A villain named Guillermo Rizal

It’s only one of the many intriguing surprises served up by The Blacklist, the longest TV series I’ve gone through, at seven seasons and a total of 152 episodes. At 45 minutes per episode, that’s a running time of 114 hours, taking me well over a month of nightly devotion to binge-watch the series.

Brief recess only subbed it with the mini-series Ratched and the film Enola Holmes, as well as important match-ups for the French Open tennis tournament.

Oh, it did get tiresome occasionally. I nearly gave up mid-Season 2 after a couple of bland episodes. But then it picked up on the action and captivating twists again, so I continued admiring James Spader as the worldly master manipulator Raymond “Red” Reddington. Billed as the “concierge of crime,” the most wanted men in the world manages to get into a deal with the FBI: his temporary immunity as long as he keeps informing them of dastardly plans that the agency can stop, and bring villains to court. Thus the blacklist.

But only as long as he works with a lady agent whom we suspect to be his daughter, or the girl he saved when she was four and entrusted to a foster father. She’s unaware of their relationship, at least initially. Even when her memory fog lifts, she still can’t accept him since he’s a cold-blooded criminal who utilizes or uncovers countless spymasters, assassins, terrorists, crime bosses, cartels, and the Cabal.

The cosmopolitan Red is all-knowing and often talks too much, in the midst of suspense and harrowing action scenes. But his gift of gab covers references to Hippocrates, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, et al. He quotes from Kurosawa: “In a mad world, only the mad are sane.” And Picasso: “It takes four years to learn to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” And Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, more lies, and statistics.”

At one point he simply intones: “Do I dare to eat a peach?” (T.S. Eliot) But he gets me completely hooked when he recites lines from my favorite poet, Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man”: “For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

This was in relation to a rare Walking Liberty half-dollar minted in 1945, with Stevens’ wife Elsie as the model. Hmm, now I’m glad to know that.

Reddington is so well-versed in just about everything, from vintage wines and exotic cuisine (fenugreek porridge of Sudan) to Merino suits and vicuña coats, the existence of Colombia’s Lake Guatavita that spawned the myth of El Dorado, or that “Nasim” means breeze in Farsi. He notes that the Holy Vehm was a 13th century proto-vigilante tribunal system in Westphalia, and that the harvester butterfly is the only carnivorous butterfly in North America. In a couple of scenes, they fly off in swarms from a deep well where murdered victims have been dropped.

So the script is quite intelligent, the downside being the fondness for gore inclusive of evisceration, featuring killers who cut up human parts in various ways. And scenes that require operating rooms outfitted by cryogenics experts seeking to use the DNA of the immortal jellyfish, which can’t die except of predation. There’s also horseshoe crab plasma that is sensitive to toxins from bacteria.

So the episodes are mostly science-based, built around a crime procedural. Several times in the early seasons, shot in 2013 or so, prescient scares are raised over the spread of viral toxins, outbreaks, contagion and pandemics. Red correctly identifies one precedent as the pulmonary plague, the 14th-century Black Death that started out as bubonic plague.

Stock action scenes become too cliché: FBI raids that lead to shootouts, vehicle detonations, car chases and crashes, grave-digging, torture victims hung up on hooks. Ambushes keep knocking out the leading lady Liz Keen, played by Megan Boone, when she’s not actually shot or having her ribs broken. You wonder why she can’t ever take a leave as a clumsy field agent.

But there’s always Reddington to help save her, and other interesting characters among the good guys to push aside the ghoulish, despicable acts of the bad guys.

Red’s own quips remain cynically charming: “The future is a sucker’s bet.” “Fairness is overrated.” “It’s the kind of day you need to kill to get your mojo back.” “It’s not a lie, just delayed honesty.” “Early is on time. On time is late. And late is unacceptable.” “There are no accidents around me. Unless they’re done on purpose.” “Sins should be buried, like the dead.” “Fear is a liar. It activates the enemy.” “Men plan. God laughs.”

And dialogue other than his can also be crisp: “That guy vanishes faster than a fart in a fan factory.”

An episode had a villain whose last name was Le Bron, who gets quickly dispatched. At wind-up, the sound track played One by Harry Nilsson. “One is the loneliest number...” The Chosen One?

Episode 20 of Season 6 features the villain named Guillermo Rizal, a genius of a gene mapper who abducts children and rewrites their DNA. He says that a pygmy tribe developed in the Indonesian island of Flores due to human depredations on our very own planet. He wants to reverse the process, and considers his experiments as a way of creating homo salves, the savior of mankind.

He isn’t specifically identified as Indonesian, and although “Rizal” could have been adapted as a surname by our neighbors, “Guillermo” would be a stretch.

Other references to our country include Red’s recollection of helping out the MILF on a munitions drop-off by ship that goes awry because of a typhoon. The Yamashita Gold is mentioned in passing, as are lost US Federal Reserve notes found in Manila. An important lady character is named Samar.

More numerous references are applied to corrupt Malaysian officials, Bali experiences, Taiwanese connections, while some scenes are set in Hong Kong. But his knowledge of arcana teems with trivia curiosa that involve the Japanese — from tsukemen ramen to the A5 olive wagyu from Shodoshima Island (at $40-50K a cow for its umami-flavored shinbone), plus the takotsubo broken heart syndrome and the 400-year-old jorogumo whore spider.

Red is a walking encyclopedia whose taste in art and music is well-defined. Paintings like Van Gogh’s “Poppy Fields” and the Hellenistic sculpture of the “Winged Victory of Samothrace” at the Louvre come up, among others. During a downturn as a caught fugitive undergoing trial, where he chooses to defend himself against treason charges, he argues before the judge that he can’t accept any juror who likes Schumann.

But he admits that he should pay more attention to pop culture, confessing that he doesn’t know the name of “that bear” in Star Wars, or what so-called Jedi mind tricks are. When a 15-year-old Japanese IT whiz says, “May the Force be with you,” Red responds: ”I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

It’s the learning experience via Reddington’s character — and all the trivia dug up by the scriptwriters to feed him — that kept me going till the Season 7 finale. And what a weird but delightful one it was.

With production suddenly cut short by the COVID-19 shutdown, Episode 152 became the finale. A hybrid formula was the creative solution. Live action scenes that were already filmed were interspersed with graphic novel-style animation, with cast members doing the voicing from their homes.

Meanwhile, a Season 8 that won’t be the final one restarted production, and will start streaming this month. So, it still won’t be the end of my fascination with a character whose world revolves around family secrets, trust and betrayal, and ironically enough, the finer things in life.