The Blacklist Recap: The Cyprus Agency (No. 64)

From the title alone I get the feeling that this episode is very different. Have we ever had an entire agency on the blacklist before?  Will we finally figure out the deal with Tom since Tom and Liz are coincidently in the middle of the adoption process at the same time Red decides to out The Cyprus Agency? I certainly hope we get some answers and fewer questions this episode.

As the show begins it looks like a cast member from The Walking Dead has stumbled on the set. A woman in a hospital gown and draped in a blanket is walking the mean streets of D.C., most likely within a few feet of the secret FBI headquarters, muttering about someone taking her baby. Girl! You in Danger! That’s where all the stew makers and good Samaritan serial killers and bad folks hang out!  Oh wait. She is in NYC where she encounters a jackass of a police officer. Then the bad guy comes for the woman and shoots the cop. Never turn your back on the suspects, officer! Then the bad guy shoots the woman.

Liz and Red are still meeting in churches because Red feels like there are still moles at the FBI office.  When he gives Liz the file on The Cyprus Agency, she is immediately suspicious of Red’s motives. Looks like our girl Liz is getting smarter.  Red says, “Life is full of lovely little ironies.” Then he debriefs Liz on how the agency procures the babies. They steal babies.

So Plan A is not so successful. They wire a couple expecting a baby soon. They ask the lawyer one too many questions. Keen and Ressler approach the lawyer and he jumps out in front of a bus and kills himself. Before he died, he seemed to be saying that they were off base looking for “real parents” because The Cyprus Agency…Oops he got run over by the bus before he could finish. Don’t you hate when that happens?

Red has someone interrogate the CIA field agent, Meera Malik. After he tells Red she is “cleaner than a duck fart”, which to be honest doesn’t really sound clean to me, Red goes in to cut a deal with her. Malik says that she did some things that appear moley, she is not really the mole. Someone gave Garrick the blueprints of the blacksite.  They are going to work together to find out who did.

Okay, its starting to look like the babies weren’t born. Yeah, I know but this is The Blacklist. I had the feeling it was going to be something like baby cloning when the attorney seemed incredulous about them trying to locate the real parents. There are no parents. Ressler and Keen have not figured this out yet, but they are never the first to figure things out, are they? The agents go to collect DNA samples from the adopted kids. Liz talks to Red and says none of the DNA matches missing kids. He mocks her FBI training and says to run the DNA against criminals. Criminals would not go to the police over a missing child. Really? What was zombie mom doing in the show opener?  Red tries to tell Liz not to go through the adoption if she has even one shred of doubt about Tom. She says there isn’t. Well, honey there should be.

Okay, so the baby cloning was a stretch. (Stop laughing at me) The DNA from twelve of the kids matches five women. They are not criminals. They are missing. So technically, Red was wrong too. So there. Apparently, the agency has all the women somewhere and is using them as their personal baby farm.

The women were all very smart college students in their twenties abducted without a trace. While Ressler and Keen are explaining all of this to Cooper, Malik steals Cooper’s FBI ID card.  She copies some files and replaces the ID. She tells Cooper that she feels there may be another mole in the blacksite.

Meanwhile, Aram found a file on the attorney’s computer. It was a dossier on a young female student at Georgetown, the next target. By the way, Georgetown is in DC just a few blocks from the FBI blacksite. Keen and Ressler go to save the girl but the bad guy gets there first and drugs her and throws her in a blue van. The van backs into Ressler and Keen shoots at the van and not the tires. Brilliant work there agents. The van gets away.

The bad guy takes the girl to the man from the agency who was super nice and cooperative with  the FBI. He’s not pleased that the bad guy was still making pick ups. Everything was supposed to be shut down. The nice man kills the bad guy in the van. Guess he wasn’t really that nice after all.

Keen and Ressler are called to the coroner. One of the missing women has turned up dead. It’s the zombie lady from the opening scene. The coroner says that it appears she has not been upright in years. It appears she has been prone in a medically induced coma and being fed through a tube. She has given birth several times. She was receiving prenatal care and prenatal vitamins.

Aram has been checking out Mr. Nice Guy. His name is Mallory. At least it is now. It used to be Michael Lassiter. The agents find his adoptive parents. He was a very troubled child. They were unable to keep him because he was a threat to himself and to his parents. The parents blamed themselves. Their marriage was troubled. They were not ready for adoption. Liz is of course hanging on their every word.

Malik and Red meet in the shadows somewhere. She gives Red the file that identifies the mole. Neither mentions the name. Red tells Malik their business is done.

Red takes Liz to meet “one of the nicest narcotics dealers” in an upscale neighborhood. A party is going on and it looks like a place were there is always a party going on. The drug dealer tells them where to find the drug and the doctor prescribing it. There are only 3 pharmacist that sell the drug in a 1,200 mile radius.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the one they want is right up the road from the blacksite.

Keen and Ressler go all by themselves to the baby farm. No SWAT,  no nothing.  Mallory is there meeting with the fertility doctor.  The receptionist tries to send them away but they insist on touring the facility. The receptionist pulls a gun. Keen and Ressler practice their Charlie’s Angels gun poses throughout the mostly empty clinic. Meanwhile, the doctor runs like hell to get a gun. Ressler actually kills the fertility doctor. Is that his first kill? He actually had good aim! Meanwhile, Liz is jogging around in stilettos, gun still drawn looking for…..? Something. Or Someone. Where the hell is Red. Is he seriously going to let her run around literally half-cocked by herself? Apparently so, Liz finds the baby farm by herself. The big sign that says Authorized Personnel Do Not Enter probably helped her. There were ten or more beds of women in various stages of pregnancy. This takes bed rest to a whole nuther level. Twenty-two women were on the farm. Mallory fathered all of the children.

Liz tells Tom she can’t adopt a baby with him.

Red goes to Diane Fowler’s house. She is the United States Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division.  She is also the mole that gave Garrick the information about the blacksite so that he could kill Red. Red is very displeased with Diane. Diane starts to threaten Red. He shoots her in the gut. He tells her she talks too much. She is aghast. She say, “You can’t shoot me!”  Red says, “Why not? You’re not one of the good guys and you are as of tonight completely worthless to the bad guys.”  Diane tells Red she knows the truth about “what happened that night” to his family. She asks him if he wants to know the truth.  He says more than anything in the world. Red says if she knows the truth then  someone else does too.  Then he shoots her three more times. Dead.

Liz is home alone crying and Tom is out with that substitute teacher woman with the fetish for taking pictures of married men having sex with her. What’s her real story? Red calls “Mr Kaplan” to clean up the mess he made of Dianne. He apologies for things being messier than he intended.

And we are officially on hiatus until after the Olympics, February 24th.