- Title: The Blacklist – Ivan
- wiki: link
of a nuclear warhead. Another fabulous example of your tax dollars at work.”
While Reddington (James Spader) begins carefully deconstructing Tom‘s (Ryan Eggold) lies by exposing Lucy Brooks‘ (Rachel Brosnahan) disappearance and laying the breadcrumbs which will compel Lizzie (Megan Boone) to uncover the woman’s true identity, he also puts the FBI on the scent of a Russian cyber criminal known as Ivan (Mark Ivanir) who he believes is responsible for a murdered a NSA programmer in charge of the development of “Project Skeleton Key” (an electronic cyber-weapon created to completely cripple a country during wartime without ever firing a shot), the prototype which is now missing.
The team heads to Minsk with Reddington to find to the notorious hacker, but it doesn’t take Red long to realize he’s not the hacker the FBI is after. The criminal the FBI is really after is a 17 year-old high school student (Will Denton) obsessed with the daughter (Quinn Shephard) of one of the Skeleton Key programmers (Frank Deal) who is willing to blackout all of the nation’s capital in a misguided attempt to get the young woman to notice him.
Although “Ivan” provides the first example of Red being wrong about a member of The Blacklist, the episode’s B-story is far more interesting and Lizzie follows the clues of Lucy’s life which lead her to discover Reddington was right about her husband all along. I’m not too keen on the show’s choice for Lizzie to hide her discovery and go about life as normal (which is what the preview for next week suggests), but I did enjoy the episode’s closing scene as Red uses the old-fashioned music box he’s been constructing over the course of the episode to offer what solace he can when Lizzie arrives to confirm his suspicions about her husband.
