The Blacklist: Everything We Know About Raymond Reddington's Real Identity

With its excellent premise of a supervillain-level criminal joining forces with the FBI, "The Blacklist" ran rings around much of its crime drama competition when it comes to sheer creativity. The show always seemed to have a massive plot twist or a fun gimmick like the season 7 live action/animation hybrid episode up its sleeve. Even though your mileage may vary on whether "The Blacklist" could sustain its speed after Liz Keen's (Megan Boone) death in season 8 robbed it of the crucia tension between her and Raymond "Red" Reddington (James Spader), the show ultimately ran on Spader fuel, enabling it to keep at least some of its momentum for the remaining two seasons.

In fact, if fans have a bone to pick with "The Blacklist," it's that the show was too mysterious toward the end. After a decade of dropping hint after hint of Red's real name (and undoing several of them as new clues emerged), the series ended without a conclusive confirmation on the slippery mastermind's true identity. But is there any way to dig into the available information and surmise the truth behind the character? Let's take a look at the evidence board. 

The most important thing about Raymond Reddington's identity is this: he's almost certainly not who people think he is. This is the only thing about his background that the show has been relatively upfront about, even though it ultimately neglected to give any concrete proof of his true identity. The question of Red's identity isn't really even a question at first, but the show fully establishes that something fishy is going on in "The Blacklist" season 5 episode 22, titled "Sutton Ross."

In the season 5 finale, viewers discover that the literal bag of bones that Red has been protecting actually contains the corporeal remains of ... the real Raymond Reddington. A pivotal moment on the show, this revelation wrecked everything the viewers thought they knew about James Spader's character. Sometimes, these types of shock revelations are last-minute concoctions to inject some tension in a show that was getting a bit long in the tooth. But as the show's creator and executive producer Jon Bokenkamp told Entertainment Weekly at the time, Red's impostor nature was part of a long game that the makers (and Spader, who was the only cast member who knew about it) had been playing all along: 

"Yeah, this is something that we've talked about from the inception of the show. It is part of the underlying mythology that we've slowly been unraveling. I think there are a number of episodes that we can go back and sort of map and chart how we got here. Hopefully that is proof of concept to the audience that this is not something we're just winging, and that we're on a very specific path, and this is a well-earned reveal."

One particular theory about Red Reddington's true identity has piqued the fandom's interest more than the others. According to it, Red was never Liz Keen's (Megan Boone) father, as has been implied — but actually her mother, Katarina Rostova (Lotte Verbeek). Katarina is introduced in the show's flashback scenes as a double agent figure who became acquainted with the real Raymond Reddington (Colin Bates) as part of a mission to get close to him, and the two eventually had a daughter before things got bad and Rostova died. However, it eventually turns out that Rostova is still very much alive and has a bone to pick with Red. However however, this version of Rostova is actually a different agent called Tatiana Petrova (Laila Robins), who's been posing as Red's former flame under orders from Dominic Wilkinson (Brian Dennehy).  

Instead of returning the Rostova status quo, the show's Petrova revelation ends up adding a third "however" in the mix. While Red's true identity is never fully resolved in the show, "The Blacklist" fans have settled on the theory that the Red Reddington we see on the show's contemporary timeline is actually Rostova, who assumed the identity after the original Red's death and uses it to handle compicated criminal-slash-spy empire business while watching over Liz. The fandom is rife with both proponents and decriers of this particular theory, and it remains a popular topic of discussion as viewers pick apart the various clues and apparent confirmations that can potentially be used to support the "Redarina" theory. 

The reddest Red Reddington herring in the history of "The Blacklist" is undoubtedly Ilya Koslov. If you stopped watching the series at a certain point, you might very well have left with full confidence that the James Spader version of Red has been Koslov all along. "The Blacklist" season 6 episode 19, "Rassvet," reveals that Koslov (Gabriel Mann) and Katarina Rostova used to be very close, and seems to confirm that they hatched a plot where Koslov assumed the Red Reddington identity in order to protect Katarina and Masha (aka Liz Keen).

The show treats the Koslov reveal as effectively canon until season 7 episode 10, titled "Katarina Rostova," unexpectedly reveals the real Koslov (Brett Cullen) has been around in the show's contemporary timeline all along. This is a true pull-the-rug twist that fundamentally changes the game, both for the viewer and for Liz. Here's how Jon Bokenkamp described this whopper of a mid-season finale twist to The Wrap:  

"That reveal that Ilya Koslov is lying in Katarina's apartment was a big part of Liz's turn against Red. She's been led to believe by [Brian Dennehy's Dominic Wilkinson], and sort of by Red, that Red is Ilya Koslov. And Red never corrected her on that.

As mentioned earlier, "The Blacklist" switches gears after Megan Boone leaves the show at the end of season 8, and ultimately opts to leave the Red question up in the air. Because of this, there's always the possibility that James Spader was actually playing real Red all along, and all the Rostova and Koslov clues were just a part of the character's well-established tendency to hatch massively complicated plots to control just about everything around him. 

This, admittedly, seems fairly far-fetched since we know that young Liz shot the original Reddington dead. Then again, it wouldn't be the first time Red has been seemingly fatally shot, only to survive and continue hatching his plots — just rewatch "The Blacklist" season 2 episode 18, "Vanessa Cruz," for another example of this. Seemingly getting shot by Liz, the person he attempts to influence throughout the show's first eight seasons, is also exactly the kind of death that chessmaster extraordinaire Red might fake for his own reasons.  

Of course, this is only a wild theory ... but then again, so are all the other clues about Red's identity. While I personally am more partial to the Katarina Rostova theory, the idea that a character could just flat-out assume the original Red's identity seems extremely complicated when you compare it to the possibility that the real Red just added another layer to his mystery by surviving Liz's gunfire — either by accident or by design. With all the theories of Red Reddington's true identity out there, who knows? Perhaps the real twist was always that there's no twist.

The most likely reason "The Blacklist" chose to keep Red's identity behind wraps is that the plot arc that would have benefitted from the revelation ended prematurely. When Megan Boone left the show, the need to solve the mystery effectively died with Liz Keen. As such, a purist might feel that the true series climax is "The Blacklist" season 8 episode 21, titled "Nachalo." This episode reveals the original Red's death, the Katarina/Tatjana fraud, Liz's original identity as Red and Katarina's daughter Masha Rostova, some new Ilya Rostov lore, and very nearly the current Red's true identity, only for Liz to get shot before she hears the truth. The next episode, season finale "Konets," is more of a goodbye episode for Liz and her dynamic with Red. 

The show continued without Boone until season 10, but with Liz dead, there was no worthy character left for Red to lock identity horns with, and thus no real incentive to solve the mystery in a conclusive fashion. In an interview with Associated Press, star James Spader (who had a lot of creative input on his character) more or less confirmed this by saying that the show ended the exact way its makers chose:  

"I was very, very glad we were able to end it exactly the way we wanted to end it. It was deliberate and we weren't taken by surprise in terms of when the ending was going to come. You'll see that the ending has conviction and we commit to it. [...] "I really felt like this was complete and I loved how it really completed a circle, in a way. It wasn't just an unbroken line from point A to point Z, but it was a circle of sorts."