The Blacklist: “Masha Rostova”

“Masha Rostova’” ends right where “Karakurt” ended, with Liz being framed for poisoning Hawkins. She is being framed by Tom Connolly, yet helps escape his grasp with the help of Reddington. The Cabal isn’t going to be stopped so easily, which means Liz is going to be on the run for some time now. In order to take the Cabal down, Liz and Reddington take two very different approaches. Reddington compiles 11 of the world’s greatest investigative journalists and presents them with the information about the Cabal, telling them to research and bring them out of the shadows. Meanwhile, Liz and Cooper find Connolly, and in a rush of anger, Liz kills Connolly, runs away and Cooper turns himself in for Connolly’s murder.

This handling of the Cabal actually highlights the differences between Reddington and Liz in a pretty succinct way. Reddington knows that just taking one cog out of this large machine won’t stop it and if anything, will probably make the Cabal harder to fight. Reddington is smarter to play the larger game, and by smoking out the Cabal will make them far easier to fight. Yet as we’ve seen with Liz’s conversation between Reddington, Liz wants immediate results, regardless of how they might hurt her. She knows that shooting Connolly will only mean bad things for her, but in the moment, she doesn’t care. It’s this sort of short-term thinking that has caused her plenty of problems throughout these last two seasons and hopefully will be a habit that Reddington will one day break her from.

But even more interesting than the battle of Liz/Reddington vs. The Cabal is Liz/Reddington vs. their old team. With Cooper out, Kessler becomes the new head of the team and his first order of business is to add Liz to the wall of criminals they need to hunt down. By putting these two teams against each other, maybe The Blacklist will finally move away from the crime of the week process for a little bit—at least until Liz and Reddington are finally inevitably working with Kessler and his new team once again.

“Masha Rostova” isn’t exactly a shocking, surprise-filled finale, though. Liz and Tom hook up again, with Liz pointing out that she doesn’t want to regret being with Tom after all this time. Even the “revelation” about her house burning down doesn’t really reveal all that much, except that we now know that Liz shot her father. But it’s still not clear who her father or mother even are and Reddington could still very much be her father. “Masha Rostova” is largely more of the same for The Blacklist in the mystery department, which is to say, not much is revealed. However “Masha Rostova” does gives us a look at what could be a largely improved third season. This second season has ended with some of The Blacklist’s strongest episodes and takes some steps in fixing problems that this show has had since its beginning. If “Masha Rostova” is any indication of what we have to look forward to, The Blacklist could be coming back better and more exciting than ever before.

Ross Bonaime is a D.C.-based freelance writer and regular contributor to Paste. You can follow him on Twitter.