(Warning: This post contains spoilers for Wednesday’s Season 8 finale of “The Blacklist.”)
Fans of “The Blacklist” were hoping for concrete answers about Red’s connection to Liz from Wednesday’s Season 8 finale, and they aren’t too thrilled that the episode didn’t deliver any.
“Years of building this up… She will never know who the f— Red is to her,” one especially aggrieved fan tweeted shortly after the episode finished airing. “Which idiot thought it was good to do this?”
Fans have long speculated that Red’s relationship to Liz is parental in nature, with early theories that he was her father circulating online as far back as Season 1. With the subsequent reveal that Red is not her biological father and more information about Liz’s birth mother, Katarina, coming to light in later episodes, a new theory soon emerged.
Known as “Redarina” within the “Blacklist” fandom, the theory (or a highly simplified version of it, at least) goes something like this: Katarina gave up Liz when she was young, wiping her early childhood memories and hiding her with a confidante to protect her from her enemies. She then assumed the identity of her late partner, the real Raymond Reddington, to became the character played by James Spader on the show.
This version of events was heavily hinted at in the final two episodes of Season 8, but the show stopped short of giving away it all away just yet. Red’s promise to deliver answers in the form of a letter from Katarina goes unfulfilled when Liz is suddenly killed (an outcome foreshadowed by Megan Boone’s decision to leave the show as a series regular) at the end of the episode.
Whether the contents of the letter will be revealed next season remains to be seen, but at least some fans say they won’t be tuning in to find out.
“For all these years we’ve been waiting to watch the scene when Liz finally knows the truth and now she’s DEAD. DEAD I’m so mad,” one Twitter user wrote. “After 8 years, are you kidding me??” wrote another.
See more reactions to the episode below.