Matt Smith reviews episode 6 of The Following season 2…
In last week’s review stopovers were mentioned. This week’s episode features an airplane and a trip to Venezuela. It’s all coming together… just as everything fittingly starts falling apart. This week sees the dissolution of factions good and evil. The above picture is the picture of teamwork, but it’s unfortunately coming apart for everyone. The cult’s pulling itself apart as it seems Agent Weston (Shawn Ashmore) is on to the idea that the FBI has an intelligence leak.
With the House of Killers looking like a mausoleum, it’s fitting this is the week Ryan Hardy makes his discovery of said abode. Both he and Weston, perhaps permanently affected by the events of season one, are becoming what they trained to stop. Killers and liars. Which isn’t an original premise, but it’s done with such balls-out glee it almost doesn’t seem the point.
This and particular episodes before it have at times felt like fulfilment of primal urges found presumably in the audience. The need to ‘punish’ evil, with the more obvious violence and the gloating that goes on over interrogations and phone calls.
That and Hardy’s willingness to murder in cold blood is worrying in the sense that the show doesn’t seem to have much to say on the matter. In the previous series it seemed they at least tried to bring up the topic of interrogation and murder as a point of discussion, while here it seems more like violent wish fulfilment. Although it did bring up the question of why Hardy seems worse because he’s now using the weapon of choice of the cult. What is the difference between Hardy shooting a cult member and stabbing them, in the end?
For more self-awareness, go to the bad guys. Joe Carroll’s façade is broken in front of Emma. He admits he’s not a writer in any decent sense, and admits he fears letting more people down. Though, as the arch-villain of the series, there is the feeling that there’s more than meets the eye whenever Carroll does anything. James Purefoy’s performance once again showing some glee in the slightly less worrying area of playing the dark pantomime villain. With his twitchy smirk, he can say more about his own character than most without uttering a word.
This episode feels and would sound more like the lead up to a season finale. Hardy on Carroll’s heels, the cult considering an escape attempt to South America and the FBI one step away from taking down the wrong main character. The fear is that the series is stretched out when it would naturally finish sooner. Like Hardy’s and Weston’s descent into darkness, the journey doesn’t seem long for the telling (also seemingly bought up by Carroll’s admittance that he hasn’t long for this Earth).
Hopefully the series doesn’t think it needs longer than it actually does. Like the connections that Carroll and Hardy have with the same enemy, it wouldn’t be a good end to the series if the one, but overriding, negative was that things went on for too long.
Matt Smith – follow me on Twitter.
Originally published February 28, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
