“Cape May” was Episode 19 in Season 3 of The Blacklist. It was a rather unusual episode, but it should be noted that it was rather important to the series as a whole as well.
For those who are unfamiliar with the contents of “Cape May,” it was set following Elizabeth Keen’s seeming death in the previous episode. As a result, Raymond Reddington is shown as being rather devastated by the whole thing. Over the course of the episode, Red helps a mysterious woman fight off her pursuers before she walks out into the water, which by the end of the episode, is revealed to have been Red’s recollection rather than something happening in the “present” of the series. Said recollection had important consequences both in-setting and out-of-setting because of its revelations.
Why Was “Cape May” So Significant to The Blacklist?
First, “Cape May” was rather interesting in that it wasn’t the kind of episode that most people would expect from The Blacklist. Certainly, it was connected to the rest of the series in a seamless manner, but it was rather experimental in nature in regards to its content as well as how that content was fed to the viewers. On the whole, the result was something that was sometimes fast and sometimes slow, thus producing an often-jarring sensation that matched well with the sense of eeriness throughout the whole thing. However, while this might have been detrimental to the storytelling in other episodes in other series under other circumstances, it worked here because in a very real sense, it was fitting when the episode was centered on Red, who was mourning for someone important to him.
Second, “Cape May” provided some insight into one of the most important plotlines running throughout The Blacklist, though in the end, said insight proved to be rather misleading in its own right. In short, the question of whether Red is Liz’s biological father or not was a very important question for The Blacklist. However, that question is bound in an inextricable manner with a number of other questions such as the identity of Liz’s mother, the exact nature of Red’s relationship with Liz’s mother, and what happened between the two in the “past” of the series. “Cape May” provided a fair amount of insight into Red’s thoughts upon the matter, though the information that it presented wasn’t as simple and straightforward as it might have been under other circumstances because of Red’s state in the episode as well as the means by which it was presented.
Summed up, “Cape May” was an important episode for a number of reasons. First, it provided the viewers with further insight into Red as well as Red’s relationship with Liz’s mother, which is critical for understanding him as well as the choices that he makes. Second, the experimental nature of the episode made it rather unusual, thus showing that The Blacklist has more range to it than most people would have expected. Third, the whole thing fed interested individuals enough information to whet their appetites but no more than that, thus satisfying enough of their interest in the series’s central mystery to keep them returning for more.
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