NBC’s “The Blacklist” wrapped its ten-season run on Thursday night with a double-episode that pulled in the season’s second and third largest audiences respectively, with 2.7 million and 2.5 million total viewers and a 0.2 rating for both.
SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE FINALE
James Spader’s Raymond Reddington met his demise after the criminal mastermind, dealing with a deadly illness that had relapsed, went out by being mowed down by a bull in a field in Spain. At the same time, the Task Force he was once the subject of were the ones assigned to hunt him down.
The end was portended in an earlier episode this season in one of his monologues about a matador named Manolete whom he admired and who “found it easier to risk his life than live his life without risk”.
Speaking with the Associated Press, Spader says they ended the series the way they wanted:
“I was very, very glad we were able to end it exactly the way we wanted to end it. It was deliberate, and we weren’t taken by surprise in terms of when the ending was going to come. You’ll see that the ending has conviction, and we commit to it.
I really felt like this was complete and I loved how it really completed a circle, in a way. It wasn’t just an unbroken line from point A to point Z, but it was a circle of sorts.”
The finale sadly never explicitly answers the show’s central mystery – who was Raymond Reddington really? A popular theory seemingly implied on the show but never stated was that he was the late Elizabeth Keene’s mother, Katarina Rostova.
Showrunner John Eisendrath said in March to TV Line that: “If it’s up to me, you will know exactly who he is. If you don’t know in the end, you’ll know that someone else overruled me.” It would appear someone did as, in the end, the truth remains as mysterious as Red himself.
Source: TV Line