The first two episodes of the season made full meals out of Red and Liz's attempts to evade capture and find some bargaining chip with the Cabal. The episode simply has too many plot threads competing for time. Instead, where 'The Djinn' slips up is in its disjointed structure. And with James Spader as its mouthpiece why wouldn't it? It's not enough to present a condemnable act when you can tell the audience precisely why the act in question is condemnable. And at the same time, the show has never missed an opportunity to step up on its soapbox and let the audience know exactly what it's thinking. As such, the story of the Bakhash clan, and the forced sexual reassignment surgery of eldest son Nasir (who since became Nasim), is almost pedestrian as far as plots go. The Blacklist has never met a troubled familial relationship it can't turn grotesque. A lot of it is needlessly outlandish and doesn't make any sense whatsoever, but that's part of the appeal of the show. What's surprising about 'The Djinn' is the content isn't necessarily the problem. Such focused storytelling was a promising way to begin season 3, but with these last two episodes, the newly developed sense of focus has begun to look increasingly like something the show will have to work it way back towards. It has been a major criticism of the series, one that was at least partially resolved by Liz's fugitive status and her time on the run with Red. And so, in an effort to stay on one path, it stalled for time. It also made it seem as though The Blacklist had one idea and only one idea, and the thought of having to develop another was something the show would sincerely like to avoid. Such fitful progression created a false sense of tension. The Blacklist spent the better part of two seasons teasing out Red's connection with Liz in a succession of sputtering starts and stops. Perhaps that's why 'The Djinn' reads as a disappointing return to form for the series. Instead, watching Red and Liz track down a wish-granting member of the blacklist feels less like they are pursuing a mysterious means to an end and more like a stalling tactic from the writers' room. But that is all surface level stuff, covering up the fact that nothing of any real significance transpires throughout the hour. It even makes use of the protagonists' current circumstances, as a means of introducing and justifying the episode's villain. It isn't Red and Liz against the Cabal the show is at odds with its desire to tell a more focused and coherent story, and having to stretch that story over 22 hours.įor all intents and purposes, the episode fulfills the basic requirements of the series.
And in that lies the real conflict of The Blacklist season 3.
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But it also speaks to the time-filling needs of a network television series and they can be a considerable impediment to the efficient telling of a serialized story. After all, NBC wound up with an incredibly successful show based off of this particular formula. To see the series revert back to this is not much of a surprise. After a few weeks of noticeably streamlined and engaging storytelling, The Blacklist has worked its way back to a familiar routine of giving its villains the lion's share of the plot, while Red and Liz are developed in the margins, if at all.
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