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Well, you don't conduct a lucrative career in international crime without racking up the odd enemy or five, and tonight, one of Reddington's old foes decides it's time to settle old accounts. The enemy's name is Anslo Garrick, and he's still holding a grudge about the time Reddington shot him in the head — so much so that he's assembled an army of mercenaries, tracked down Reddington's exact location, and tricked the FBI into bringing Reddington into its heretofore impregnable fortress for the express purpose of returning the favor about bullets to the head. Tricking the FBI was the easiest part of the plan.
The not-so-easy part? The actual shooting of Reddington, who proves to be an elusive target. If only Ressler could say the same thing: He takes a bullet to the leg before the first commercial and spends the rest of the episode bleeding profusely. At least, he and Reddington get to spend some quality time together, hiding from Garrick in the bulletproof glass-encased SpaderCage and bonding over emergency blood transfusions.
And what of Keen? Well, she's trapped in an elevator when Garrick's guerilla squad performs its initial assault. But before you can say "yippie kay yay, mother profiler," she goes the full John McClane, escaping from the elevator and plucking off bad guys one by one. She's so badass in this episode, I didn't even think about her wig until this very moment. I wonder how the wig is doing, come to think of it…
Anyway, Garrick really wants Reddington to come out of that cell, so much so that he rounds up all the FBI agents and members of Reddington's support staff that he's captured and threatens to shoot each one in the head unless Deputy Director Cooper gives him the secret code that opens up the SpaderCage. But Deputy Director Cooper is a man of firm resolve and… well, I hope none of you got to attached to Luli, Reddington's accountant, during her few moments of screen time this season. Dembe, Reddington's bodyguard, is just about to meet the same fate, when we cut to the credits and we realize that this is just part one of this storyline. Don't worry: When Part Two airs in a week's time, you'll be able to draw Ressler's leg wound from memory.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Boy, they are not kidding with that "Due to violent content, viewer discretion is advised" warning at the top of the show. Because that caption barely faded to black by the time we’re treated to a few seconds of a very bloody, very wounded Ressler being tended to by a weary-looking Reddington with a very sharp-looking knife. How did we arrive at this rather sorry state of affairs? Let’s flash back to 13 hours earlier at a Bavarian beer hall, where it seems we could have started this episode in the first place without any hiccup in the narrative. Red is having a few comically over-sized steins of beer with some of his criminal chums to celebrate some lucrative caper that happened off camera. That’s when Ressler shows up -- the buzz kill. Reddington pretends like he’s a State Department mole being flown off to Bavaria as some sort of Crooked Employee of the Month award, just to keep his criminal pals from getting suspicious. But the real reason Ressler high-tailed it off to Germany is because Keen needs Reddington, or so Ressler says. Reddington wisely surmises that if this is actually the case, then whey isn’t Keen here herself? Because she’s been detained, Ressler responds. For what reason, Reddington demands. Sounds like a case of the bullshits to me.
And indeed, by "detained," Ressler apparently meant "still mourning her recently dead adoptive father" and going through boxes of his effects, which include a singed stuffed bunny. That, in turn, triggers a flashback to the fire that scarred Lizzie both literally and figuratively in her childhood, which we heard about ever so briefly in the pilot episode, but not so much since. Lizzie is many things right now, but detained isn’t one of them. She is wearing a robe that suggests she’s been cast as Yum Yum in a local theater group’s production of The Mikado, so maybe that will take her mind off her grief.
But Reddington doesn’t know any of this, and he’s flown back to the FBI’s Super Secret BlackOps Center where he and his henchman (Luli and Dembe, if you’re scoring along at home) are placed in protective custody. Instead of examining the kind of complicated trust issues that have created the need for a ruse like this to bring Reddington in from the cold, we’re instead treated to some FBI-provided exposition: there’s an imminent threat on Reddington’s life. Reddington scoffs that there’s always an imminent threat on his life. He’s not scoffing when he finds out who the would-be assassin is, though -- a fellow by the name of Anslo Garrick. But that’s only because Reddington has figured out what the FBI is too thick-headed to have worked out on its own. That the FBI’s information likely came from Garrick himself and that he fed it to the FBI precisely so that the usually hard-to-find Reddington can be easily tracked down to a predetermined location. Reddington explains this slowly, as if he’s talking to children, in large part because that’s about the cognitive capacity of the open-mouthed-breathing FBI agents he’s talking to. But it also allows us to cut away to an assault team methodically infiltrating the FBI’s BlackOps Center in the exact manner that Reddington describes.