"Honey, you can't tell me that there's not one shred of
doubt, one shred that wonders..."
And with that, Elizabeth Keane scuttles the potential adoption of a baby with her husband.
Far be it from me to claim expertise on the female psyche, but the logic of this baffles me. If I operated with the mindset that a shred of doubt should decide big decisions, I'd be curled up in the fetal position on my bed. I can't remember the last decision that I made that didn’t have at least some doubt.
Doubt arises from uncertainty, from an inability to know. Whether it is a failure to know all the facts before a decision needs to be made or questions about the ramifications of a decision, doubt constantly plagues the human condition. If you deny that doubt exists about most decisions, you are either lying or willfully naive.
But Agent Keane seems smart and familiar with situations that have great amounts of uncertainty. Doubt should be something that she's used to dealing with and mitigating. It shouldn’t paralyze her. If a single doubt affects her so much with this, wouldn’t it wreak havoc with her job, where a split second decision could determine the fate of dozens, if not hundreds, of people?
I think the real reason Agent Keane decides not to have a baby is that the show's writers are steering a ship but don't know their port of call. It seems to me that the recent plot line that has Reddington eliminating moles is more about writing off characters rather than having a plot destination in mind.
The concept for this show has always been good, and generally James Spader (not David Spade, whose names are surprisingly easy to conflate) has been brilliant enough to spackle over the cracks in the writing. Those cracks exhibit themselves in things like Keane's doubt and a lack of character development for anyone other than Keane. Even Reddington, despite Spader's brilliance, seems static under the writer's ham-fisted script. Whether the writer can improve those deficiencies is the only doubt I have about this show.