Cape May is a mesmerizing, phantasmagoric treasure chest.
 
Please pardon the length of this post. Cape May for me was unique – the most challenging, hypnotic, abstract and turgid episode in 8 seasons of TBL. Its cinematic pacing, puzzles and verbal ambiguities were addictive like a Bergman movie, a Beckett play or a Stoppard text. My views below explore circumstantial evidence of the “Redarina” sex and identity change that was later outlined in Rassvet and finally codified in Nachalo. Hat tip to Eastcoast for the timeline thread for the dates below.
 
In 2016 Red (who previously was Katarina) is tricked into believing that daughter Masha died while birthing baby Agnes. The despondent RR embarks on an NYC opium-den bender, then a revisit to the Cape May NJ diner and beach resort where, twenty-some years prior, Red as Katarina slaughtered her pursuers and attempted to but did not drown herself.
 
KR in 1990 was physically alone at Cape May. RR likewise is physically alone at Cape May in 2016. When we viewers see them both together, it is the 2016 RR (post opium) who is flashing back to and self-examining his prior existence. Thusly RR “rescues” KR from suicide not physically but metaphorically.  Dittos for Red’s metaphoric aid in helping KR, solo in Cape May, kill all of her 1990 attackers.
 
Cape May also separates the pre and post Katarina-Red bodies for several metaphysical self-dialogues. The current RR and his former self KR thusly debate: their prior choices, suicide, killing enemies, protecting Rostova offspring. Parts of these surreal, time-traveling, RR-KR conversations are disconnected, puzzling and cannot be better understood until new info emerges in later BTL seasons (e.g., in Requiem).
 
TBL directors use clever telephone clues to time stamp various ambiguous Cape May scenes and action. The wall phone in the 1990 diner flashback is a relic pay phone activated by a single coin. The hotel desk phone has buttons in 2016 with RR, but suddenly had a rotary dial for the 1990 KR suicide visit flashback. Likewise the cell phone from KR's 1990 enemy/victim was a slide-panel model with the protruding antenna nub.
 
The Red-Katarina Cape May dialogues cover the dilemmas and choices that each character faced twenty years apart. Circa 1990 KR chose to protect and save only one body from the Christmas fire – thereby rescuing daughter Masha and subordinating the fatally wounded (original) Reddington. KR later chose to relocate and rename Masha as Elisabeth and to vanish herself by becoming RR. Circa 2013 this resurrected RR chose suddenly to reverse course and stealthily to re-establish contact with the unsuspecting FBI agent Lizzie, his now grown daughter. RR in 2016 like KR in 1990 chose to reject suicide.
 
RR in 2016 sees a beachcomber find KR's precious abandoned, inscribed gold locket from “Papa. To RR this 1990 suicide-day memento is priceless; he buys it back with a huge wad of hundreds. Finding his old locket suddenly compels RR to “see someone.” We viewers learn only in later episodes that this “someone” is his own hermit father and former KGB mentor Dominic.
 
Piano clues in Cape May foreshadow and illuminate these startling Rostova family connections. We see the 1990 KR at the resort grand piano playing slow, sad, mournful notes. Later in 2016 we see RR alone, reminiscing, and re-playing at the same piano those same distinct music fragments. One broadcast week later in The Artax Network, Red sees that Dominic's piano has a broken key that prevents Dom from playing a minor-key Russian prelude. It is RR’s upbringing (i.e., his former life as KR) that gives him those intimate music details about father Dom.  After his prickly visit RR secretly repairs the broken piano key before returning to DC without saying goodbye to his angry, bitter father. As the Artax episode ends, Rostova patriarch and great grandfather Dom begins another sad, elegiac, minor-key piano melody that continues over a montage of poignant scenes: of his altered daughter RR at his granddaughter Lizzie’s grave site; of 4 FBI Task Force members’ remembrances of Liz; and of Tom swaddling Dom’s newborn great granddaughter Agnes. Masterful scene and music architecture.
 
During my NBC broadcast viewings of these two episodes I was clueless. I had no inkling whatsoever of even a “Redarina” possibility, nor of all the evidence therefor embedded subtly throughout episodes. But after many hours of later reading here the prescient “Redarina” advocacies and counter arguments of Blacklist Refugees (plus my scores of rewind-repeat viewings of many DVD episodes) eventually I axed the “ludicrous” label I had first attached to “Redarina.” In phases I upgraded “Redarina” to a Red herring; then to amusingly feasible but highly unlikely; then to OK– credible; next as OMG likely; and lastly to ... reality. Further post-Nachelo episode re-viewings (laden with scores of new Aha! moments) convinced me that the TBL producers, directors and writers imbedded the Redarina option in the arc of the series beginning with the Season 1 Pilot. Several perceptive, prescient Refugee posters here were on to this evidence very early. Kudos!!! 

Apologies if this post should have been in the Redarina thread of the Theories heading.