The Longevity Initiative

"The Longevity Initiative" is the seventeenth episode of the second season of the American crime drama The Blacklist. The episode premiered in the United States on NBC on March 26, 2015.

Plot

After a state trooper is shot and killed when he stops a truck revealed to have several experimented-on human corpses in it, Reddington reveals the next blacklister to be Roger Hobbs. Hobbs is a billionaire tech mogul whose fascination with immortality led him to develop and fund a research team for just that purpose. Leading the research is Dr. Julian Powell, a scientist who has been injecting the cells of an extremely unique jellyfish species into humans in order to hopefully force their cells to regenerate. While Liz and Reddington go after Powell, The Major decides Tom's love for Liz has clouded his judgment and made him a liability, and he plans to have Tom executed. Before this comes to fruition, however, the Germans that Tom had been trying to infiltrate now intervene and capture them both for interrogation. As both are being tortured, Tom says they will never talk. One of the Germans then pulls a photo of Liz out of Tom's wallet and threatens to harm her instead. But when Tom says Liz is FBI, the leader of the German group decides that attracting the attention of the FBI would be a greater risk than letting Tom go. Having nowhere to go, Tom heads to Liz's home.

Reception

Ratings

"The Longevity Initiative" premiered on NBC on March 26, 2015 in the 9–10 p.m. time slot.^[1] The episode garnered a 1.6/5 Nielsen rating with 8.12 million viewers, making it the second highest-rated show in its time slot behind ABC's Scandal, which collected 8.06 million viewers on a 2.3/7 Nielsen rating.^[2] It was also the twenty-fifth highest-rated television show of the week.^[3]

Reviews

Ross Bonaime of Paste gave the episode a 6.0/10, stating: "'While I do maintain that The Blacklist should take hints from other, better shows, it ends up not making sense thematically in 'The Longevity Initiative.' In fact, this episode becomes one of the least action-focused episodes of the season, and while it’s not exactly bad, it’s also not that enthralling either."^[4]

Jodi Walker of Entertainment Weekly gave a mixed review of the episode, writing: "Let’s call his episode what it was: glue (not filler). It arranged some important pieces on the Blacklist chessboard so that at some point in the near future, Red can come in and light those pieces on fire with a blow torch and then probably 'blood angel' them, or whatever."^[5]

References