The Blacklist season 5 spoilers: The DNA, the bones, and the flash-forward

On Wednesday, The Blacklist season 5 delivered what was arguably the biggest episode of the entire series and for a wide array of reasons. This of course starts with the fact that Tom Keen is dead.

Is he really gone for good? We know that it’s fair to ponder over these sort of questions with a show like this since they have done the fake out death before, but unfortunately this time it’s no fake out. Ryan Eggold and executive producers Jon Bokenkamp and John Eisendrath confirmed the news in a statement on Wednesday. What we’re left to do now is try to move forward and pick up some of the pieces.

This does include the DNA and the bones. Tom had finally learned the truth about them before his death, but didn’t live long enough to tell Liz thanks to the shootout at the hands of Ian Garvey. Is this going to be a storyline that finds its way back into the series? You can go ahead and count on that. In speaking to TVLine, Bokenkamp confirmed that the ten-month time jump is legit, and that the show is going to return by delivering one of their more out-there episodes. The subject of the bones will eventually also find its way back into the show:

“When the show comes back, it’s a really, really unique, out-of-pattern, different episode. Things have really been blown up with Tom’s death, and Liz trying to figure out how to move forward is a story that we really dive right into. It’s like an episode we did called “Cape May,” and we did a flashback episode with Mr. Kaplan. This, like those, is one of those out-of-pattern episodes that promises to be super-emotional and raise some really great questions. It’s not a Case of the Week. It’s like an independent movie that we tell when we come back.

“Regarding the suitcase, it is still out there. Reddington has no idea where it is. Elizabeth Keen doesn’t know about it. And Ian Garvey, played by Jonny Coyne, who is fantastic, is going to be a significant problem for Reddington. The shadow of Garvey and what he represents will be a really interesting big bad for the back half of the season.”

As someone who’s said previously that “Cape May” is one of the series’ best episodes, this excites us greatly just because we get to see the writers deal emotionally with where Liz Keen is and how she feels. We firmly expect this upcoming episode on January 3 to be one of the greatest Megan Boone performances on the show to date — it’s hard for it to be thought of as anything otherwise due to where she is and what she now has to confront. Her child is older, her husband is gone, and her entire life is different from what it was.

(Photo: NBC.)