The Blacklist, a TV show on NBC that ran from 2013 to 2023, had viewers tuning in and on the edge of their seats for its entire 10-year run. To this day, it holds a 91% critics’ score and a 79% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and fans continue to speculate about its unanswered questions over a year after it officially ended. The show told the story of Raymond “Red” Reddington, a former government agent turned fugitive who strikes a deal with the FBI – in exchange for his freedom, he will work with them to capture the “blacklist.”
The titular list is a list of the world’s worst mobsters, spies and terrorists on the FBI’s radar, a who’s who of America’s most wanted, and the kind of criminals that only a mind like Red’s could understand well enough to catch. It was a premise that captured the attention of viewers across the country – but it was the mystery at the heart of the show that had fans tuning in every week, the question of who is Ray, AKA “Red,” really, and what are his real motives for striking this deal with the FBI?
Who Is Red on the Surface?
Ray “Red” Reddington is considered a criminal mastermind, a highly intelligent and ruthless antihero who is high up on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and for good reason. He’s used to being the most intelligent person in the room, he knows how to read and manipulate people with ease, and with his lack of moral compass or empathy for most people, he can be an incredible ally or a great danger to all those around him. Although he doesn’t necessarily enjoy hurting people, and he doesn’t relish in killing, he also isn’t opposed to it – he never does it for the joy of it, but he does view it as a means to an end, a potentially necessary way to get what he wants, especially from the people on the blacklist.
Red is an enigmatic and unknowable figure, and the mystery surrounding him is something he himself works to maintain. The other characters only know what he wants to know about him, only ever seeing the parts of him he’s willing to show, and how much of what he shows them can be trusted and how much manipulation is never entirely clear. Because of this, the audience is only ever given hints, pieces of the puzzle that may never lead to the full picture, about his true intentions and identity. Fans of the show took these bits of information and possible revelations and did what fans often do – creating their own theories and possible answers about who Red really is beneath all the lies and manipulation of his character.
What Does Red Want?
Along with his freedom, one of Red’s conditions for working with the government is that he’ll be working with a particular profiler – Elizabeth Keen. His interest or connection to her is unknown to the other agents and the audience, which begs the question of why he’s so insistent on working with her. Although there is no shortage of suspense and mystery in every aspect of the show, it is this mystery that most captivated viewers – trying to figure out who Liz Keen is to Red, and why he wants to be in her life so badly. Throughout the series, the question of how Red and Liz are connected and why Red cares so much about her is one of the driving mysteries for both the other characters and the viewers at home.
As the show progressed, bits of Red’s past and his strange connection to Liz were slowly revealed, or at least alluded to. By the end of Liz’s story in the show in Season 8, she believed that Red was her father – and much of the audience, at least at that time, believed the same, even though he denied being so. Once he had revealed everything about his past, save for his exact relation to Liz, it seemed obvious that he must be a parent to her.
Who Is Red, Really?
To the very end, The Blacklist never gave its audience a definitive answer about Red’s identity – as is expected of the writers, they offer up ambiguous possibilities without telling the viewers anything conclusive. The biggest clue that viewers got to an answer was in the finale when Red was speaking with Liz’s daughter, Agnes. Agnes made the joke during their conversation that he was sounding like a mom, and Red replied that he just couldn’t help it.
It might not be a direct confirmation, but in its own ambiguous way, this seems to be the show hinting at the fans that their theory about Red’s identity as Liz’s Mom, and formerly as Katarina Rostova, was correct. If this is what the showrunner and writers were hinting at, then that would mean that Red had transitioned and changed his identity prior to the start of the show – a potentially interesting storyline that was never really explored in The Blacklist, which is maybe for the best, as many viewers were unsure of the show’s ability to tackle that storyline with any nuance or complexity.
This possible answer, as is the way with a show that depends on intrigue and mystery like The Blacklist, is the closest fans will ever come to knowing Red’s real identity. It isn’t an answer, but it’s something – and it’s as close as anyone is going to get, never knowing for sure.
