Sunday, March 15, 2015

What I’m Watching: The Following


The Following: Season 3, Episode 2 “Boxed In” (F)

I need to make sure that, at the very least, my reviews of this show are decently entertaining since this show is a true horror in every sense of the word. Killing off Agent Clarke is an easy way for this show to demonstrate how deadly and threatening its new villains are without actually harming any of the four central law enforcement characters it now features, and while he died brutally, we didn’t have to see it, and his wife wasn’t needlessly suffocated while he wasn’t even there. I didn’t recognize Joy Osmanski, who I remember from her days on “The Loop” nearly a decade ago, as his wife, who got to appear just to be flirted with in the supermarket and then nearly asphyxiated just for sport. What gets me every time is just how incompetent the FBI and the police are on this show, to the point that local law enforcement had vehicles prepped for them to conduct searches within minutes of being notified of their landing but couldn’t have bothered to start the searching themselves to actually save Clarke. The unpredictable insanity of the bad guys continues to clash deeply with their ability to stay off the grid due to their supposed superinteligence, and the fact that Mark is being used as a pawn without any knowledge that he’s being played makes little to no sense. This season is unfurling its purpose very slowly, and we didn’t even get to see Joe when Ryan went to a maximum-security facility for a heart-to-heart, with Dr. Arthur Strauss instead. I’m still not convinced that Gwen is an innocuous non-threat, but arranging for her to be the doctor who saw Clarke when he had a heart attack seems like a stretch, even for this show’s omniscient villains.

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