TV Review: THE BLACKLIST: Season 4, Episode 6: The Thrushes [NBC]

The Blacklist The Thrushes Review

The Blacklist: Season 4, Episode 6: The Thrushes neatly wraps up the show’s current story arc and gives one of its supporting characters a real chance to shine.

In fact, Thursday night’s episode was so solid that the only real thing that anyone can consider a missed opportunity came in the form of throwaway antagonist Rene Le Bron (Patrick Page). Looking like a combination of Arnold Schwarzenegger and F. Murray Abraham and sounding scarier than either of them, Le Bron appears to be set up as the primary villain of the show only for it to be established that he is just wanted by Red (James Spader) and the FBI for his connections to Alexander Kirk (Ulrich Thomsen). Connections that, unfortunately, they are unable to capitalize on because the Russian billionaire has him eliminated, depriving us of a potentially great character.

On the other hand, we had a fantastic plot that brought the woefully-neglected Aram (Amir Arison) to the forefront of the drama. Confronted with incontrovertible evidence that his girlfriend Elise (Annie Heise) is part of a hacking collective called The Thrushes that has used a “rubber ducky” thumb drive to disrupt the task force on Kirk’s behalf, the humiliated IT expert agrees to wear a wire and incriminate her. When she discovers that Aram is on to her and has foiled her plans, he pulls a gun on her and delivers one of the show’s best lines in recent memory: “Quack, quack, b*tch”. Reading it on its own it sounds ridiculous, but Arison manages to fill the line with the perfect mix of hurt and cool and make it wholly believable.

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