Do we have something equivalent now? Sounds like a tempest in a teapot. I've rooted both my fones, and thought having a Blacklist Crime Phone would be fun.
Any minor characters you wish you'd seen more of?
Mine is Russell Quinn. OK, maybe a teenage drug dealer might be stretching it, but he seemed to know his stuff, not only in terms of being a user/dealer, but also knew a good deal of chemistry as well. Sounds like a useful expert to have around.
And you could imagine him in his twenties. Like many nerds, he likes what he knows: so his ideal mansion looks like his parents' house? Plausible, I'd say. And he'd have a great hidden lab....
Yes, he talks a good game. He's debatably good at keeping the secret about who he is and his family situation. But that's probably not all he's keeping on the down low...no matter what he says...I'm not talking about Spader here, but Reddington is a very good actor...
The "only analogue" thing.
If he was trained at Annapolis, he knows celestial reckoning, and could probably know his way around at least one 8-bit computer and possibly early Macs as well. Ever since the early Eighties, they have been used as navigational instruments, and even the paltry ZX-80 could be used as an ENIGMA-grade emulator. Macs have been able to do PGP since...well, when PGP was devised, the early Nineties. Mighty useful for a spy! Note: that may not translate to being able to deal with social websites, memes, and this "Sneaker" character who hangs with the Tates....what's up with that?
Math in general.
Speaking of Annapolis, he graduated with honors, but maybe is Russian -- He knows the calculus. Along with chess, ballet and circus skills, one of the best things the Soviets were good for was math. It's cultural -- while in America, Barbies say "math is hard", and people debate whether chemistry and Algebra II are even worth teaching at all on the general level, Soviet Russian schools fostered the attitude that math was simply something that educated people were assumed to know. It was cheap to teach, and required no special equipment or materials (unlike chemistry or, say, art). If you were forced inside on a crisp -40° day, you could always pull out a pencil and paper and a book and calculate the slope of a curve. Besides, it was ideologically safe!
He's probably not so afraid of needles as he lets on.
He did a field blood transfusion on Ressler, and so had to do venipuncture on both of them. Also, there's the drug angle: he likes opiates, and jazz. Not so far from sharing a little bump with a fellow whose stylings on the alto sax he's fond of...subcutaneously, you can't tell...
Opium dens, despite talking about them and the place he was sleeping at the beginning of Cape May, have been past tense in America since the late Fifties, and aside from the few that have been reconstructed by antique collectors here and there, are now only found in the backwoods of Laos, where a small group struggle on with jury-rigged and overused pipes and lamps. (As someone said, it was as if wine culture had been strictly forbidden, and a few cellars in France struggled on with mended stemware, peddling badly-vinted plonk made from noble grapes.) What prohibition couldn't do, the heroin trade devastated, and of course, now, junkies use Oxycontin and other semi-synthetics. It's sad. Just sad all around.
About pop culture...
He was born in 1960. If he wanted to "Americanize" in his early 20's, especially in NYC, it would have been either punk or disco. Punks, especially New York punks, tended to be literate, and loved other arts than music. Brian Eno, William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, all of these were what punks loved. (Heck, look at Patti Smith. Scholarly papers have been written about Madonna's politics. Patti Smith has written some, not only about her own, but 17th century Japanese drama.) Network TV and most current movies in the 80's were trying to appeal to the mainstream. Bo-ring!
And sex...
He bills himself as a horndog. Horndogs love stimulants, generally because it makes you hard and even more horny. It's terrible for the dénoument, however, but most users don't think of that. (Some just keep on thinking that it's not the drug, but something else, and keep trying to find the right partner, the right act, the right set of circumstances...) He doesn't like coke, or anything in that ballpark, he prefers sex...?
However, he hardly ever is shown actually flirting, or dating, or having anything to do with women, other than in an anecdote, and the few we see are all kind of weird, which makes you wonder what he actually does. My guess is that a) he's got very specific tastes, which he sates with the help of an extremely discreet bordello, possibly in some exotic locale, and/or b) Dembe.
Sweet Dembe. Yes, I know Red despises human trafficking, and rescued the lad from just such a situation. It's also true that the country that Red rescued him from would probably have killed his friend for doing what he did as a sex slave on his own. Yes, Dembe has a daughter and even a granddaughter, but that never stopped anyone, as Charmides, my ex-hustler friend often points out. Nothing that wouldn't keep him from laying his head in Red's lap...now and then...sweet, sweet Dembe....
You get turned on to The Blacklist reruns and the first thing you do when you find out James Spader's character ("The Concierge of Crime") always has the best of everything is to start wondering "What kind of tea does he drink? He can't have Cuban cigars and XO cognac ALL the time..." He does have many connections in the tea-drinking parts of the world...
I'm thinking a good vintage Pu-erh...from a "forbidden tree". Goes well with the specially letterset and bound Cathay, "lost" from the Pound collection in the Beineke at Yale...Or perhaps he's seasonal? A white, to go with blossoms in Spring? A strong Russian, served outdoors from an antique samovar in gold-trimmed glasses with the Russian Mafia? A fine Morroccan Etzai, served with pharmacological sweets on the street where William Burroughs lived?
What's your tea fantasy?