The Blacklist – Ruin

By: Robert Warren

“It`s four in the morning. It`s the end of December,” the lyrics to Leonard Cohen`s “Famous Blue Raincoat” plays. “I am writing you now just to see if you`re better.” Grace (Megan Boone) runs through a forest dressed for the cold weather cracking leaves as she runs. She stops to catch herself and takes a breath from the exhaustion of running. She looks down and sees a bear trap hidden in the leaves.  She grabs a stick from a stack and sets off the bear trap so no one gets hurt on it. Crows fly in the air.

Arriving to an outdoor cabin, as she opens the door she is greeted by her dog. She takes off her coat and sets it in the closet. She takes off her shoes and feeds the dog. Grace stands one foot up balancing and smiling. She sets her foot down and reaches for her medication. She sits at a table by a fire eating cereal. She takes a bite of a cookie and begins washing her hands. She washes a bowl and turns on the garbage disposal in the sink to clean the drain. The record with the Leonard Cohen`s song stops working.

Into the next day Grace begins cutting and messing with wires in an outdoor generator to her cabin. The electricity comes back on to the outdoor light and then the generator stops working again. She enters the hardware store looking for a specific L14-20 male plug.  She finds the one she is looking for and then approaches the cashier mentioning the fact that her generator went out again. The cashier follows to tell her about the upcoming weather and how there is going to be a storm approaching and maybe ice. She leaves with the plug she needed after short conversation.

She goes back to the generator and fixes it again. She starts axing a stump.  Transitioning to the next scene, Dr. Nguyen (Kimiye Corwin) is helping Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone) deal with pain. Keen is stuck in a wheelchair. Back in the present, Grace is still axing the stump and then goes into the cabin. A man named Colin Knox (Jay Wilkinson) delivers a package to her, saying hello to her dog Kate.

Keen is crying over her deceased husband Tom Keen`s grave. She leans down crying by his tombstone admitting, “I`m not doing very well,” to Tom. “I told myself I was not going to tell you that,” Keen says to Tom. Keen, who is trying to be strong, sniffles as she tries to bear with the fact that he is no longer around.

In a separate scene, Grace walks out of the cabin with a gun in the cold, past the generator as a dog barks. Grace looks down and sees a dead man lying on the forest floor and briefly looks around as the music intensifies. She rubs her hand alongside the dead man’s face, but he then grabs her arm and she jumps. It turns out that he is not dead after all. He starts trying to mumble a few words, but they are indiscernible and they appear to be his last words as he passes out from the cold.

Grace uses a wheelbarrow to take the man into her cabin and places him on the couch near a warm fire, placing a warm scarf over him and just trying to help him wake. On the radio it says that it is 20 degrees. Grace tries calling for help over the radio, but no one answers. She tries to start her car, but it won`t start.

Grace walks into a nearby station and is looking for Knox. Grace sits at a desk looking at a picture. Keen, in a separate scene. picks up a picture and is in a house with Raymond `Red’ Reddington (James Spader). Keen tries to make Reddington promise that he will keep working on the Blacklist without her, but he assures her that it will not work without her. Keen continues by thanking Reddington for all the help he has done for the task force and again pushes for him to keep working on the Blacklist. Reddington commits a promise to continue the work. Keen wants Reddington to stop following her and let go, but Reddington brings up the point of, “What about Agnes?”

In a separate scene Grace, still in the station, writes a note that says, “There’s been an emergency. Come when you can. ~Grace.” Grace leaves the station and goes to her cabin with a gun. When she enters she sees a bunch of people wandering in her cabin. “Who the hell are you people,” Grace asks.

The men in Grace’s apartment claim that there plane went down and they were worried that they may not last much longer out there in the wind. Billy (William Mapother) claims that the plane fell what must have been six to ten miles and the guy in Grace’s bedroom, the one on the couch is Mike. He is a guy that tried walking it out during the cold weather.

Orson (Danny Wolohan) says, “I thought we were gonna die out there.”  Grace wants to get Mike to the hospital, but the weather is an ice of a mess, the phones are not working and the car is all iced up. Grace notices that Billy is bleeding and she tries to help him clean up. Billy tries getting to know Grace’s story, but she is reluctant to tell it. He tries hearing about the person who is with her and she mentions that there used to be somebody but not anymore.

Keen is talking to Susan Hargrave (Famke Janssen) about her beautiful baby girl Agnes (Katherine Kell) who she had with Tom. Hargrave is looking after Agnes until Keen is ready to care for Agnes again since Keen is still trying to make it after the heartache of Tom’s death.

Grace is trying to radio for help. There is soft mumbling over the radio, but it does not sound like the help is able to understand her to come. Colin comes into the cabin to see what Grace needed help with. Grace needed to get Mike to the hospital, but with the roads being so bad from the ice it seems near impossible.

Grace has the idea to try to get the radio that was on the plane to work and while it seems hard to do Grace is pretty insistent about giving it a try. Orson is willing to try to help and give help in guiding the direction. He claims to have a decent sense of direction; however, it is not the most fulfilling of arguments. Colin, Bill, Orson and the rest are all planning to go, except they suggest that Grace stay to look after Mike. While they want Grace to be the one that stays and all of these men seem to have a want to go with Colin, Grace worries that there may be something they aren’t saying.

It seems weird to Grace that they walked ten miles from a plane crash that she didn’t even hear of and is worried about Colin going with the people from the plane crash. Part of the group takes off with Colin and as Grace sits alongside the bed of Mike she mentions it isn`t completely right for Mike`s friends to leave him. Mike says, “Not friends.” So Grace asks, “Then who the hell are they?” Mike responds that, “They`ll kill you, too.” Mike says, “Ratted…Carlucci family,” which Grace knows to be a crime family and Mike mentions that he is there because he is their witness protection. “Witsec dumped you up here,” Grace says. It is only understandable that now Grace is worried about the situation more than she was before as now she knows it is a crime family heading off with Colin.

Mike is concerned that the men will kill him so Grace hands him a gun and is trying to figure out how to get them out of there. Bill, who actually did stick around a little later, walks into the room checking to see how Mike is doing. Grace mentions that everything seems to be going well and Mike should be good for at least a few more hours because he is a fighter.

One of the men start talking to Grace about why she still wears her wedding ring when her husband is gone. Grace mentions that it serves as a reminder and the man pieces together that this must make sense as to why she is out in the woods – to escape the world who knows of him. Grace realizes her dog Kate is missing and starts looking for her.

Another man walks into the cabin but without Colin. Grace asks about it, but the man insists that Colin headed back to town with another ranger. Grace asks about her dog, but no one knows where she is. Grace grabs the gun back from the sleeping man Mike. Grace tries once again to radio for help, but then notices that the radio has been disconnected likely from one of the men in the house. Grace looks around the side of the room and notices her dog dead next to a cover. She lifts up the cover and it is Colin who is dead.

In another scene, Keen is talking to Reddington in a house about Agnus and Tom. Dembe Zuma (Hisham Tawfiq) is moving boxes. Reddington wants Keen to make time for grieving. Keen wants revenge upon Tom’s killers and is planning to attack them.

Back at the cabin Grace uses a walkie talkie to contact Bill who thinks she is fixing the generator. She is frank enough to say that she knows he killed her dog Kate and Colin. They both are threatening with killing one another if things are not followed by one another. Grace shocks Bill with some news over the walkie talkie that she is not scared of him and that her name is not Grace. It is Elizabeth, an FBI agent and the drink he just had ice cubes in…those ice cubes had broken glass frozen into them by her because she knew he was a killer. She mentions that if the four of them want to come after her they better come with a fight because to her they are just practice.

Another man in the cabin dies as Keen also drugged the food. Another one of the men steps in a bear trap the Keen left out. Mike is no longer in the bed and the men are looking for Keen. She sets a section of the cabin on fire. Another man comes after her and she whacks him down.

Keen is in the station with Mike who she carried on a sled. Billy enters the station and Keen throws gasoline on him and in his eyes. He is hurting and she exits the station. He keeps coming after her, threatening her. She shoots a flare gun at him making him shoot up in flames.

Alice Merton`s “The Roots” plays in the background as investigators set up numbers around the cabin. Cameras click as they take pictures of the scene. Investigators talk to people around the town for details, but everyone just seems to know the lady they mention as “Grace.”

Keen is walking out from the forest hands free from this and is putting pictures on the floor to piece together the scene. Keen is done with that and knocks on Dembe`s door as he invites her in. Reddington is in the room and Keen thanks him for honoring his promise. Keen mentions how relieved she feels now that she killed some men that were bad. It didn`t matter how bad they were she mentions, but that it feels good. She feels healed now. She mentions she is coming for Tom`s killers. Keen didn`t keep her promise of not fighting and asks Reddington’s forgiveness. Reddington mentions that he forgives her ,but he says, “But, will you be able to forgive yourself?”