Matt Smith reviews episode 9 of The Following season 2…
This week’s episode of The Following is a tough one to review. I’m not sure if I like it, with its constant twist and turns, surprises round the corner and shock-grabs. The question of whether it’s perhaps becoming a pleasure, while not being categorically ‘good’ is popping up in my head. The question that, even if it’s not necessarily high quality television with it’s constant stream of plot twists and soap opera-esque turns, it might still be enjoyable at the least.
Stuff certainly happens, you have to give it that. At no point can you ever accuse The Following of having a plot that doesn’t move, even if it’s not always forward or if the quality dips. Even with the misplaced romcom moment between Max and Mike, in which the former walks in on the latter while he’s naked, The Following proves it can go anywhere for a bit of sudden surprise.
Joe Carroll pushes further to put himself at the top of the new cult this week, manipulating Micah to do his bidding. There’s a strange sort of enjoyment in watching Carroll. Despite the fact he didn’t exactly orchestrate the cult’s change, so much as it was a coincidence that Micah wanted him around to help, the show does its best to convince us that Carroll is the best among the archetype of infamy-seeking killers.
It’s probably down to the way Carroll, both within James Purefoy’s performance and the character itself, never takes things too seriously. With Kevin Bacon and, particularly in recent episodes, Shawn Ashmore doing the heavy lifting when it comes to the sombre and brooding, it leaves a place for Purefoy to engage in more amusing turns. Beats such as the funny moment when Carroll tries to teach Micah his lines for a homemade video they’re planning on sending to the media, where Micah reveals he’s more into improv than his director would like.
With all the shocks the show has in store, perhaps it was inevitable that some of the episode gave away a bit too much in terms of what was coming next. With the promise of more to come, perhaps it was inevitable that Lance would just get shot and become one of the many inconsequential killers that have become nothing more than a gaggle of TV trope-psychopaths. The show made an excellent commentary on itself when it killed off an interesting character while falsely toasting immortality.
But this episode does show that, even with everything staring you in the face, even the people in charge of our safety can be blinded to the truth. And that’s the theme The Following has been playing on from the very first episode. That no one is beyond turning to the other side at a given moment, and that those sides aren’t good and evil. They’re Ryan Hardy and Joe Carroll.
So, from the reveal of Micah being not so much a huge part of the series as much as he was a mini-saga and a tool to bring Joe Carroll back to infamous power and the revelation at the end that defies belief and everything else within the human brain, the series has bought things back to where they were in season one. While the first series was, in this critic’s opinion, better than what has followed, I’m still unsure as to whether this is a further return to quality, or just another way the show has made itself uninteresting.
Matt Smith – follow me on Twitter.
Originally published March 19, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
