BWW Recap: Butterflies are Free with 'Lady Ambrosia' on THE BLACKLIST

A trail of bloody footprints in a supermarket leads to the candy aisle, where a young and uncommunicative child in orange face paint is cramming his face with goodies. Meanwhile, Liz is trying to turn down a trust account from Red for her child, because she's peevish, petty, and resentful, like a particularly irksome and whiny adolescent, which pretty much sums up her usual behavior to someone who's done nothing but save her neck repeatedly. Red decides to tell her the story of Lady Ambrosia, who took unloved children and promised immortality. Turns out Liz knows the story, but she still gets that there's some woman who takes kids.

Liz also likes a family from Annapolis that not only wants her child but isn't scared of her or of an open adoption. Then she briefs the team on three children including the above, named Ethan, who were all presumed dead but were found alive a few years later. All were special-needs, all found with odd face paint. She and Ressler try to talk to Ethan in the hospital, but he's autistic and doesn't speak. However, he loves Liz's ballpoint pen and keeps it. In this scene Liz uses her lately only alleged credentials as a psychologist to work with Ethan. It's amazing someone finally remembered she has a usable skill. Maybe someday she'll have the brains to re-profile Red.

A hippie earth mother leads a parade of happy, singing, face-painted commune kids to a well. A man bears a pallet with a grass-and-flower-wrapped something, which he slides into the well as butterflies emerge and the children sing for joy. The man's name is Theodore, he seems to be mentally challenged, and she knows "what you've done." A shot down the well shows skeletons.

Back at the ranch, Aram reveals how deeply special-needs Ethan is, and that his parents consulted four adoption agencies in the two weeks before he supposedly died. Cooper doesn't believe any legitimate agencies were consulted and demands investigation.

Remember Glen at the DMV? Red waits forty-five horrifying minutes to see him while the lady sitting next to him insists he's the hot guy from her exercise class and attempts to pick him up. Red came for Glen to find the current name and address for a former KGB agent, but Glen wants to rush because he has a nooner with his friend Trudy at a no-tell motel. Red offers him two soft, warm blondes who will adore him if Glen drops his session with Trudy to do Red's job. Meanwhile, Ethan's mother calls an agency and speaks to Noah, to whom she complains that Ethan has returned.

Let's just get most of Not-Tom's under five minutes of plot spread out through the whole episode done right here: Not-Tom calls Liz from Gina's car to tell her that she should keep the baby and she no longer needs Red. Gina and Tom blow up a car together as she tells him that they need each other and he should go to Switzerland with her. Then in a turn, she has him (and everyone else from the jewelry heist last week) shoved in the back of a van and shot with a machine gun. As a henchman prepares to torch the van, Not-Tom emerges from under some other bodies and shoots Henchman. He breaks into a home where he digs a bullet out of his leg and collapses in front of a child who walks into the bathroom where he's just done that.

Speaking of henchmen, Liz tries to cook for Ethan and winds up torching her kitchen. The sound of the smoke detector freaks Ethan out. Boz, Red's kindly next-door henchman, runs in and ends the emergency. Liz does not like this. Liz is an idiot. Who else has a helpful, hunky henchman in the next apartment? Maybe he does dishes, idiot-woman. Or lifts furniture for vacuuming. But no, you're too good for having that in your life, free of charge. Red and Liz fight about Boz, her not wanting his dirty money for her child - did we mention she's a damn fool - and that Red thinks she should keep her child, while she thinks her life is too dangerous. Red shuts her up with "But what is your life without one?"

Aram and Liz find there are ninety-three families who tried to put special-needs children up for adoption, of whom sixteen had children die shortly thereafter, in situations where one parent wanted the child adopted and the other wanted to keep the child. Of those, three children have been found alive. Lady A is the repository of special-needs kids whose parents can't agree on what to do with them, and Noah is her go-between.

Glen reveals that the former KGB agent Red wants lives in Gaithersburg. Red presents him with his two ladies - a pair of adorable, fluffy, soft, warm Pomeranians. At first Glen is upset that it's not two human hotties, but then he realizes he can now score with girls at the dog park.

Lady A and Noah argue about her care of the kids at the commune. Noah's also logged into the foster care system and has found that Ethan is with Liz. Aram and Ressler warn Liz, but Noah gets there first. Ethan hides, and Boz emerges from next door and takes down Noah. Liz, shut up about the handy henchman next door. You clearly need one. Ethan's still got that pen. Good thing it's a cheap ballpoint and not a Mont Blanc.

Red walks into a session with a signing teacher and a hearing impaired child and admires the language. The teacher is our former KGB agent. Red wants her Glasnost files, but she won't turn them over unless, as she says, he can return her dead daughter. Oh, snap, Lady A must have her, huh?

A social worker wants to take Ethan. Liz questions Red why Boz and he took Noah, and Red explains he also has a missing child to find. She asks Red why her mother gave her up. Red explains that Katerina Rostova knew the Soviet Union was falling apart and sent Masha - Liz - to America for safety and then decided she needed to keep the family together, so came over with her father. Red is sad that Katerina's husband was the only man she ever loved. Ah, Red, so, as we suspected, you had a thing for Katerina. More than ever, we bet you were Katerina's American spy handler. Katerina left her clothing in a pile on the beach at Cape May and disappeared, presumably drowned. (But there's no body, one gathers, and this show follows X-FILES rules; perhaps Katerina is alive?) Red also regrets passing Liz to Sam and not raising her himself. Take that, ungrateful kid.

Ethan's been drawing butterflies. The same ones on the children's face paint. The only known carnivorous species. The team wants Noah but Red is using his torturer, Mr. Brimley, to get Lady A's address from her husband so he can rescue Anya. We do not want to know why Brimley needed a llama. We don't. Noah explains that Lady A is processing Anya's "rebirth" into the well and among the butterflies. "She sets them free so they can stay children forever" and not wind up rejected outcasts like their son Theodore.

Red interrupts Lady A processing Anya. "I heard it's her birthday. I'm her fairy godmother. We came to celebrate." He announces that there's only one ugly person there, and it's not Theodore. While he and Dembe rescue Anya, a newly empowered-thanks-to-Red-talk Theodore takes mama to the well and throws her in. Butterflies emerge from the well as Samar and Ressler take the other kids home.

Ethan is returned to his father and Ressler is so happy he actually smiles for once. Liz tries to call Not-Tom, unaware he's being rushed into emergency surgery. Red returns Anya to her mother. Cooper wonders why Red cared about the case.

A grateful mama former Soviet agent hands Red the Rostova file. He looks at it and groans. "It keeps getting worse." Mystery! Liz reads Glinda the Good's parting words to Dorothy before Dorothy heads to see the wizard.

Will Tom survive surgery? Will Liz ever understand that Red is not the source of her problems, but that her life is? Is Katerina Rostova really dead? And what's in that file that just makes things worse, and this show even more renewable? (It was renewed for a fourth season in December, by the way.) Comment below or tweet @MarakayBWW to let us know.

Photo credit: NBC/Universal

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