Blacklist Finally Painted Itself into a Corner, and Season 10 is the Proof
The Blacklist had a fairly good run for a crime drama, with ten seasons and 201 episodes, but now it has been officially cancelled.
The tenth season, which is currently airing, will definitely conclude the story of Raymond "Red" Reddington (James Spader) and his blacklist of the world's most dangerous criminals.
Today even James Spader himself does not argue that it is the time for The Blacklist to end. As he told in an interview with NBC Insider, "I think if the show went beyond this year, it would turn into a very different show."
He further clarified:
"And I think that the thing that has been nice about this show was that we've never really had a really clear paradigm for the show. Tonally the show shifts a lot from episode to episode, and I think that even the show has taken strange turns, and I suspect that the show, if it went much further, would just become something that would be less recognizable to me."
Frankly, not only Spader is right, it probably would have been better to end The Blacklist even earlier, because the series went off the rails long ago, with the death of its female lead, FBI criminal profiler Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone) in the Season 8 finale.
While Red always was the main character of The Blacklist, Keen was both a foil and an important support to him. Furthermore, the mystery of their true identities and the connection between them, causing Red to interfere with her life, was a crucial plot thread – and that whole thread just unraveled after Keen's assassination.
Sure, we are still teased with hints about who Red really is, and why he was so adamant about working only with Elizabeth Keen. He still have yet to provide any explanation beyond simple statements alluding to working with her father.
But after even her death failed to push him into revealing something more, the fans got even more bored of the endless teasing that they already were.
This whole plot twist probably was introduced as an attempt to solve the problem of the series' declining ratings by shocking and puzzling the viewers – but, unsurprisingly, it only aggravated said problem. The renewed storyline is not up to the standard set by old seasons, so it is clearly the time to conclude it, reveal whatever is yet to be revealed, and move on.