Cape May

"Cape May"

Season 3, Episode 19

Episode Information

Air date

April 21, 2016

Directed by

Michael Watkins

Written by

Daniel Knauf

Episode Chronology

Previous	Next
“Mr. Solomon: Conclusion”	“The Artax Network”

“Cape May” is the nineteenth episode of Season 3 of The Blacklist and the sixty-third episode overall.

Synopsis[]

Raymond Reddington in a dark room, he has Nik (the doctor that operated on Liz) and appears to be holding him hostage. Nik explains in detail that he did everything that he could to keep Liz alive as long as he did, it was out of his hands. Nik tells gun wielding Red that he doesn’t want to die, Red scoffs that everyone dies some day.

A few days later a woman wakes Red up in what appears to be the basement of an opium den, Red is disoriented and out of it. She kicks him out and tells him that it is Friday and he has been there too long. Red stumbles out in to the street and is almost hit by a car that he notices being a private taxi. After swiftly managing to slip inside the car, Red eventually persuades the driver to take him to Cape May, New Jersey.

On the 200 mile ride, Red has a lot of time to think. He has flashbacks of Liz’s death, and Agnes. When they arrive in Cape May, Red takes out stacks of 100 dollar banknotes and buys the cab from the driver for several thousand dollars. Then he heads to a local Cape May diner. While he is sitting there, he notices a woman hiding from a man outside, although there is a slight chance that it could all be in his imagination.

Afterwards, Red heads down to the beach to sit by the ocean, and he sees the same woman again. The mysterious woman wanders in to the ocean and Red chases after to save her, once he hits the water and begins swimming out he finds her and drags her back to land. Red drags the woman in to an abandoned beach house nearby. He rummages through the house looking for a blanket to cover the woman up with. In the waiting room there is a woman dressed in a 1960’s style dress.

Red ignores the random woman in the house with them and rushes back to help the drowning victim he just saved from the ocean. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to tell what is a figment of Red’s imagination and what is not. He lays down with the shivering woman and she whispers, “It’s not that he died. Or the way that he died. It’s the things that I said to him just before he died.”

Red falls asleep in front of the fireplace with the woman he “saved”. He wakes up a few hours later and it is dark outside, the woman is gone, and the house appears empty. Red can hear footsteps upstairs, he finds the woman in a room staring out the window. She tells Red that there is a man outside, he has come to kill her. Red tells her to stay away from the window, he heads outside to investigate, with a hatchet.

Red returns a few minutes later with a tattered old umbrella, he tells her that was what she saw outside in the storm and that there isn’t anyone out there. Red’s new friend is relieved, she heads to the kitchen to make them some dinner. While they eat rice and canned mushrooms for dinner, Red asks the woman questions about herself, but she is elusive and won’t tell him anything about herself.

Instead, she asks Red what has brought him here. He stares off in to space and says that it “was a Hobson's Choice. There was a woman and her child, both doomed, he could only save 1 of them. And, he chose the child.” Red goes on to say that he thought if he nourished and taught the child, she would be safe and happy, but all he brought her was misery and eventually death.

While Red and the mystery woman are talking in riddles to each other over dinner, there is a knock at the door. It is a police officer, he is named Duncan. He explains that the neighbors saw lights and thought that they were trespassing. Red gives Officer Duncan a fake ID and says that he is friends with the owners and they lent them the house.

After the officer leaves, Red keeps his new friend company while she takes a bath, they hear a window being smashed downstairs and Red springs to action. It’s the man that was chasing her in the diner at the beginning of the episode, before she tried to drown herself. Red grabs a club and searches the house for the intruder. Red and the woman catch the intruder, she kills him by bashing his head off the bathroom sink. After he is dead she announces that he is “Not the first and not the last“, and implies that more men will be coming to try and kill her.

After the house is safe again, Red and the woman head downstairs to sit by the fire. Red gets emotional talking about Agnes. He says that Tom Keen wouldn’t let him near the baby, or even let him hold her, and told him that he would never see Liz’s baby. Red couldn’t do anything to Tom, because Liz is dead and Tom is all that Agnes has left.

The woman’s cell phone rings, she answers it and snaps it in half, she tells Red that he has to leave, the others are coming for them any moment. He loads the body of the man they killed into the car, but the woman tells Red that she is not going with him. She is staying at the house and waiting for the men to come to kill her. Red tells her that suicide is selfish, she sobs that she has a child and she is being raised by someone else. And as long as she is alive, her child’s life is in danger. Sounds an awful lot like Red’s relationship with Liz.

Red refuses to leave and they begin preparing for battle and finding anything they can use for weapons in the house. A car arrives outside, Red says “but I don’t know your name”. The woman scoffs, “Don’t be ridiculous Raymond”. Apparently, she knows his name.

Outside at least a dozen men have the house surrounded with guns. Inside, Red and his new friend have booby trapped the house so whenever any of the guys go into the kitchen, they are electrocuted. Red waits at the top of the stairs, and systematically takes out any guy that walks up stairs by strangling him with a rope. Meanwhile, the woman that is working with Red has set up a bomb in the other room with a propane tank, which takes out another one of the attackers.

Red and his partner manage to kill every single one of the guys attacking them on the Cape May beach. Red tells her to get the car, they have to clear out ASAP. Red heads to the garage to check on her, but he is confused because the dead body they put in the car last night is gone. He rushes back inside the house and looks around, everything is in pristine condition and all of the dead bodies are gone.

The woman that he was helping is gone too. It looks like it was all in his head after all. Red looks out the window and sees her wandering in to the ocean again, he rushes out there to save her (again), but the woman is gone.

Red spots a beach comber on the beach, he tells Red that the only person he has seen on the beach in over 2 weeks was him. The man is using a metal detector to dig up things in the sand. He pulls up a buried necklace, covered in sand. Red gives him a large folded stack of 100 dollar banknotes for it, and then runs down to the water and washes off the necklace. There is an inscription which reads, “To Katarina Love Papa”. The woman appears again, she tells Red, “You had no choice, it was me or Masha.”

The beach bum interrupts Red’s vision to make sure he is okay. Red excuses himself and says there is someone that he needs to see, he rushes off the beach.

Press Release[]

A mysterious beauty on the run from unknown assailants accidentally crosses paths with Reddington and enlists his help to fight back against her attackers.

Number on The Blacklist[]

None, N/A

Unanswered Questions[]

Raymond Reddington
1. Red’s dream and/or hallucination indicates that he is losing contact with reality. Is this a sign of further emotional and/or mental stability problems?
  1. A: Most likely, yes. In later episodes he behaves irrationally and almost with disregard for his own safety.
2. How is Red an actuary?
  1. A: Red replies that he is an actuary, “in a way” because he is constantly making decisions which hinge on the risk, damage, and cost analyses of the situation.
3. Why did Red leave his handgun at the opium den?
  1. A: He was quite high and either aware that he should not be handling a gun or simply too out of it to care and/or notice that he was leaving it.
  2. A: As a tip for overstaying.
4. What are Red’s outstanding debts?
  1. A: Cost of the running his crime syndicate.
5. Why had Red not repaid his debts earlier?
  1. A: It was not seen as urgent.
6. Why did Red tell Marvin Gerard to pay all his debts?
  1. A: He did not want to deal with any business, having no debts means nobody seeks repayment. It is also possible, though highly unlikely, that he was planning on dying in Cape May.
7. Why did Red buy the taxi cab?
  1. A: He required the vehicle.
8. Why did Red take a large amount of money with him on the trip?
  1. A: Red went “off the grid”, so he brought enough cash to satisfy all/any of his needs for an extended period of time.
9. How much money did Red spend? I am referring to the banknotes we saw such as the taxi cab and the beach find.
  1. A: Unknown, at least 100,000 dollars was required for the taxi cab.
10. Why did Red take so long to find the “correct” fake identity card?
  1. A: He needed the correct state.
11. What did Red do to Nik Korpal?
  1. A: It is revealed in “Greyson Blaise” that Reddington almost killed him.
12. In the piano conversation, who is the woman Red is talking about? Elizabeth Keen or Katarina Rostova?
  1. A: It was intentionally unclear, as it was applicable to both. The episode was focused on Red's confusion, so it is possible Red didn't know which one he was talking about. The scene was written to apply to both women.
  2. A: In the first part of the speech, he is talking about Katarina: “There was a woman I loved. She was my life. My heart. And she died”. The rest is talking about a little girl she, the first woman on the speech, Katarina, left behind, and this little girl is/was Liz, and/or Agnes to make it totally unclear.
Katarina Rostova
1. Are the assassins in the “Cape May“ flashbacks from the Osterman Umbrella Company?
  1. A: They were more likely KGB. Katarina fled the KGB and Cabal.
2. Is Rostova dead? The series has been offering contradictory clues.
  1. A: The dream/hallucination could just be how Red was interpreting things in his confusion. Sort of like the Katarina Red knew died that day, and a new Katarina was born. There is still the letter and photo from Anton which indicated Katarina was alive after her drowning.
  2. A: The dream/hallucination served as a pseudo-flashback to just before Katarina fled into the water and came back.
  3. A: The dream/hallucination seems to represent Katarina Rostova's death.
  4. A: It's confirmed by Constantin Rostov that Katarina is alive. Her whereabouts are unknown for the moment.
  5. A: It's confirmed that Katarina is alive in “Robert Diaz”.
3. What happened to Rostova? Red’s dream and/or hallucination imply that he was present at her death.
  1. A: Red did not see Rostova die. When she first walked into the water, he pulled her out. At the end of the episode, he saw from the hotel her heading back out, but before he could get out there she either disappeared or he came out of his hallucination. All along when he's said she died walking into the sea.
Dream and/or hallucination
1. When did the actual events take place? The payphone and the rotary dial imply the 1980’s.
  1. A: It occurred around 1991 according to “Rassvet”.
2. Why was the water left running during the attack?
  1. A: It was used to electrocute any of the attackers.
3. How much was real? The police officer seemed a real world event.
  1. A: Everything was a real event, but the opium resulted in Red blurring the past and present together.
  2. Q: What events happened in the past and what events happened in the present?
    1. A: Red going into the water, breaking into the resort, making dinner, talking to the police officer, and feigning an attack were real. The woman and the attackers were not real, but he did do those actions as if they were there.
4. Why did Red not consider calling for help? He would have kept his mobile phone with him. Rostova could have mentioned the option.
  1. A: Since he was reliving memories, if he didn't call for help the first time he wasn't going to do it this time.
5. Why did the dream Rostova state that Officer Duncan “knew”?
  1. A: She is manifested by Red's mind and likely a subconscious feeling.
6. How long was Red at the hotel? It seemed to be 2 days.
  1. A: The beach scavenger said that Red had been there for 2 weeks.
  2. A: The man said that Red was the only living person he saw within the last 2 weeks. He never stated when he saw Red the first time.
Hotel
1. Why did nobody find the necklace/jewelry before Red arrived? It had been buried for several years and there would have been multiple people searching the beach with metal detectors.
  1. A: At the end of the episode, the man with the metal detector said that Red was the only other person he had seen for 2 weeks, implying that it was not a popular beach.
  2. Q: There is a motel/hotel/resort there.
  3. A: Metallic objects buried for years or even decades at beaches are still being dug up.
2. Does Red own the hotel or was it abandoned?
  1. A: The hotel was abandoned. Red broke in, but told the local police that he had been friends with the owners, who had let him have the place for the week.
3. Why did the neighbors call the police about the lights in the hotel?
  1. A: The neighbors most likely knew that the owner was gone, and they didn't know who was in the hotel.
4. Why did the hotel have faulty electricity?
  1. A: The hotel was rundown since 1 of the owners died.
5. Why was there a lack of people at Cape May?
  1. A: It was the “off season”. Similar to “The Shining”, it was not tourist season. That would explain why Red went there.

Slanders on the FBI[]

Trivia[]

This is the first episode where Megan Boone, Diego Klattenhoff, and Harry Lennix are absent.
Right before attack on hotel you can see flag upside down, the symbol of distress.
The name Katarina is of Greek origins and derived from Hekaterine and Hekate, the goddess of magic. Among the meanings are ”pure”, ”each of the two”, ”far away”, and ”one hundred”.
The name Katarina, etched in Russian handwriting on the back of the necklace, is clearly not spelled in its formal version but in a rather more intimate and endearing one.