“Cape May” was Episode 19 in Season 3 of The Blacklist. It was a rather unusual episode, but it should be noted that it was rather important to the series as a whole as well.
For those who are unfamiliar with the contents of “Cape May,” it was set following Elizabeth Keen’s seeming death in the previous episode. As a result, Raymond Reddington is shown as being rather devastated by the whole thing. Over the course of the episode, Red helps a mysterious woman fight off her pursuers before she walks out into the water, which by the end of the episode, is revealed to have been Red’s recollection rather than something happening in the “present” of the series. Said recollection had important consequences both in-setting and out-of-setting because of its revelations.
Why Was “Cape May” So Significant to The Blacklist?
First, “Cape May” was rather interesting in that it wasn’t the kind of episode that most people would expect from The Blacklist. Certainly, it was connected to the rest of the series in a seamless manner, but it was rather experimental in nature in regards to its content as well as how that content was fed to the viewers. On the whole, the result was something that was sometimes fast and sometimes slow, thus producing an often-jarring sensation that matched well with the sense of eeriness throughout the whole thing. However, while this might have been detrimental to the storytelling in other episodes in other series under other circumstances, it worked here because in a very real sense, it was fitting when the episode was centered on Red, who was mourning for someone important to him.
Second, “Cape May” provided some insight into one of the most important plotlines running throughout The Blacklist, though in the end, said insight proved to be rather misleading in its own right. In short, the question of whether Red is Liz’s biological father or not was a very important question for The Blacklist. However, that question is bound in an inextricable manner with a number of other questions such as the identity of Liz’s mother, the exact nature of Red’s relationship with Liz’s mother, and what happened between the two in the “past” of the series. “Cape May” provided a fair amount of insight into Red’s thoughts upon the matter, though the information that it presented wasn’t as simple and straightforward as it might have been under other circumstances because of Red’s state in the episode as well as the means by which it was presented.
Summed up, “Cape May” was an important episode for a number of reasons. First, it provided the viewers with further insight into Red as well as Red’s relationship with Liz’s mother, which is critical for understanding him as well as the choices that he makes. Second, the experimental nature of the episode made it rather unusual, thus showing that The Blacklist has more range to it than most people would have expected. Third, the whole thing fed interested individuals enough information to whet their appetites but no more than that, thus satisfying enough of their interest in the series’s central mystery to keep them returning for more.
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If you sat down on your couch at 9 pm Thursday night and changed the channel to NBC, no one would blame you for wondering aloud, “What show is this?”
Because even though the program that aired for the next hour did star James Spader, and it was sandwiched between new installments of Strong and Game of Silence, in no way did it resemble a regular episode of The Blacklist.
And that, of course, is because it wasn’t a regular episode of The Blacklist. Save for Red and his freakishly eloquent monologues, this week’s outing didn’t feature any of the usual characters or plots we’ve come to expect from the NBC drama — with Liz’s absence naturally being the most glaring of all.
In the first episode since Megan Boone’s protagonist was seemingly killed off, we took a deep dive into Red’s tortured mind — and boy, was it trippy. Here’s how it all went down:
A few days after Liz died from complications during childbirth, Red takes a cab to Cape May, N.J., where it seems he’ll do little more than decompress and grieve. But just as he makes himself comfortable in a beach chair looking out at the waves, he spies a beautiful red-haired woman near the water, who sheds her coat and locket before throwing herself into the waves in a suicide attempt.
Red — despite the many, many layers he’s wearing — is able to rescue the woman from her near-drowning and takes her back to the beachfront house he’s squatting in… and the 24-ish hours that follow Red’s act of heroism are some of the most bizarre and mysterious that The Blacklist has ever produced. [And if you’ve seen even one episode of the show before, you know that’s saying something.]
Eventually, the men chasing our unnamed beauty make their way to the beach house, and in a massively entertaining but super-tense sequence, Red and the woman take out the hitmen, one by one. A few hours later, as Red is preparing to flee the scene of the crime with his anonymous companion in tow, he realizes he can’t find her anywhere in the house. Instead, he discovers that she’s back on the beach, preparing to once again throw herself into the water.
For the second time this episode, Red, in all his three-piece-suited glory, runs across the sand in an attempt to save the woman, but by the time he reaches the water, she’s gone. And I don’t mean dead — she’s really gone. Vanished. As if she were never there in the first place. Looking for some answers, Red approaches an older man sweeping his metal detector across the beach… but when he asks the stranger if he recently saw a woman dive into the water, the man replies that Red is the only other sign of human life that he’s seen on the beach in two weeks.
If you’ve got a strong radar for plot twists, or you’ve watched The Sixth Sense a bunch of times, you may have seen this next part coming: As Red looks back on his last 24 hours, he realizes that it was all in his head — there never was a woman, no assassins. Every conversation he had with Anonymous was held with himself. He was the one playing the beach house’s piano. He prepared dinner and drew a bath for… no one. [And this is officially the saddest episode recap I’ve ever written.]
But just as Red seems willing to accept his day-long hallucinations, the man with the metal detector discovers a locket buried in the sand — the same locket that Red’s “acquaintance” had been wearing. He buys it from the man and washes off the dirt, revealing an inscription on the necklace that he seems to recognize. And just then, the red-headed woman appears before Red once more — and not only has Red known her all along, but she is Katarina Rostova, Liz’s biological mother.
“You had no choice. It was me or Masha,” Katarina says, stroking Red’s face. “But you did save me. Through her.” So, that monologue Red gave earlier in the episode, about the heartbreaking choice between saving a woman and saving her baby? It seems that doesn’t just apply to Liz and baby Agnes, after all. With that in mind, Red runs off the beach, announcing that there’s someone he needs to see.
OK, Blacklist fans, it’s your turn. What did you think of the show’s first Liz-less episode? Drop your reactions in a comment below.