After a handful of episodes that focused on The Blacklist’s main cast, and after last week’s strange diversion into the seemingly impossible, “Vanessa Cruz” brings us back to The Blacklist as usual, but with the added benefit of some huge character moments.
Our Blacklister for this week is Vanessa Cruz, a woman who has been framing businessmen who framed and killed her husband years ago. She has her own personal hit list of men upon whom she wants to get revenge, by framing them and ruining their lives. As with almost every Blacklister story, her convoluted backstory is much less important than the broad strokes of her character: she’s extremely skilled at deceiving and framing people.
In the bigger picture story, The Blacklist is wise to try and speed up the whole Fulcrum plot, by giving Reddington only about a day to give the Fulcrum to The Director and his Board of Shadowy Figures before they will kill him. Reddington says he’ll help Liz catch Cruz if she gives him The Fulcrum, but instead she turns to get help from Tom, who will help her in exchange for his fake passports which he once hid in their house. Of all the lying men in Liz’s life, it seems like, at this point, she hates Red so much, she’d rather trust the ex-husband who tried to kill her.
Maybe the most mysterious aspect of “Vanessa Cruz” is that whenever Reddington suggests someone for the list, he has an ulterior motive for wanting to focus on them, but that doesn’t show until the end of the episode. We see that Reddington wants to use Cruz—who gets away free by the end—and her set of skills for his own reasons.
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