The Blacklist puts Liz undercover in “The Harem,†this week, and she gets more than she bargained for while on assignment. Red works on a business deal, and there’s still no sign of Mr. Kaplan. The rest of the task force and Tom Keen were background characters in order to let Liz shine this week.
The Government Witness Protection list has been stolen. Red knows who’s going to steal it next. A group of women called The Harem are expert thieves, and the WITSEC list just so happens to be their next target. Red knows that they can’t be beaten, so you know what that means. Liz needs to go undercover and join them. Time is of the essence because someone on the WITSEC list was just murdered.
Liz manages to get in with the Harem, but she’s already having trouble with her cover. The girls had a little too much to drink, and Liz was a chatty drunk, very revealing. The one woman, Emma, says that Liz revealed enough to know what she’s really about. Liz is worried, so she follows Emma. Guess where Emma goes… straight to Raymond Reddington. So Red had a woman on the inside with Emma, but she went silent. That’s why Red wanted Liz on the inside.
When the task force can’t find anything about Emma, Red lets them know that she is former MI6. Emma talks with Liz about working with Reddington. She lets Liz know that it’s hard. It has been almost ten years since she started working with him. She was just a low level analyst when he came to MI6. She went to work for him full time because she was just star struck by him. Liz was not prepared to hear that not only does Red have relationships with other law enforcement agencies, but Emma was exactly where Liz was when this whole journey started.
Emma ended up getting the list, but they lost a member of The Harem. Liz kept telling Emma that there’s always a way out. While the rest of the Harem members are trying to get away, Emma makes off with the list. Thankfully, Red knows exactly where she’s going and intercepts her while she watches her son play soccer. Emma tells him that she wants out; she doesn’t want to miss any more of her son’s life. Red gives her an out and provides her a safe place to stay with her son. She had no idea that she was allowed to quit working for him. Is Red realizing that his “business†affects everyone he employs and not always for the better?
Meanwhile, Red can’t be counted on to help out with The Harem because he has business of his own to attend to. I always think it’s interesting when Red flaunts his criminal ways in front of Liz; this time it was in the form of his accountant who cleans his dirty money. Red wants to take some of that money to bail out a cruise line. He tells the man, “I save your business. You don’t look too closely at mine.†Red could use the cruise ships to transport cargo of his choosing.
The owner of the cruise line business agrees but is later agitated when Red’s bailout money doesn’t arrive. Red knows that his accountant should have sent it, so something must be wrong. Red finds out that his accountant died of an apparent heart attack, while the money is in some random offshore account. They have no idea how to recover Red’s money, and he has now lost the business with the cruise line. Red knows that someone killed his accountant and is after his organization, but who is it? Could Mr. Kaplan be out for revenge?
