The Following: episode 15 "The Final Chapter"

***SPOILERS***

Last night's finale found me having my heart in my throat for the last ten minutes. I'm not exaggerating when I say it was heart-stopping.

We start off seeing that Joe has taken Claire to a secluded island with a nearby lighthouse. Joe and Claire still aren't getting along, that's safe to say.

Agent Hardy and Weston, along with the rest of the FBI try and find where agent Parker was taken as they watch a security video showing her being put in a trunk. Hardy sees a little boy approaching the station wearing an Edgar Allen Poe mask. The little guy tells Hardy and the FBI that some girl paid him $20 to wear the mask. Inside of it is written a number in marker.

They call the number to find that it belongs to the cell phone left with agent Parker in her coffin.

The FBI tracks down the car agent Parker was taken in and see that the tire is slashed, realizing that the car was meant to be found. Not a second later they undergo severe gunfire. Hardy is able to sneak away without being seen by the sniper and disarm him. Hardy and Weston take the sniper into a run down shack and demand that he tells them where Parker is or they'll torture him. Not believing them, the follower gets smug to which causes him to get beat down and having Hardy damn near poke his eyes out. He talks and tells them where Parker is buried.

On the way to the burial site, Parker tells Weston and Hardy how proud she is of them and how glad she is she got to work with them. She's breathing faintly and sounds tired. Hardy and Weston arrive on the scene a mere moments later and dig her up, only to find that she didn't make it. After a moment of their mourning, the sniper starts mocking them and Hardy goes over to him and shoots him dead like a dog, a lot like what Brad Pitt did in "Se7en" to Kevin Spacey.

In Parker's coffin, Hardy finds Joe's book and skims through it to find that it's all been planned. Everything. Their arrival to Parker's burial being too late to save her and the shootout that happened earlier. But Joe got some things wrong, in his book Weston got killed at the shootout earlier. Thus leaving them hope to change the story. As Hardy reads on, he discovers where Claire is and what he has to do.

He holds agent Weston at gunpoint and insists that he not be followed.

Meanwhile, Joe and Claire have a heated discussion and Joe kills a man he's taken hostage right in front of her. Showing her who he is and making her face it.

When Ryan arrives, he's greeted by Emma who makes him take his gun and phone out. He is then blindsided by another follower and drugged. 

Ryan wakes up to Claire tied in a chair and Joe holding a knife. This is where Joe and Ryan finally have it out with words. Ryan provoking him to change his ending from killing Claire to killing him. He starts really getting under Joe's skin before he makes a quick attack and chases Joe off. Once untied, Ryan chases Joe into the boat house and they fight their final fight as a fire breaks out from Ryan's gun shooting some gas cans. Joe struggles but is finally defeated by Ryan as he's thrown into the fire that becomes a huge explosion.

Ryan talks the FBI agents into letting him take Claire back to his house and so he does. There, they're about to have a nice romantic dinner. The takeout guy is very suspicious and Ryan doesn't see it because he's in ecstasy over his victory. He hears a bang, as if someone opened and closed his door. So he goes to check and sees nothing, so he locks it. Only to be greeted in the kitchen by his neighbor Molly, who after stabbing him in the stomach, tells him about her being a follower and how her chapter is killing Ryan.

Claire inters the room and is stabbed in the back by Molly and Ryan screams leaving us with a cliffhanger.

I knew the finale was going to pack some punch and it didn't let me down. It was a solid finale to a solid first season. I'm sad agent Parker is gone, but I'm glad they killed her off to stop being so predictable with her near death encounters. 

If I have one issue with the finale it's that I think Weston should have had a bigger part to play. He's been through hell and still there fighting the good fight and I feel like he earned having some spotlight. I get that Joe and Ryan's story was more important, but I think they could have squeezed him in more.

Oh, and Emma didn't die. I'm mad about that...

I can only imagine what's going to happen next season as it looks like Joe's followers will still be going strong and keeping his legacy alive. If anything, his death may be the cause of more followers and you've got to think that they're going to be very angry at Ryan and Claire.

THIS EPISODE GETS 3 1/2 REAPER SKULLS OUT OF 5

THIS SEASON GETS 4 REAPER SKULLS OUT OF 5

The Following: episode 14 "The End is Near"

***SPOILERS***

"The Following" packed another heavy punch with last nights episode. Joe Carroll's "rewrite" is in effect and so things got crazy. 

Ryan Hardy and the rest of the FBI have narrowed down where Joe and his followers are staying. After arriving and kicking the doors in, they find only one single male follower who has hung himself in the middle of the house. Thus making a statement that Joe is still in control.

Meanwhile, Joe takes Claire with him to a suburban house, Emma and Jacob as well. When they arrive at the house they realize it's inhabited and Joe quickly takes action in tying the couple up. All the while, Joe's being extremely over generous as he always is. Meanwhile, Jacob is starting to show his doubts with Joe's plan.

A news team is doing a report on Joe's cult and interviews a nice young woman, who babbles on and on about "The Masque of the Red Death". It becomes obvious that she's a cult member and she stabs the news reporter and kills her. She's then taken into custody by Ryan and agent Weston and interrogated. Ryan gets rough with her and she tells him the reason Claire has to die is so he can be reborn.

Back at the house, Joe is serving dinner and being polite to his hostages and Claire. Claire offers to help him open a bottle of wine for dinner and Joe unwillingly trusts her. But when two police officers arrive at the house as part of a sweep, Emma shoots them dead. When Joe gets up from the table to see what's going on, Claire nails him in the back of the head with the wine bottle and frees the couple and they all run off into the woods together.

Ryan, Parker and Weston figure out that the rest of the followers are at the shelter, mixed in with hundreds of normal people. And since the FBI doesn't know what all of the followers look like, it makes their task of hunting down the followers nearly impossible. Once they arrive at the shelter, they break into groups to search out any cult member by looking for odd behavior. Ryan gets a track on one of them but is at a loss when the electric goes out. In the darkness, we see people with knives and axes and other deadly objects coming up behind people and butchering them. 

Luckily, Ryan and the other agents take most of them down. There are a handful of casualties, but they did all they could. A mass slaughter was staged to take attention off of Joe's leaving.

However, Parker gets taken by two followers who outnumbered her in the dark.

Back at the house, Claire and the couple are running through the woods when a car drives up and they flag it down for help. Only to find that Jacob and Emma are the ones inside. Claire gets captured and taken back to Joe while the couple gets away. 

When Jacob and Emma give Claire over, Joe takes her on a boat and locks her in a room before taking off to sea. Jacob and Emma are to meet him at their planned destination, but yet Jacob yet again, shows weakness and doesn't want to follow Joe anymore. He tells Emma that he loves Joe and appreciates what's been done for him, but he doesn't want to die for Joe. He asks Emma to join him in running and after sharing a kiss, Emma confesses that she loves Jacob and Joe and she cuts Jacob's throat.

Then, we go to Agent Parker and her kidnappers as they carry her down some stairs into the woods and bury her alive. She screams as the dirt falls over her coffin she's nailed in and the screen goes black.

Next weeks finale is going to be insane! I love this show so much, it's my favorite new show this year. I know with a show like this, it's going to pack a nasty knockout punch for finale episode this season. I was extremely mad at Emma killing Jacob because I was really hoping that Emma would get hers. And after what she did to Jacob and Paul, she deserved to die. I really thought that Jacob would kill her, but unfortunately he got soft and didn't stay strong.

And if there's one thing that I have to complain about it's Agent Parker's being captured. No one comes that close to dying that often. If she were a real FBI agent she would have been retired long ago. I think that if they're going to keep putting her in these situations they should kill her. If not, then stop putting her at near death almost every episode. Either that or someone higher up should realize she's not able to be in the field by herself and reduce her to desk work.

Nonetheless, another great episode of this awesome show.