Does Dr Nick die in blacklist?
Warning: The following Q&A contains major spoilers for The Blacklist‘s Season 5 fall finale. Proceed with caution. During its four previous seasons, The Blacklist put Tom Keen through the physical and emotional wringer time and again — and he somehow survived all of it. Getting tortured and stabbed in the pilot episode? No problem. Tied up and left to waste away on a boat in Season 2? Piece of cake. Chased by assassins at his own Season 3 wedding? Bring. It. On. (He even survived the cancellation of his spinoff series, which is perhaps the most impressive of all.) But Tom’s spotless death-cheating track record was finally tarnished on the NBC drama’s Season 5 fall finale Wednesday: After getting entangled with a blacklister who was seeking the mysterious suitcase full of bones, Tom suffered injuries in a shoot-out that ultimately became fatal. Earlier in the episode, Tom finally procured the DNA results of the bones, and although the home audience didn’t become privy to the information on that sheet of paper, the look on Tom’s face indicated it’s a really big deal. He called Liz — who had spent the entire episode trying to track her husband down — and assured her that when she got home that night, he would tell her everything he knew about the skeleton in Red’s closet suitcase. But when Liz arrived back at their apartment, Tom had been tied up by Ian Garvey, the blacklister for whom this fall finale was named. There was chaos for a few moments: Tom was stabbed multiple times. Liz collapsed to the floor after one of Garvey’s men hit her, resulting in a sizable head injury of her own. Bullets flew. Fortunately, Red and Dembe burst through the apartment door before Garvey’s team could actually kill Tom or Liz — but the damage had already been done. The newlyweds had lost so much blood, and suffered such intense injuries, that they barely survived the car ride to the hospital — and once they reached the emergency room, Tom couldn’t be revived, despite the doctors’ many attempts with the defibrillator. (As for that flash-forward we saw in the Season 5 premiere? Total misdirect. Yes, Tom was lying on the floor, covered in blood, and yes, Red did shoot a gun in Tom’s general direction — but Red was actually killing one of Garvey’s men, not Liz’s husband.) In the final minutes of the episode, Liz awoke in a hospital bed, intubated and disoriented. “How long?” she scribbled on a pad, showing it to Red, who was at her bedside. “Lizzy, it’s been almost a year,” Red revealed of her coma. “Ten months.” Liz’s next handwritten question: “Tom?” And Red was then forced to give his daughter the bad news: Tom had died — and he wasn’t just saying that as part of an elaborate plan to mess with Liz’s mind. As Red revealed Tom’s fate to Liz, we watched as Harold Cooper paid a visit to the hospital’s morgue to see Tom’s corpse. The sheet covering his dead body was taken off, and after Cooper took a few moments to look at it, Tom was slid back into his refrigerated slot in the morgue’s wall. TVLINE | I have to ask, since we’ve seen a major death faked on The Blacklist before: Is Tom really dead? TVLINE | Tell me how you came to the decision to kill him off in this episode. When did those conversations start in the writers’ room, and why was it creatively the best route to take at this point? TVLINE | What communication did you have with Ryan Eggold about Tom’s death? Did he find out before the rest of the cast? TVLINE | Is it possible that we’ll see Tom again via flashbacks? TVLINE | Back in the Season 5 premiere, we saw a flash-forward to tonight’s fall finale, which looked like Red would kill Tom but was ultimately a misdirect. Was there ever a version of that scene where Red really was the one to off Tom? Also, there’s this great conflict between Tom and Red. The suitcase, all the baggage they have from the past — it all comes out in this season, and that was our way to acknowledge to the audience that something was off and someone would be on a collision course with disaster. TVLINE | Speaking of that suitcase, this episode ends without revealing anything else about where those bones are, whose bones they are or the information that Tom got from those DNA results. Where will that storyline go when the show picks up in January? Regarding the suitcase, it is still out there. Reddington has no idea where it is. Elizabeth Keen doesn’t know about it. And Ian Garvey, played by Jonny Coyne, who is fantastic, is going to be a significant problem for Reddington. The shadow of Garvey and what he represents will be a really interesting big bad for the back half of the season. TVLINE | When Liz wakes up from her coma at the end of the episode, Red tells her that she’s been out for 10 months. Is he telling her the truth? TVLINE | You mentioned earlier that Tom’s love for Liz was one of the only things keeping him from getting killed by Red. Now that Tom is gone, how will Liz and Red’s relationship be affected? They have to confront the idea that Liz is his daughter, and within her DNA is the possibility to do some incredibly dark things. That terrifies Reddington, and as much as he can see 10 minutes in the future, he’s genuinely concerned about what she might do. Liz is also super-aware of that. She doesn’t like the idea that her father is, in some ways, the devil. She wants nothing more than to be normal and have a normal life. And yet, she’s been sucked into this world that she’s having a hard time fighting back against. That, more than anything, will be something that Liz and Red will have to confront. It’s not only [about] why Tom died and who is behind his death and the more surface-level questions that we’ll confront about what really happened. But deeper than that, the bigger question is: Who is Elizabeth Keen? With that, I hand it over to you. How do you feel about Tom’s death? Devastated? Thrilled? Completely neutral? Drop a comment below with your reaction to Wednesday’s fall finale. |