Being An Expert On The Blacklist
I have not watched Season 8 of the Blacklist. I mean, did you see how Season 7 of the Blacklist ended? I may, by the time this article goes up, have done so, but if that happens you should view it as a failure of Netflix, a moment where clearly nothing better seized me to do, an attack of boredom so distinct that I exhausted other, better options like Goosebumps 2 or watching Venom again. I mean I did write about it, back in 2018 and 2019. That’s where I had were the article about how the story had seemed to be setting up a twist where Raymond Reddington was secretly a trans dude.
Then they revealed that uh, no, they weren’t going to do that.
At that point, I lost all faith in the storytelling and the ability of these storytellers to plan anything and I thought ‘what a bunch of idiots’ and left it. I did not write a word about Blacklist in all of 2021, because I had simply given up on the show and not watched it. I was done. It was ‘gamer’ to me.
But then I started getting hits.
I started getting a lot of hits.
Like the year I wrote that article, it got a total of 25 views.
In 2020, it got 300 views, which is weird.
In 2021, it got over 1500 views.
And that 25 views, that’s what I think of as, you know, normal. That’s a totally okay number of views on an ordinary article, and this absolutely blew the doors off it. And that meant that eventually, even as someone who tries not to pay too much attention to his stats, I finally noticed that Is Blacklist Queer? was getting attention.
And that led to me looking into why.
See, it seems that this is a thing that Blacklist teased might be the case in Season 8. And I guess, in the interest of protecting people from the ‘twists’ of this ‘story’, I’m going to put down a sigh spoiler warning.
Story Pile: Blacklist, Again, Again
Alright, so the Blacklist. I’ve talked about it before. It’s a bad show. It’s a clueless show, a show that establishes itself with an interesting hook, then spends subsequent episodes constantly and effortlessly making sure it is less and less interesting. The first episode introduced us to the tension between a woman finding that the most wanted criminal in America was turning himself over to the authorities in order to personally explain to her some immense truth that started with the discovery that her husband of a number of years was hiding a secret from her that included hidden cash, weapons, and passports, in her house.
There’s no great secret or brilliant plot at the heart of The Blacklist, it’s just a fantastically dumb series that follows inthe pattern of CSI of each researcher finding one random thing they can build a whole episode around, and that’s what you’ll find if you bother to watch it. Any given episode has about one idea, and the rest is shaky-cam and mediocre stable characters orbiting around James Spader and making it look like they know what they’re doing as they build towards this season’s mysteries and revelations, to see the cool twist they’re building.
(There is never a cool twist.)
Continue Reading →Is Blacklist Queer?
I have a love-hate relationship with Blacklist, the NBC tv series that basically exists because James Spader is a charismatic man who looks good in a variety of neat hats. It isn’t a good series. Not really. I don’t think you’ll lose anything by being spoilered on plot points from late in the series, but I also don’t think you should be sinking hours and hours of your life into watching this show to keep up with what I’m talking about.
Still, it briefly opened the window for a queer angle that would have been amazing and exciting and then it didn’t do it, which feels like an enormous own goal. But I need you to understand what I’m talking about, so let’s put that in your hand, and you can meet me after the cut, if you want to.
Spoiler warning for the general plot and some specific details about Raymond Reddington’s identity in The Blacklist, and also some cissexism and transphobia from a show I don’t think that much of.
Continue Reading →Blacklist’s Twist’s Piss
I’ve watched all of the Blacklist that’s available on Netflix Australia right now, which is to say up to the end of Season 4, and I did so only, I can assume out of some sense of ridiculous obligation. Blacklist is a TV series that establishes itself with a strong premise, a robust opening, a promising cast of initial characters, and stands back, arms spread, saying watch this unfold.
I have now after all this watching, some information for you which must come after the fold, because somehow someone out there might be fancying No, I want to watch this show, without that knowledge, so it can surprise me. If that’s the case, friend, please, first of all, brace for disappointment, but, for your sake, here is the fold:
Continue Reading →