Last night’s episode of The Blacklist, entitled “The Vehm,” featured a religious cult who used medieval methods to torture men they believed to be pedophiles. There was also a high-ranking Catholic official as the mastermind behind these murders who did so for his own financial motives. And Raymond Reddington shot and killed a bound and unarmed man because he had attacked Raymond’s friend Elizabeth Keen.
Yet within this violent and disturbing episode was one of the more pro-life messages and dialogues found on network television today.
Elizabeth Keen is a convicted felon; the daughter of a KGB agent; a criminal informant for the same FBI team she once worked with before she went on the run with the FBI’s most wanted man; and in love with the man who was once hired to be her husband in order to spy on her.
And now she finds herself pregnant and forced with the dilemma of bringing a baby into this severely messed-up world she is in.
She ends up writing a pros and cons list concerning keeping the baby where the cons list far outweighs the pros list. It’s not determined by the end of the episode what exactly she will do, although she does appear to be leaning one way. But the refreshing part is that it turns out her decision is not between having the baby or aborting it, but in keeping the baby or putting it up for adoption.
Back in season 1, when Elizabeth was “happily married” to Tom, the man hired to spy on her, they were trying to adopt a child. So she knows firsthand what it’s like for parents to so badly want to adopt a child but find themselves waiting and waiting and waiting. So now with a baby of her own inside her womb, her character remembers that frustration felt of not finding a baby to adopt and wants to be able to bless other parents with the gift of the life inside her.
But I do not only believe it’s Elizabeth’s experience with adoption that has led her character to choose adoption over abortion, but perhaps a message about the sanctity and blessing of all life that, oddly, this show filled with violence seems to be expressing.
In one of the final scenes of the episode, Reddington shares with Liz that his concerns of her adding a baby to her life were not to be interpreted that the life inside of her was anything but a blessing. He then talks about her KGB mom, who he said cursed the life inside of her every single day of her pregnancy with Elizabeth. But from the moment Elizabeth was born, she was nothing but a beautiful gift to her mom.
Hopefully, most of us cannot relate much with the characters of The Blacklist, but certainly anyone who has lifted up a helpless, completely dependent, crying, beautiful baby that God used them to help create can agree with Elizabeth’s KGB mom that this child is only a blessing, just like Psalm 127:3 says: “Children are a blessing and a gift from the Lord.
I for one appreciate how The Blacklist affirmed that last night.
Kevin Harvey is the author of two books, including the 2015 HarperCollins release All You Want to Know about the Bible in Pop Culture, available at Barnes and Noble, Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, and Amazon. You can also find him keeping up with the latest goings-on in pop culture on Twitter: @PopCultureKevin
The Bible in Pop Culture 