Reddington is getting desperate knowing that someone in his inner circle is out to get him. He invites all of them to a dinner party. Red wakes up the next day in a hospital bed, barely able to breathe. The clock is on to find out who poisoned Red and why.
Raymond Reddington is dying. A doctor was called in to work on Red in a secure location, and he tries to keep Red contained to the bed. Red is having none of it and needs to retrace his steps as he has lost all memory of the night before. He ends up finding a woman, Lulu, in the trunk of a car. She’s mad because he’s the one who put her there. Red has no idea why he would do that until they figure out that she’s Marvin Gerard’s neighbor.
When Lulu sees how sick Red is, she decides to help him. He’s pretty harmless in this state anyway. She gets him some medicine from a local pharmacy and actually works to keep him alive. With her help, he is led to the restaurant where he invited his most trusted associates. When he gets to the restaurant, he finds them locked in the kitchen. The only two people missing are Marvin Gerard and Dembe. Red is worried that Dembe has been kidnapped. Marvin Gerard sent a bottle of wine, which leads Red to believe that Marvin is behind the attack, and the bottle of wine is the delivery method for the poison.
Red knows who must have made the poison, The Apothecary, their next blacklister. The task force looks to the last mysterious poisoning. A woman, Helen, was set to testify against a man named Ilario Panetti. After a night out to eat, Helen had a weird allergic reaction and is now on life support. When speaking with Panetti, it seems that he had nothing to do with Helen’s poisoning. He was being blackmailed, and she saw Panetti paying the blackmailer. He liked Helen and wouldn’t have hurt her; he, too, wants to find her killer.
It turns out that Helen’s husband was drugging her. She had to hold on until their ten year anniversary or else her prenup would prevent her husband from any of her family money. After her ten year anniversary, her husband planned to pull the plug for good. Thankfully, the FBI shut him down and brought Helen out of her coma.
The Apothecary is definitely scary. He keeps his wife sedated because he’s afraid she will try to leave him again. His wife looks absolutely terrified, but she’s too drugged to do anything, even speak. Then we get a glimpse at the horrifying abuse this woman endures. The Apothecary shows her that she is pregnant, and he couldn’t be more excited. He takes her into a room in the house that he turned into a nursery, and she’s clearly agitated. Thankfully the task force finds the Apothecary and his wife and save her from the abuse.
Now, it’s time to figure out how to save Red. The Apothecary uses specialized poisons that affect the person based on their medical history. Whoever drugged Red needed to know his medical history intimately. Since there were 11 people who had access to his accounts and could fund an attack on him, he was able to narrow down his list of enemies. It appears that a bottle of wine sent from Marvin Gerard is the most likely culprit of the origin of the poison. Red goes to confront Marvin, but he doesn’t have the full story. The lab got the results back, and the bottle of wine was not the method of delivery for the poison. Marvin Gerard is innocent.
The people at the lab explain that the poison had to have been delivered earlier than the dinner party and by a drink with a much higher alcohol content, like scotch. Red starts to put the pieces together and comes to a startling conclusion. He had a glass of scotch just prior to the dinner, and only two people had access to the bottle, himself and Dembe. Now, it appears that Dembe has not been kidnapped; he is the one behind the attack.
