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This week, Reddington and his FBI chums had better get to the bottom of their case quickly—as this particular case involves someone who's been buried alive with only enough oxygen to keep him alive until Jay Leno's opening monologue. Our unfortunate victim is an NSA analyst whom a French superspy is hoping to trade to Iran in exchange for a $20 million-plus payday. But everything goes pear-shaped and the only one who knows where our faux Edward Snowden is buried is a courier who is not only impervious to pain but also unwilling to co-operate with the Feds. So, um, good luck with that, Reddington and FBI chums!
In the end, though, the FBI gets its man, and everybody has a part to play in it. Keen works some profiling magic. Malik gets to show off her marksmanship and vehicular pursuit skills. Ressler goes undercover as a violent, scowling idiot. Truly, everyone plays to their strengths in this episode.
But most important, we seem to finally be arriving at a resolution to the So I Married An International Assassin subplot that's been popping up whenever it looks like this show is in danger of developing some narrative momentum. Keen has been able to figure out that the Angel Station shooting that her husband seems to be implicated in involves a Russian national who was either mole or defecting or a defective mole. Tom Keen has made a discovery of his own, namely that someone's been messing with his box full of passports and firearms and unmarked stacks of cash. "We need to talk," Keen tells her husband at the episode's end, having been handed some more intel on the Angel Station incident courtesy of Reddington. "I was just about to say the same thing," Tom tells her, as he produces the box of incriminating, secret stuff. "I'm going to be able to put my kids through an Ivy League school," says the couples therapy expert who's going to wind up with these two as clients.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!It’s nighttime in the Keen household, and since the missus is immune to the pleasures of his tender smooches, Tom Keen decides to ask our Lizzie just what the matter is. She finally decides that now’s the time to quiz him on this Angel Station business, and I guess that’s a sore subject because he starts to choke her. Before you get excited, know that this is all a dream sequence—the second cheapest way to start your show, right after playing Sympathy for the Devil. Back outside the realm of Dreamland, the Keen marriage is as dreary as ever with Tom nattering on about the surrogate mother who’s apparently going to turn over her baby to them and Lizzie doing the “Well, my husband could well be an assassin, but I really want to be a mommy” dithering. At least the apple-eating gentleman monitoring the Keen household via closed-circuit television isn’t bored by all this. I hope that’s not the same apple he was chomping on two episodes ago.
Cut to out in the woods somewhere, where a dude in a creepy mask is fetching another tied-up dude from the back of an abandoned truck. Creepy Mask is videotaping the other dude, who is forced to introduce himself as Seth. (I like to think that this is Seth Green, and that Creepy Mask Dude is burying Seth alive because he, like the rest of us, has tuned into Dads at some point this fall. But I’m vengeful like that). In an ensuing struggle, Seth manages to stick a knife into Creepy Mask Dude, which doesn’t faze him so much as perceptibly annoy him. Just to show he doesn’t hold a grudge, Creepy Mask Dude leaves Seth with an oxygen tank before planting him in the cold, cold ground. Guess we have the Case of the Week for James Spader and his gang of intrepid crime busters.
That’s what Reddington seems to have concluded, at any rate. An Iranian is trying to obtain some piece of intelligence that Reddington would very much like to have instead, but someone named The Courier is involved—for the record, that’s Creepy Mask Guy’s nom de guerre. And since The Courier is not a cat to be tangled with lightly -- just ask poor Seth Green in the ground! -- Reddington decides to task his FBI chums with this particular job. That’s certainly more productive than what Keen and Ressler are currently involved, which appears to be squabbling about the necessity of FBI profilers. You will be shocked to learn that Ressler thinks profiling’s a lot of hooey. Well, good thing for Ressler that Keen’s prepared a profile of him. It’s a bit more involved than "insufferable dick" but that’s the upshot.