As per usual, this new episode of "The Following" starts off quite nicely, with a bang. It is now evident that every episode will begin with showing the events that led up to the suspensful ending of the previous episode. This one starts off with a man in an Edgar Allen Poe mask setting an unsuspecting man on fire and we quickly learn that the man who has been killed was one of Joe Carroll's harshest critics. We then meet the man who is responsible for the murder and learn through a flashback that his objective with Carroll is to kill all of those who "ruined" his life. His harshest critic, the man who refused him tenure, and of course Ryan Hardy.
The theme of this episode is the act and feeling of being fooled. Throughout the episode many of the characters are fooled and they call themselves out for it. Hardy and Parker feel responsible for two major deaths in the episode and point out that they were fooled by others, including Carroll himself. Also, in the "captors" subplot of the show (which is growing increasingly more interesting, suspensful and more tense than the main plot) we learn that Paul feels fooled by Jacob now that he's back with Emma. This episode makes it clear that Paul and Jacob were doing a little more than "faking it" as a gay couple.
It's revaled that they had sex at least once while living together (I truly applaud this show for showing two gay kisses in this episode) and Emma is close to becoming aware. Whereas last episode focused a lot on her past, this one dives into Paul. He seems to be very troubled by everything that's happening and he feels betrayed by Jacob and is somewhat frieghtend of Emma (who continues to be an extremeley complex and interesting character). He attempts to "re-claim" his straight-ness and his loyatly to the group by kidnapping a young woman from town. I'm intrigued to see where the writers take that plot point next week. The only thing that bothers me about this great subplot is that Carroll's son keeps asking Emma when he can call his Mom. The writers need to figure out how to have him stop asking that becuase it just makes it seem like they put that in there because they think the audience is stupid.
Over in the main plot, we find a bit out about one of Carroll's other followers who kills with fire and we meet his wife who appears to be very scared of him. But in a nice plot twist we find out that she is actually a part of Carroll's group herself and she kills Agent Riley. So there goes the only African American character on the show. That's pretty much all the main plot showed us this week. There was a nice ending once again with a video that Emma emailed Claire of the captors teaching her son to kill things, and saying hi to Ryan, which was a great way to end the episode.
Though this episode was probably the best so far, there are still some writing problems when it comes to the dialouge, but because the opening, closing and subplots were so strong, I really enjoyed the episode as a whole. One thing that I'm dissapointed in is that this episode makes it seem like there are only a few people in Carroll's cult, which I hope is not the truth because if it is, the show is automatically less interesting and has less of a chance at being interesting in the long run.
