The inestimably wonderful Frank Whaley plays a serial killer whose deal -- we figure out almost as quickly as Red deduces (somehow) -- is that he likes to take domestic abusers and Dexter them to a table, and then inflict all of their victim's wounds on them at once, in front of his mother, who has become like this Munch painting in a giant wig, from all the fucked up stuff he has made her watch him do over the years. Then he calls 911 and lets them sort it out, but it seems like mostly the people die.

So Liz and Ressler are able to track this guy down basically by repeating to themselves and each other "It's like he is doing to abusers the things they do to other people!" over and over and eventually they get to his house and he tries to kill the mom, but Liz shoots him. Later on she feels like maybe he was a hero, but the whole reason she's over-involved -- which makes Red overinvolved, of course, which gets Cooper overinvolved -- is because this was an unsolved case from her days before the Blacklist.

What else they are both very involved in is, the fallout from Anslo Garrick's little visit to the Black Site: How there is a mole, and Jane Alexander and Alan Alda are both very upset, and so on. So Red goes on an insane murder spree throughout the episode (grieving for his minority minions all the while) that gets more and more ornate and hilariously brutal as it goes on. The little gay fella that was so brave in the siege, Aram, gets set up as the mole but then Red forces him to do fast hacking at gunpoint to prove his innocence so that he can get to the last person, who is... Some Gollum-looking dude I have never seen before that knows Jane Alexander and whom gets suffocated to Junip's lovely "Line Of Fire" in the saddest, most beautiful part of the episode.

So that was Red's day, just beating the shit out of people and then killing them, or scaring the shit out of people and then killing them, or occasionally having beautiful sad moments and killing them. If you care about Liz at all, know that her hair is gigantic this week, because it is full of secrets. Or because it is a wig. Either way, the secrets are all Tom's:

Tom goes to "Nebraska" to do job interviews, which pisses Liz off because she doesn't want to move to Nebraska, but at episode's end, when it's Red that walks in her door instead, she is like a thousand times more relieved to see him, no matter how much she tries to play it off. I agree that Tom job-hunting in a place she suddenly really doesn't want to be is kind of a dick move, but I also feel that he was not in Nebraska, because he is evil and was somewhere evil doing evil things, so I mean, sometimes you have to pick your battles.

Did you like that? I did. I love Frank Whaley and I liked the insane parallels of like, "What would you do?" about these various levels of morality: Is it okay that Frank is showing people what their behavior means, or not? If not, is that because they usually die, or because it is super fucked up of him to do this and therefore tainted by his own craziness? (That's the one I personally think. Call the cops, don't tie up your mom and make her watch you deflate people's lungs and detach their retinae!)

And then over on the Red side, you're like, "Well, those fifty people I just watched him torture to death were kinda asking for it. Except wait, no, they didn't even know who he was or what he was doing, they were just playing parts in a complicated scheme. I thought for a second it was okay, but then I realized it was because it was Red doing it, and Red is great." You know? Anyway. Sympathy for the Devil is what this show's all about, but I really liked the questions the Good Samaritan posed, in this particular case of the week.

Next Week: An actual person from the Blacklist, on this show that is called that. Tom comes home from Nebraska full of cool things to say about Nebraska. Liz is kind of surprised that not everybody is secretly pleased to have Red back fucking with all of their heads. Jane Alexander and Alan Alda, perhaps this will be the week I figure out who their characters are and what their roles are on this show, because that is the one thing that eludes me so far.