Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
Raymond Reddington turns himself in to the FBI and offers Assistant Director Harold Cooper a list of dangerous criminals, but insists that he will speak only with new profiler Elizabeth Keen. The arrangement unsettles the task force, especially Donald Ressler, who had spent years pursuing Red. Each case brings Liz closer to Red’s criminal world while leaving his reason for choosing her unanswered. At home, she also finds passports, cash and a gun hidden beneath the floorboards, evidence that her apparently ordinary husband, Tom, has been living under another identity.
Liz investigates Tom while the task force handles Red’s leads, and the two threads increasingly collide. She learns that Tom’s hidden gun is tied to a Boston murder and that the woman using the name Jolene has entered their lives with her own interest in him. Red pursues a mole inside his organization and then the FBI, killing people he believes betrayed him. His answers about Liz’s past remain partial: he says he chose her because of her father, denies being her father, and insists her father died in a fire.
After Liz shoots Tom during a struggle, his body disappears, leaving his fate uncertain. The season’s closing conflict begins when a prison transport plane carrying Berlin’s people crashes and Berlin’s forces target the task force. A wounded guard’s story helps identify the real Berlin, while Red kills a different man he mistakenly believes is his enemy. Meera Malik is killed and Cooper is left in a coma; Liz and Ressler learn Berlin has escaped. Tom tells Liz that her father is alive, Red denies it, and Red’s burn scars remain unexplained.