'The Following' Recap: Season 1 Finale 'The Final Chapter'

“The Final Chapter” marked the finale for the inaugural season of FOX’s The Following. True to form, The Following made sure to have meaningless plot points and ridiculous teases up until the final second of the show. When coupled with the unnaturally idiotic dialogue and Kevin Bacon’s complete lack of interest in acting, “The Final Chapter” continued the momentum of ever-worsening quality from week to week.

For the first half of the show Ryan and Mike were “frantically” trying to find a recently buried alive Debra. After Mike avoided being sniped from afar, he and Ryan took Alex – one of the followers who buried Debra at the end of last week – and tortured him in order to have him reveal her whereabouts. Best yet, the torture was sanctioned by Ryan’s boss. The writers decided to add a ticking clock element, which was completely superfluous because Ryan and Mike were more nonchalant than intensely worried about finding Debra.

In fact Ryan seemed completely apathetic to the entire situation. Kevin Bacon maintained the same facial expression throughout the episode, if not the entire season, which made the stakes of finding Debra before she died incredibly low. He was calm and uninterested even when Debra was saying her last words on the phone as they were “racing” (without any FBI backup, of course) towards her gravesite. Debra’s last words were about as cliché as you can get, lacking any sort of gravity.

They arrived too late and Debra died, marking the death of another fairly meaningless character, and Ryan decided to kill Alex for taunting about Debra’s death. This could have been a great moment for the show, if it had any gumption whatsoever as it would be the first time that Ryan flew off the handle and killed anyone that wasn’t an immediate danger. Having Ryan kill in cold blood seemed to be Carroll’s entire point, for a couple episodes at least, and to have had Ryan deal with what he had just done would have made the show interesting. Instead Ryan runs off with Carroll’s manuscript, which he buried with Debra, and doesn’t let Mike go with him – leaving him to clean up the bodies, apparently.

To make sure he was not outdone, Carroll was holding Claire and a random hostage in an abandoned house next to a lighthouse. Carroll was all over the place this episode. First Claire was getting under his skin, then he had his first actual moment of insanity by killing the random hostage in front of Claire making sure she gave him full credit for his kills. It was a shame to get this so late in the season as it could have added some depth to Carroll’s character.

Apparently, Carroll’s main motivation for this episode and season was to get the truth from Claire and Ryan about their sordid love triangle. On “this cozy night of truths” (yes, that is an actual bit of Carroll dialogue) Carroll asks both Ryan and Claire when the first time they knew they were in love. Carroll doesn’t get the answer he wants and threatens to kill Claire but gets flustered by Ryan saying the final chapter and ending of his book was all too predictable.

When Ryan bad mouths Edgar Allen Poe Carroll can’t take it anymore, which somehow ends up with Ryan and Carroll exchanging haymakers in a boathouse. A fire breaks out, Carroll ends up in the midst of it, and Carroll’s “screams” that were clearly added after the scene and were not sound mixed properly end up making Ryan feel guilty for a split second before the entire boathouse explodes. And thus Carroll is dead.

Or is he? For some reason the show wants to make the audience think that Carroll has somehow survived. Even after the supposed confirmation Ryan gets that the corpse at the bottom of the ocean’s dental records and preliminary DNA samples match Carroll’s there is still doubt cast over Carroll’s death. If that weren’t stupid enough, Ryan ends up getting stabbed by his ex-girlfriend Molly in his apartment and Claire, upon seeing him laying on the floor, decides to rush headlong towards him allowing Molly to stab her in the back. The episode ends there.

The ending falls right in line with all the other eye-rolling, groan-inducing moments The Following has produced in its first season. It really feels like the writers just try to think of “cool” ideas every week, regardless of how well they fit within the larger story of the show. What is the point of having Molly show up and stab Ryan? Aside from the cliffhanger aspect, which is clearly another cheap trick, what does that mean for the future of the show? What would a second season of The Following even entail? If Ryan were to go off the rails and seek vengeance on those who have wronged him it could be interesting but would also be a deviation from what the show currently is. More than likely it’ll be another season where Ryan slogs through an investigation of a different serial killer.

The Following could be one of the worst new shows debuted in the 2012-2013 season. It was barely worth anyone’s time within its first few weeks and it certainly is completely worthless now. The sophomoric attempt at a smart and clever horror/serial killer show has gladly reached its conclusion for the season and, hopefully, isn’t long for this world.