With Kevin Bacon and James Purefoy as the main characters, The Following (2013) gives us a berdorline alcoholic ex-FBI agent's journey to save the woman he loves from her psychotic ex-husband and his cult of serial killers. The thriller was amazing at first, but then proceded to fall straight into every single clichè it could find for its last two episodes, going as far as giving us the most boring and predictable cliffhanger they could to close the first season. But, because it went strong for 13 episodes before, it gets 3 stars - and here's to hoping that the second season will be just as good as the first 13 episodes of the first one.
Now, after the read more, you'll find a detailed list of everything that was so wrong about the final two episodes. Keep in mind, there will be spoilers for the final episodes of the first season.
Things were going well at first, consistent with the show's background, up until the point Claire escaped. Escaping wasn't the problem, jumping in front of the first car on a deserted road by the woods was. When the people on the car turned out to be Joe's followers, a total of 0 viewers were surprised. That was the first cliché that sent everything downhill. At that moment, I thought that maybe Claire did deserve to get caught.
Then the FBI takes more than half of the episode to realize that Joe's followers were going to attack on the evacuation center. Let's rephrase this, Joe's followers attacked on the all you can kill buffet that the police had set for them - and despite one of the followers quoting The Masque of the Red Death (I mean, how obvious can you get?) - the FBI takes half an episode to realize how bad the idea of putting everyone together on a big room without making any background or ID checks really is. Which is followed by Agent Parker being kidnapped, and then buried alive for absolutely no reason.
It doesn't advance the plot, stalling the story instead. It gives you the feeling that the only reason it is happening is so they have something to show until Ryan Hardy decides to go after Joe Carroll. But then they make it worse, by turning it on a character death - a character death that is explicitly placed there to increase Ryan's manpain - because everything that happened to him up until that point clearly wasn't enough.
This is followed by the good guy killing a guy who's handcuffed and means no threat to him at the moment - and aparently, getting away with it -, and going to face the bad guy all alone on a lighthouse. Because no one ever saw that coming.
Carroll decides is time to kill his wife because she stabbed him twice, but because he waited for Hardy to show up, he lost - one of these days I want a villain who actually kills the hostage instead of just talking about it and waiting for the hero to come up and ruin his plans. That's something I'd watch.
They fight, Ryan teases Joe by talking about Edgar Allan Poe and throwing every single adjetive that could be used to describe the episode at Carroll's book, and Carroll dies, there's a big explosion, the hero gets the girl.
But wait! It's not over yet. On a surprising turn of events that even my blind, dead grandfather saw coming, Ryan's neighbour - who we already knew was a part of the cult - shows up at his apartment, stabs him and Claire, and that's it, that's how the season ends.
