Wujing’s ingenious plan might not be so ingenious after all.
In his pursuit to destroy Raymond, Wujing broke out a former blacklister on The Blacklist Season 10 Episode 6 and employed her services to try and find the location of the post office.
Most of what happened was quite predictable, and it was what we thought would happen in our review of The Blacklist Season 10 Episode 5. A lot didn’t come as a surprise save Vesco’s untimely demise.
Wujing’s plan to expose Raymond is multifaceted. It is not as easy as calling a conference of all criminals and telling them what he thinks he knows. He has to have it backed up by hard evidence.
He spent the hour trying to find the location of the Post Office so that he could extract the plea bargain the US government made with Raymond. Those documents are so top secret copies don’t exist outside the Post Office.
And one has to give him kudos for being dedicated to the cause and taking it up in the first place.
However, he seemed to suffer something most people after revenge suffer — overconfidence and blinders from approaching the situation from an emotional angle.
Wujing: I believe Dembe Zuma is part of the FBI team collaborating with Reddington, and soon enough, Perillos will get him to reveal all the details of Reddington’s arrangement with the FBI. Most importantly, where they’re headquartered.
Robert: And then?
Wujing: We raid it.
Robert: A secure FBI facility?
He was willing to break into the post office despite being quite aware that it is one of the most secure FBI stations.
In his blown-out zeal to expose Raymond, he missed the obvious signs about Vesco.
Vesco thought he was good at manipulating people, but anyone who paid little attention to his body language could figure out that he was spying. We already had our suspicions about where his allegiances lie as early as the first meeting he had with Wujing.
From his raised eyebrows every time some new piece of information was spoken or the nature of his questions, one could tell he was fishing. But Wujing could not see that because he was looking for a yes man, and Robert played the part well.
He employed the skills of one of the most ruthless blacklisters ever. Dr. Perillos was turning a new leaf in prison, helping women suffering from chronic pain. She had become so engrossed in the job it could have made an honest citizen out of her if she hadn’t been broken out.
For her, this was something from her dreams: finishing the job she started with Dembe.
Plenty of awful people have been on the blacklist, but Dr. Perillos stands out. She digs through the emotional backlog and comes out with something to torment you over. For Dembe, it is his record of some questionable career choices.
Dr. Perillos: Or maybe it just felt natural, leaving a corrupt, violent, white man for a corrupt, violent, white institution.
Dembe: I know the FBI’s history, thank you.
She is made scarier by how Laverne Cox portrays her. Taking care to spell out every word and sentence as if they are the most important words to have ever been uttered.
Dr. Perillos’ end felt forced. That might be because of the direction the story is supposed to take, or it might result from Wujing’s actions.
One would have thought he would keep as many blacklisters as possible on speed dial. It felt like a bad decision, but he seems to have a knack for making those.
Killing Vesco and Dr. Perillos will come back to bite him. It is not a great look when everyone who has been broken out of prison and interacted with him dies.
He also might be overestimating how people might react. If Vesco was any indication, some might love and/or fear Raymond too much to consider going against him. Others might have found themselves in a better place and appreciated what Raymond did.
He will find soldiers willing to join his cause, but that pool will not be as big as he wants.
Raymond is an older man whose friends keep dying around him. That does something to a man.
Of all his friends, Vesco is the closest to his age, and Vesco’s death must have hit him hard.
It was hinted earlier that living was becoming harder for him daily, and the most recent death only reinforced these feelings.
Elsewhere, Siya was looking for something. It is unclear what she was looking for, but this obsession with her dead mother cannot be a good thing. Sometimes it is good advice to let the past remain so because you might not like what you find.
Halrod: Where’s Malik?
Dembe: I dunno.
Ressler: She’s been closing out the office, going over old case files. Maybe the late nights got her.
If she was interested in knowing who her mother was, she would find out by talking to the people who knew her, not papers. Papers can’t tell you much about who a person was. Probably what they did, but not the little things that made them who they were.
Case in point, her little chat with Ressler opened her eyes more than anything she had read in the past couple of nights.
Ressler: The Blacklist exists so that we can go after criminals that we never would have heard of without Reddington.
Siya: That sounds great in theory.
“Dr. Laken Perillos Part 2” was a much better episode. Even though we saw Dembe in pain, he had been missing for a while now, and it was good to see him. Wujing got a lot of screen time which was the best part of it.
We learned more about his plan and who he is as a person. That included his strengths and flaws.
What follows now is the invasion of the Post Office, data extraction, decryption, and the aftermath.
Do you think he will be successful in breaking into the Post Office? Should Raymond start to be scared?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.
You can watch The Blacklist online right here on TV Fanatic to catch up on what you may have missed.
Denis Kimathi is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. He has watched more dramas and comedies than he cares to remember. Catch him on social media obsessing over [excellent] past, current, and upcoming shows or going off about the politics of representation on TV. Follow him on Twitter.