#this time i intend to rise again like those inflatable bounce-back clowns

[roominthecastle]

I’ve never thought about this before bc I always just looped the assumed death of Red’s family with the Cabal (which I obvs still believe) but what if Katarina had something to do with it too (whether intentionally or unintentionally)? That would be fitting I think

Something is def up w/ their relationship, anon. Red telling Liz “your mother can’t hurt you” alone would have given me a weird vibe (do you keep her locked in an attic, Rochester?), and he’s not exactly defending her, imo, but more like making sure Liz has a bit more nuanced image of her than just “cruel monster”, so she feels safe enough to bring Agnes home. When Liz asked him in S3 “Was my mother a terrible person?”, Red didn’t jump at the opportunity to dispel that notion. He later told her that Katarina was exceptionally smart and resourceful but you can also say that about serial killers, it still doesn’t make them a welcome presence in your life. And in the most recent ep, he still doesn’t go beyond “she wasn’t as bad as…” and, as I mentioned, there is an underlying motivation here to convince Liz to take Agnes back. We have too many holes and question marks still.

But whenever Liz has doubts about herself, Red always assures her she is a good person despite the bad things she’s been pushed to do, so the fact that he doesn’t do this when he talks about Katarina suggests that she wasn’t quite in this league of “good person doing bad things out of necessity”. She loved real Reddington yet completely destroyed him bc that was her job. She was indirectly responsible for the death of 134 sailors. She maimed the corporal who blackmailed her and murdered his boyfriend by blowing up their home. All these are facts and not some distorted ghost story. And it was at the time when Red was feeling sure Liz had betrayed him that he told her she reminded him of Katarina. But there is also Dom’s story where we see her at a different phase in her life where the consequences are catching up w/ her at last, and it’s not a soulless monster I see here. Or maybe it’s bc Dom is telling the story and we see her through his bias – I don’t know. Like I said, there’s still too many question marks around this.

I still don’t think any of this makes her someone who would be willing to kill a mother and her child (even if she wasn’t aware of their connection to Red), but, at this point, we  alsocannot rule out some other indirect action on her part that could have led to Red’s family tragedy. We’ll see. Still, right now, my hunch is that it was Red who took strategic advantage of her utter desperation to further his ongoing anti-Cabalagenda, and I don’t think he was 100% forthcoming about his motivations just like he is still not telling Liz what it is exactly that he’s been doing w/ his list despite his claims of protection/help and the fact that he’s directly involving her in this battle neither can walk away from.

There’s also an emotional dissonance in how the Red-Kat relationship has been presented to us so far. The anger Dom feels towards Red regarding Katarina’s mysterious fate doesn’t match how he frames his involvement in “Rassvet”. Red’s guilt and Dembe’s claim that Liz will never be ready to hear what he did to her mother don’t match the image of a selfless protector who simply miscalculated their odds against a global shadow government, either. “what you did to Katarina” implies calculation and intent, placing Red in the shoes of a perpetrator and not in a state of shared victimhood (I think what happened to Samar – and the whole “the company can corrupt even the best among us” – will have thematic relevance here but I’m still not sure what exactly: was Red in Aram’s situation? but in that case why wouldn’t Liz understand? or was he in Levi’s and what he did to Levi was a manifestation of guilt and self-hatred? or was he in Samar’s place once??).

It’s possible that neither Dom nor Katarina knew what had happened to Red’s family and therefore they didn’t know that he’d been on a revenge mission already when she reached out to him for help in 1991, and he cooked up this identity theft bc it gave him the best tools to further his agenda + save Katarina at the same time. It probably felt like a win-win (and we know how much he loves trading in win-win situations) but then something happened that necessitated that impossible choice where he chose Liz (and now I really hope we get to see a repeat of this in the present where he once again has to choose and it’s Liz again).

I believe Red’s family tragedy is the original (but still hidden) inciting event and Red’s already told this story in various ways:

≻“A farmer comes home one day to find that everything that gives meaning to his life is gone. Everything that he loved, taken from him. […] A life’s work erupts from his knotted mind. Years go by. His suffering becomes complicated.”

≻“I understand how you feel. Beneath the iron-and-rust exterior beats the heart of a man swimming in immeasurable grief. […] Let me tell you something that someone much wiser than I told me at a similar point in my life. Go home. Turn back from this and go home. It may seem like the hardest thing in the world, but it is profoundly easier than what you’re contemplating.”

≻“I walked through the door. And there was just blood. All I saw was blood. All there was was blood.”

≻“I once had a relatively normal life. Bills to pay, play dates, family, some friends, people to care about. Lost all that.”

This original loss is what put him on the path he’s still on. His mission is to find out what happened and punish those responsible. Taking on Reddington’s identity, building a criminal empire, compiling the blacklist and crossing off each name – these are all in service of his “life’s work” that erupted in the wake of that original loss.

And this life was not lived with Katarina, she was “just” someone who got caught up in his mission when she went to Red for help and he realized the opportunity this (her connection to real Reddington, his $40 million frame fund, and his significant leverage against the Cabal) presented (or for an advanced level of paranoia: Red could have had a hand in that mess that resulted in the Christmas fire, too). And he never strayed from this path… not until he met Liz. She was the one who reminded him of who he once was and when he thought he lost her, he was ready to give it all up, which brings the Djinn’s words to mind about how it isn’t death/vengeance that really drives Liz or feeds her soul but a “lost world, another life”.

I suspect this is ultimately true of Red, too, and that’s why he had such an intense reaction to Liz describing her fantasy. It’s not just hers, it’s theirs. And it would explain why they wrote in the pregnancy in the first place: Agnes was the missing piece that (hopefully) will allow Liz and Red’s story to come to full circle – from a shared loss of a family to a shared dream of a new home.