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.