As if there weren’t already enough medical shows on TV …
Red’s medical consultant Herbie became the key player on The Blacklist Season 9 Episode 14.
That’s because, once again, the Task Force and Raymond were working on two separate cases.
The unexpected connective tissue between the two missions was Sen. Panabaker, the Task Force’s former protector within the FBI.
It had to kill Cynthia to come to Reddington, hat in hand. Also, you had to wonder why she didn’t take her problem directly to the Task Force. After all, Harold and company owed her big time.
But no. Someone had abducted and tormented her now-comatose daughter-in-law Shiela, and she wanted them found and punished, more so than just brought to justice. And Red was going to understand that dark state of mind better.
While Raymond got from where she was coming, he had his medical mystery with which to deal. So Shiela’s bizarre case ended up back in the Task Force’s lap anyway.
Even unconscious, Shiela ended up the team’s best witness, carving two women’s names into her leg. Those names led them to the Tiny Fighters Foundation, as those two and Shiela had been featured on that group’s website before their abductions.
That certainly didn’t make any sense because who would want to torture selfless women who cared for chronically ill children?
Fortunately, the women behind the abductions, Eva Mason and Nurse Binstock, couldn’t leave Shiela’s bed empty. So they went after Mary Sutton, who had recently been spotlighted on the foundation’s website.
Since Mary’s daughter, Sarah, recently had been hospitalized after a seizure, Eva had to attempt to snatch Mary from the hospital just as Ressler and Dembe arrived. So the abduction of Mary failed.
Even worse, Eva left evidence in the form of a drug injector. That’s where Herbie came in.
Weecha and Raymond had been attempting to reach Herbie to help with a medical mystery of their own (more of that later), but he wasn’t picking up.
However, it turned out to be nothing nefarious. Herbie was just a stressed-out new father whose wife had left their daughter Sue for him to care for alone. And he was clueless on that front.
Grandfather Red got Sue calmed down in no time, offering Herbie some hard-won wisdom. Watching Raymond simultaneously rock and serenade Herbie and Sue was hilarious.
In short order, Herbie had identified the manufacturer of the injector and a suspicious local purchaser, which gave the Task Force all the intel they needed to shut down Eva’s operation.
It also gave them someone to interrogate when Binstock tried to attack Ressler with a scalpel.
Zealot Binstock refused to talk. That was when Panabaker crossed the line to the dark side, deciding to employ Teddy, Reddington’s interrogator, instead, desperate to get results.
That blew open the case, as Teddy revealed that the abducted moms were anything but saintly. Afflicted with Munchausen by proxy, they made and kept their children sick.
Panabaker couldn’t believe this of Shiela until she began thinking back over Shiela’s past behavior.
It was informative to listen to her and Raymond speak philosophically about having to make the hard choices. How could a politician not have crossed over to the dark side before this?
So the Task Force found themselves with two villains, Mason and Sutton, the woman Mason was pursuing. Luckily, Dembe could pinpoint Sutton’s hideout, and the squad arrived just in time to participate in a tense showdown, with both Mason and Sarah waving guns around.
Finally, Panabaker made the tough choice, taking her granddaughter out to eat while the FBI was arresting Shiela.
Maybe this case will make Panabaker more morally flexible regarding future quandaries. It would be helpful for the Task Force to have a friend in high places who can help them further bend the rules.
Reddington’s mission involved the tracker that was found inside Liz’s body. HIs tech guru uncovered that not only was it a GPS tracker, but also it measured drug dosing.
Why you should ask, would anyone care about the drugs Liz was taking? Or was she being dosed without her knowledge? Or was just the GPS part of the device being utilized?
Those are questions for another episode. Red is still working on how the tracker got inside Liz in the first place.
At least Herbie could give him a lead that a Boston hospital used these experimental trackers.
It was terrific how Weecha and Red could scoop up precisely the right doctor at that hospital.
This visit led to seemingly another dead end, as the trackers were never employed thanks to privacy-rights concerns.
The big reveal was that the inventor of that tracker was Andrew Dennison, the grad student that Harold’s blackmailer wants to be “disappeared.”
What is the connection between the tracker in Liz’s body and Harold’s blackmailer? Was the blackmailer somehow involved in Liz’s murder, and he doesn’t want Raymond finding out about that?
Those are a couple of questions that promise to be answered in the season’s final third.
To follow the tracker, watch The Blacklist online.
Did you enjoy seeing Panabacker again?
What is the connection between the blackmailer and Liz’s death?
Will Ressler be able to maintain his sobriety?
Comment below.
Dale McGarrigle is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow him on Twitter.