The Following: Season 1: Episode 14: The End is Near Review

With the first season of The Following drawing to a close, Joe Carroll, played by James Purefoy, is on edge. After being stabbed by Claire Matthews, he retreats to alcohol — and with Ryan Hardy and the FBI closing in, Joe Carroll plays his final aces up his sleeve. Carroll asks some of his followers to commit suicide as a statement of their loyalty to him. When Ryan Hardy finds the boarding house where Carroll resided, Joe Carroll left a message for him — a bookmark for Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Masque of the Red Death, a gothic story about the inevitability of death. Carroll’s white horses come in his followers as they lay seige publicly, killing several in the process, including a news reporter. A young woman, declaring herself “Annabelle Lee” from The Masque of the Red Death, declares that the Red Death is coming. With the message delivered to Carroll’s followers, a public onslaught occurs, and several innocent civilians and police officers are killed or seriously injured in the process. Meanwhile, Joe Carroll, Claire Matthews, Jacob Wells and Emma Hill retreat to an occupied house, and Joe Carroll and Emma Hill vent their differences to Claire Matthews and Jacob Wells respectively in their own ways.

The body count has seriously jumped up in this episode. The Final Chapter comes next, but it won’t be the end of this fine series. It is one of the better episodes as we see Joe Carroll’s charisma strewn in his cult.