The Blacklist: Netflix delivers a dreadful ending to the show that once ruled the world

REVIEW: “It’s hard to believe this is how it ends.”

The Blacklist fans could be forgiven for sharing FBI Counterterrorism Division assistant-director Harold Cooper”s (Harry Lennix) sentiments as the 218th – and final – episode unfolded.

Yes, after 10 seasons, the globetrotting, triple-crossing Machiavellian misadventures of Raymond Reddington (James Spader) have finally come to an end – but in an abrupt damp squib of a dénouement that surely rivals Dexter as one of the worst endings to a beloved series.

To be fair, The Blacklist should have ended long ago. It’s initially clever criminal-of-the-week conceit having stretched well past any sort of credulity, as cabals came and went and the question of whether Red was really FBI profiler Liz Keen’s (Megan Boone) father twisting through so many obfuscating machinations that virtually everyone was past caring by the time it was eventually resolved.

And as Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent famously put it in The Dark Knight, “you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain”. What was once the biggest show in the world a decade ago, with viewers eagerly awaiting each new installment, dropped its entire final season on Netflix earlier this month to virtually no fanfare.

Much of the problem was the show never really progressed. From the start to the finish, it was essentially Spader chewing the scenery and playing cat-and-mouse with his FBI pursuers-turned-colleagues-turned-pursurers.

Having been lucky enough to visit the show’s tiny base of operations at New York’s Chelsea Piers in 2014, perhaps I saw too much of just how constrained and formulaic the set-up was, but watching the final two-part story it looked obvious that not much had changed in nine years.

Indeed, the finale summed up all that had gone wrong with The Blacklist.

Portentous and pretentious, the whole 90-minutes felt like a valedictory for Red, while Spader literally phoned in his performance. While a few of the original supporting cast, including Lennix, Diego Kattenhoff’s “humourless fellow with the handsome hair” Donald Ressler and Hisham Tawfiq’s long-suffering Reddington right-hand man Dembe Zuma, were still present and correct, any newbies seemed to simply be second-rate stand-ins for the likes of Amir Arison’s Aram or Mozhan Marno’s Samar.

Constantly reminding us that Reddington is “no ordinary criminal…his assets are in the billions, the scope of his influence is basically unlimited, but it’s his mind you should be worried about”, the last outing also showed just how predictable his woman-in-every-port (usually serving him breakfast or soup), misplaced loyalty and time and geography-defying ability to seemingly be in two places at once had become.

The “cryptic” conversations, once so wittily and wilfully obtuse, now felt tired, while the FBI taskforce’s ongoing moral conundrum of whether to support the “mission, or the man” was overshadowed by their sheer lack of nous or street smarts. I mean, why were they still using the same photo of Red (with hair and looking more like the late, great New Zealand Film Festival supremo Bill Gosden than James Spader) they had in the first episode, when asking people as to his whereabouts?

“I’m ready for this to be over,” Siya Malk (Anya Banerjee) says at one point – and her character only joined this season.

Believe me, even if it’s been years since you last watched an episode, you were once an ardent fan, or are convinced Spader can do no wrong, by the time the soundtrack unleashes both Knocking on Heaven’s Door and a jaunty Spanish language version of My Way, you’ll be wanting the torture to end as well.

All 10 seasons of The Blacklist are now available to stream on Netflix.