not a reason to heavily doubt Reddington’s paternity, though we have come up with many a conspiracy theory over the summer. The point of this article is not so much to rehash any of them; instead, we want to touch more on where we want to see the Reddignton story go now moving into season 5.

More Lotte Verbeek – “Cape May” could very well be one of the best episodes of the series, largely because of seeing this character so detached and unhinged after everything that he went through. If you view it further through the lens of Liz being his daughter, it’s even more powerful that he was seeing an image of Katarina Rostova from the past. The Outlander actress Verbeek is great in this role, and we’d love to see her play around in Reddington’s consciousness a little bit more this season.

A new day in the life – Where is Reddington living now? What is he doing? How is he going to recover from not having his organization? This is a chance to see a more vulnerable guy with less of a wall around him. The one big secret he does still have is the one in the suitcase, and that could be coming sooner rather than later.

More face-time with Aram – We didn’t get a lot of that over season 4, but we’ve made our desire for it clear — heck, we actually spoke with Amir Arison right around the finale on that very subject! We have to find a way to explore this more, if it is at all possible.

A battle with Tom – With Ryan Eggold back as a series regular, there is all sorts of untapped potential for the series to dive deeper into what is one of the show’s most contentious relationships. They’ve got a long history, but how is Tom going to feel about Liz now knowing that Red is her father? Is he going to try and be more protective of him, or cause more issues between the two? He’s the one carrying the suitcase at the moment, and that only adds to the intrigue.

What are some of the things that you would like to see for Spader’s Reddington during The Blacklist season 5? Feel free to share in the comments! (Photo: NBC.)