Just a quick recap of my minimal criteria for a good Blacklist episode. I’m a rather forgiving audience, so all I really expect each week is a high-quality villain and maximum Red Reddington screen time. I’ve now added a third variable: minimal relationship time with Tom and Elizabeth. So, let’s get our first spoiler out of the way: “The Cyprus Agency” fulfills NONE of these, and even has the temerity to open with some adorable home-life nonsense with Tom and Elizabeth cooing over their impending adoption of a yet-to-be-born baby. In other words: we know right out of the gate that the events of this episode will derail this bit of domestic bliss, likely in the most spectacular way possible. How does the Cyprus Agency find such perfect children? By keeping tabs on exceptional young women, kidnapping them, keeping them sedated and in captivity (but also delivering chemically perfect prenatal care because…SCIENCE!), and then impregnating them. The babies are then delivered to the unwitting dupes, while any woman who manages to awaken from her chemically-induced coma is given a doctor-prescribed dose of hot lead by a dude with the most comically evil handlebar mustache seen on network television in three decades. He also drives an “unmarked panel van” that he apparently drove straight off the “Abductor’s Emporium” lot. This guy should get stopped at every third traffic light but instead has operated as the Agency’s kidnapper par excellence for years without incident. So confident is he in his ability to skirt the boundaries of law and common sense that he continues with his abductions even when he knows that the FBI is investigating them! To answer your next question, yes, we do get the obligatory abduction-in-a-parking-garage sequence, because when we’ve hit this many cliches in such a short span, why not just go for it? It could only be better if he then tied his victims to railroad tracks while cackling madly. Need more? How about the revelation that Harold Cooper (the still criminally underused Harry Lennix) leaves his FBI ID card (which doubles as an access card for top secret computer records) unattended in an unlocked briefcase that light-fingered, shifty, newly eeeeevil Meera can casually boost, and then replace while his back is turned! Suddenly, Agent Cooper doesn’t look fit to be assistant director of my comic book collection, let alone an elite unit of FBI agents. Perhaps I’ve got “The Cyprus Agency” all wrong. Perhaps it was all meant to be played for laughs. After all, in the first act, we got to see a crooked lawyer so panicked by the prospect of having to answer the FBI’s questions that he wanders into traffic and gets hit by a bus. And I don’t just mean “hit by a bus” in that you hear the screech of brakes and then the guy is toast…I mean “hit by a bus” in a manner that would make Wile E. Coyote proud. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for all news updates related to the world of geek. And Google+, if that’s your thing!
