Finale Interruptus: Cold Cases - Case File #012: The Following

Every television series begins with a promise…

Most do.

Some don’t.

Some endings are still missing.

These are their case files.

Joe Carroll’s Second Novel

Joe Carroll is back in custody before the first episode of The Following is over. He has escaped from death row, murdered Sarah Fuller, the woman who survived his first killing spree, and brought the man who caught him out of retirement. In the interrogation room, Carroll tells Ryan Hardy that he’s writing another book. Ryan is its protagonist. By the time the FBI has Carroll behind bars again, people on the outside are already carrying out his plans. One of them is the woman Claire Matthews trusts to look after her son.

Kevin Williamson gave Carroll an occupation that went some way toward explaining his power over people. Before prison, he was a literature professor and a failed novelist. He had taken his obsession with Edgar Allan Poe into his murders, but the second book gave him something he could never get from writing the first. He could give someone a part to play and convince them that their life meant more inside his story. The title had room for all of them. The Following was the audience Carroll had always wanted, and its members could do things for him that an admiring reader never could.

James Purefoy played Carroll with enough warmth to make you understand why anyone would stay in the room with him. There’s a flashback in which Joe invites Ryan in for a drink, and Kevin Bacon lets you see how pleased Ryan is to be asked. That moment complicates the scenes they share after the escape. Ryan has spent years living with what Carroll did to him, right down to the pacemaker he needs after Joe stabbed him in the heart. He also remembers what it was like to enjoy the man’s company. Carroll remembers it, too, and by the season finale he’s still trying to get Ryan to admit how much that first encounter meant to him.

Claire is the person who gives that history consequences beyond the two men. She was married to Joe, she has a son with him, and she and Ryan fell in love after Joe went to prison. When Joey disappears, the investigation turns on how thoroughly Carroll’s followers have insinuated themselves into Claire’s life. Joey’s nanny, Emma, takes him to a farmhouse with Jacob and Paul, two men who had posed as Sarah Fuller’s neighbors. The pilot’s murder and its kidnapping come out of the same patient deception. The people Claire and Sarah had learned to trust had been put there for a reason.

Williamson said before Season 2 that he was drawn to the scenes where Carroll found vulnerable people and earned their devotion, and to the scenes between Ryan, Claire, and Joe. Once Joey was taken, he felt the search had to drive the season. You can see the pull of both stories at the farmhouse. Ryan and the FBI need to find a missing child. Inside the house, Emma, Jacob, and Paul have to live with each other once the roles they’ve spent years playing begin to fall away. Paul resents what Jacob and Emma have together, and the history between Paul and Jacob gives him reason to. Carroll can tell them what Joey’s kidnapping means to him. The three of them still have to decide what they mean to each other.

Ryan has people on his side, too. Mike Weston is the young agent who knows Hardy’s work and wants to learn from him. Debra Parker leads the investigation and brings expertise in cults, a skill that matters in a case where understanding why someone follows Carroll can tell the FBI as much as knowing where they went. In the last hours of the season, the followers bury Parker alive and leave Ryan and Mike a way to call her. The two men reach her too late. Carroll has left a copy of his manuscript with Parker, and Ryan uses it to work out where Joe has taken Claire. By then Ryan has lost a colleague, and Joe still gets to decide where the two of them will meet.

The trail ends at a lighthouse and a burning boathouse. Ryan gets Claire out, and the FBI identifies the partial remains in the wreckage as Carroll’s. When Ryan takes Claire back to his apartment, the season gives them a brief chance to believe it’s over. Then Molly, Ryan’s neighbor and former lover, comes in and stabs them both. She’s one of Carroll’s followers. The man they thought had died in the fire had already given her a part in the story, and she’d been close enough to Ryan to wait for her chance. The first season ends on the apartment floor, with Ryan and Claire bleeding in the one place he thought he could take her home.

The Family That Found Joe Carroll

A year after the fire, Ryan Hardy is teaching criminology in New York. He’s five months sober. He spends time with his niece Max, an NYPD detective, and has an apartment with a locked room where he keeps the evidence he’s collected on Joe Carroll. Ryan tells Mike Weston he’s through with the case. Max knows how much of his time he still spends on it. The second season gives Ryan a life that looks like it could work, then opens the door on the part of it he keeps hidden.

On the anniversary of the fire, men wearing Carroll masks attack passengers on a subway train. They announce that Joe is alive. One of the survivors, an art dealer named Lily Gray, tells the FBI what she heard. Ryan has spent a year looking for evidence that Carroll survived, and Lily seems to have been in the right place to give him some. She was there because the men behind the attack were part of her own circle. Lily had built a family of followers around herself, including her twin sons, Luke and Mark, both played by Sam Underwood. The attack was meant to draw Carroll out. The man they wanted had been lying low with a woman named Judy and her teenage daughter, Mandy.

Lily’s reveal could have played like a repeat of Molly’s. Both women got close to Ryan by letting him believe he understood who they were. The difference is what happens once Lily has Joe in front of her. She has people, money, and a place for him to go. She also expects him to fit into the family she’s built. Luke and Mark already have loyalties that predate his arrival, and they can turn on him as easily as they can kill for him. In the first season, Carroll handed out roles in a book he meant to write. In Lily’s house, he finds out what it’s like to be cast in somebody else’s.

Joe leaves with Emma and Mandy and finds a religious commune called Korban. Its leader, Micah, welcomes them in, and Joe works his way into Micah’s confidence before taking over the group. Korban gives him an audience that already believes obedience is a virtue. It also gives him a public enemy in televangelist Kingston Tanner, whose son Preston becomes part of Joe’s campaign. Mandy, who knew Joe when he was hiding out with her mother, walks away from Korban and goes to Lily. Lily offers to spare her if Joe gives himself up. He tells Mandy he loves her and ends the call. For all the attention the season pays to Joe’s ability to make people feel chosen, that phone call shows what being chosen by him was worth when he had something to lose.

The year since the boathouse fire has changed Mike Weston, too. He was the young agent who looked up to Ryan in the first season. Now he’s the one with a personal reason to keep going after Lily. Her family has killed his father. When her people raid Korban, Mike finds her alone. Ryan and Max try to talk him into taking her alive. Ryan tells him, “Don’t be me.” Mike shoots her anyway. Ryan knows what it is to spend years organizing your life around the person who hurt you. He recognizes where Mike is headed even as he’s still keeping a room in his apartment for Joe Carroll.

Claire has been living with a different version of the same problem. She survived Molly’s attack and went into protective custody. Mike knew she was alive, and Ryan spent the year believing she was dead. When Claire comes back, she has her own reasons for wanting a say in how the hunt ends. She uses reporter Carrie Cooke to get a message to Joe that only he’ll understand. By the finale, Luke and Mark have taken Claire and offered to exchange her for Carroll. Ryan gets Joe out of a church standoff to make the exchange. A year after they fought in a burning boathouse, the two men go to the same house to bring Claire out alive.

The exchange ends with Luke dead and Mark escaping with his brother’s body. Joe dares Ryan to shoot him, then all but begs him to do it. Ryan lowers his gun and tells Mike to call the FBI. Afterward, he’s ready to pick up with Claire where they left off. She tells him to build a future for himself. She loves him, and she still leaves. For two seasons, Joe had counted on being able to bring them together whenever he wanted Ryan’s attention. Claire finally gets to decide what happens between them once Joe is in chains.

Ryan tells Joe he won’t be seeing him again. At that moment he has a better reason to believe it than he did when the boathouse burned. He watched Carroll go back into custody, and he was the one who chose to send him there alive. Keeping that promise would mean leaving Joe alone even if Joe called for him one more time. The third season would give Carroll one last chance to ask.

The Man Who Taught Joe Carroll

A year after Ryan Hardy sent Joe Carroll back to prison, he’s dancing at an FBI colleague’s wedding. He’s there with Gwen, the woman he’s been seeing, and when she brings up living together, he playfully dodges the question. Joe is a month away from execution. Ryan has enough distance from him to make a toast about love in front of a room full of people. Then a man working the reception throws blood on Ryan and the brides and calls him a liar. The third season opens with a roomful of people watching Ryan get accused of something he and his colleagues would rather keep to themselves.

The accusation goes back to Lily Gray. Mike shot her after Ryan and Max tried to talk him into taking her alive. The surviving Gray twin, Mark, wants the three of them to admit what happened. The premiere also answers the question Season 2 left in the getaway car. The man who picked up Mark and his brother’s body was Andrew, one of the people now helping Mark stage murders that call attention to what the FBI did. Mark still talks to Luke, and Sam Underwood keeps playing both brothers even though only one of them is alive. In a season that will eventually put a dead Joe Carroll in Ryan’s head, Mark gets there first. He can still turn to his brother, and Luke can still tell him what he wants to hear.

Mark’s revenge gives the season a way back into the consequences of the Gray case, but two of the people helping him have business of their own. Kyle and Daisy are connected to Arthur Strauss, the doctor who helped Joe after the boathouse fire and had taught him long before that. Ryan comes to see the attacks as a way to discredit the FBI and undermine Strauss’s trial. The scheme works. After Kyle and Daisy kidnap and kill Carrie Cooke, a key witness, the case against Strauss is dismissed. Mark wants people to know what Mike did to his mother. Strauss benefits if the agents investigating him can be made to look like people a jury shouldn’t trust. The trouble for Ryan is that there really is something to expose.

Strauss had been in the story since Season 2, when Ryan figured out where Joe might have gone for medical help after the fire. Bringing him forward changes the way the series looks at Carroll. The professor who taught his followers to see murder as a literary project had once been somebody’s pupil. Strauss had other students, and Joe tells Ryan that their teacher generally kept them apart so they would depend on him. When Strauss goes into hiding, he expects help from Theo Noble, his favorite. Theo kills him. Ryan has just found a man who could tell him how Joe Carroll came to be, and by the time the FBI catches up, that man is dead at the hands of another pupil.

Michael Ealy’s Theo is harder for Ryan to get a read on because he has spent years making himself look ordinary. He has a wife, children, and a career in computer security. Carroll wanted people to recognize his work. Theo has built a life around people seeing what he wants them to see and going about their day. When he needs to disappear, he turns to Strauss’s records for a connection that might help him do it. That search eventually leads toward Eliza and the people whose resources make a disappearance possible. The series gets there by tracing the people who helped Joe Carroll disappear after the fire.

Finding Theo means Ryan has to ask Joe about Strauss. Joe agrees to help on the condition that Ryan keep visiting him until the execution. Those visits give Carroll something he’s been after since Ryan told him they would never see each other again. Ryan has to come through the door of his own accord. By then Gwen has moved in with Ryan and asked him to stop keeping secrets from her. The show puts those two arrangements close enough together for you to see what each person expects from him. Gwen wants to know the man she lives with. Joe can give him information he needs for work, and he knows Ryan will make time to hear it.

On the morning of his execution, Joe takes three hostages and demands that Ryan come to the prison. Once he has Ryan there, he gets him to admit something that goes back to Debra Parker’s burial. Ryan took satisfaction in killing one of the men responsible for her death. He says the same about killing his father’s murderer. Joe hears those admissions as proof of how much they have in common. Ryan ultimately stays to watch the execution, and the lethal injection ends the question the boathouse fire had left open. James Purefoy told TVLine a few days later that Joe really had died.

Purefoy still appears after the execution because Ryan can supply Joe’s side of a conversation without him. Hawley described those appearances as a way to give Ryan’s self-destructive impulses a voice. The writers let the visions go before the finale, and that leaves Ryan to make his next decision without Carroll there to goad him. At the wedding, he could put off answering Gwen about moving in and go back to dancing. By the time Theo gets to her, Ryan has a home with Gwen and a reason to picture a future there. He’s also spent the season finding out how readily he’ll make room for one more case.

Ten Days Before the End

Fox canceled The Following on May 8, 2015, with two hours of its third season still to air. The premiere had drawn 10.4 million viewers in January 2013. Season 3 opened with 4.8 million, and the most recent episode at the time of cancellation had drawn 3.22 million. Broadcasting & Cable reported that Warner Bros. was shopping the series to other networks. By then the ending was already locked. The production had filmed multiple endings for Season 2, but Alexi Hawley told TVLine that this time they’d filmed the one they’d been working toward.

The May 18 double finale, “Dead or Alive” and “The Reckoning,” brings the Gray family’s story back to the man who set Mark’s revenge in motion. Mike Weston shot Lily while Ryan and Max urged him to take her alive. Mark finally gets close enough to stab Mike and dies believing he’s avenged her. Mike survives. Hawley considered his reunion with Max the end of their story as a couple. There was a time when Mike thought following Ryan’s example would make him a better agent. By the end, he’s nearly died for a choice Ryan begged him to reconsider, and Max is still there when he wakes up.

Theo takes Gwen hostage, and Ryan shoots him. For a moment, it looks as though Ryan will get to leave with her. Then Theo gets up and the two men go over the side of a bridge. Hawley said the fall was deliberately ambiguous. Ryan may have slipped or let go. The choice Hawley wanted viewers to understand came afterward. Ryan got out of the water alive and decided to let Gwen, Max, and Mike believe he’d drowned while he went after the people behind Theo. Gwen was carrying his child. Ryan could see her again from a distance before he left, and she had no way of knowing he was there.

Case Status: Open

The day after the finale, Hawley told TVLine that the writers had been considering a very wealthy individual or a small group as the force behind Eliza. They’d talked about HBO’s The Jinx and what money might allow a killer to get away with. The finale had already established a chain of people who could insulate whoever was at the top. Eliza had recruited Lisa Campbell. The person Eliza spoke to by phone was someone the audience had yet to meet and, Hawley said, might have occupied another rung in the organization. Finding out who answered that call might only have given Ryan another name to follow.

There’s a line from the first season’s farmhouse to that phone call. Emma, Jacob, and Paul took Joey because Carroll gave them a place in a story they wanted to believe in. Lily Gray could offer Joe a house, a family, and people ready to act on his behalf. Strauss had taught killers to keep their distance from one another and depend on him. By the time Theo reached Eliza, the question was how far someone could get with access to people who could make a problem disappear. A fourth season would have followed Ryan into that arrangement just as he’d made himself disappear from his own life.

Season 2 had already shown Ryan what it was like to be on the other side of that decision. He spent a year believing Claire had died in his apartment. Mike knew she was alive and kept it from him while she was under protection. When Claire came back, Ryan wanted the life he’d imagined they could have before Molly came through the door. Claire told him to build a future for himself. She could make that decision because she was there to tell him what she wanted. The last time Ryan sees Gwen, she’s in Mike’s hospital room, and he leaves without giving her that chance.

Hawley saw Ryan’s choice as a sacrifice. Ryan believed that if the people behind Theo thought he was dead, Gwen and the child would be safer. A fourth season could have shown whether he was right about the danger and what Gwen made of the choice once she learned he’d survived. If Ryan ever came home, he’d have to knock on his own door and wait for Gwen to open it. By then, she might already have told their child how his father died.