T. Earl King VI

Plot

Reddington reveals the next blacklister to be the infamous King family, who, for 200 years, have been under the guise of being investors and businessmen; their real business, however, was running underground auctions where the products sold ranged from stolen paintings to high profile kidnapping victims. When they kidnap Reddington using Madeline Pratt as bait, Elizabeth uses the identity of a proxy from an infamous Russian art collector with an interest in stolen paintings, and infiltrates the auction to retrieve Reddington and shut down the Kings' business. Meanwhile, Tom realizes that he has been missing Elizabeth, and calls her before taking an undercover job in Germany as a neo-Nazi named Christof Mannheim.

Ratings

"T. Earl King VI" premiered on NBC on March 5, 2015 in the 9–10 p.m. time slot. The episode garnered a 1.8/5 Nielsen rating with 8.23 million viewers, making it the third highest-rated show in its time slot behind ABC's Scandal and CBS's The Big Bang Theory. It was also the twenty-seventh highest-rated television show of the week.

Reviews

Ross Bonaime of Paste gave the episode a 7.0/10. He stated: 'T. Earl King VI' is not only a welcome episode where The Blacklist is clearly just having fun, but also integrates past villains in a way so that it doesn’t feel forced and works quite well."

Jodi Walker of Entertainment Weekly gave a positive review of the episode, stating: "Because this show, in between all the creepy, killer families and Russian mystery men, always ends up boiling down to the relationships. That’s why tonight worked so well on both the big and small scale. Even in the little time we spent with the Kings, those were some juicy family dynamics."