The following text has MAJOR spoilers so do not read if you missed some episodes or plan to watch The Following in the near future.
Ugh. This show... I don't even know how to begin describing it. It started some 15 months ago and had an awesome pilot episode! The story of an imprisoned serial killer who escapes his captors and plans reunion with his wife and son who don't really like him any more (to put it mildly), as well as revenge against an FBI agent who arrested him and virtually an entire world who does not understand him. We learn about his amazing network of killers, a cult of disturbed wackos who found their own sick meaning of life. We also found out that the show will not be soft in any way - victims were not spared nor saved at the last second, but brutally murdered without any remorse. Mind you, I am not a fan of brutality, but I do appreciate realism in such situations and there's a serious lack of it in 99% of movies and TV shows.
That lasted for about two, maybe three episodes and went downhill right after that. It got incredibly stretched and unconvincing, the characters became annoying, all the cliches were back in the game, then it got even more stretched... all the way into the season finale where the good guy defeats a bad guy and all is well. Or not, since the good guy and the love of his life got stabbed multiple times in his apartment, leaving The Following with a major cliffhanger. Season 2 was inevitable.
We are already 12 episodes into season 2 and the exact same scenario happened again! First two or three episodes were great again and I hoped they really got it this time. I was wrong - the rest of the season 2 (so far) went through the same scenario as it did last year - stretched, unconvincing, annoying and predictable. This year Mr. Wacko-serial-killer (who did not die at the end of the last season, as expected) is leading a crazed religious cult and is even more annoying than before, and our FBI good guy is a whole lot darker than he was - and that's the best thing about The Following, in my honest opinion. He shoots to kill and is absolutely focused on just one thing, with no regard to human life when it comes to bad guys. There's a third side as well, made of yet another seriously disturbed group of people who are obsessed with Mr. Killer - at first in a positive way towards him... until he dumps them and makes yet another powerful enemy. Quite a mixture.
Overall, this show had so much potential and I have to say that Kevin Bacon is doing a really good job as FBI agent Ryan Hardy. But it should have been compressed to no more than 6 episodes a year. And with a lot less capturing and escaping and recapturing and more escaping and...
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