The following contains major spoilers for The Blacklist . It’s been just over a year since the final episodes of The Blacklist debuted , but it’s only been a few months since I finished a massive binge of the entire 10-season series. While I have already written about the fact that The Blacklist ’s biggest mystery is no mystery at all , that doesn’t mean that the show ended for me with no open questions.
I have several, and most of them have to do not with how The Blacklist ended, but with how it might have ended. A lot of people have issues with the way The Blacklist ended for Raymond Reddington. It was a somewhat anti-climactic finale for a character who seemed capable of anything.
But I’m not thinking just of how things could have ended for Red, but how things could have ended for Elizabeth Keen if The Blacklist had ended two years earlier. Season 8 Of The Blacklist Was A Major Endpoint, Even Though The Series Continued The Blacklist was officially renewed for Season 9 in January 2021, just after Season 8 premiered. This means the showrunner and the writers knew for most of the season, and almost certainly before the final episodes of Season 8 were written, that the show would need to go on.
However, they also knew the show would go on without one of its major characters. Megan Boone , who had played The Blacklist ’s co-lead, FBI Agent Elizabeth Keene, had reportedly given her notice long before the show’s renewal that Season 8 would be her last . This meant .