This week on The Following Mark hears noises coming from Luke’s room, and finds Giselle dead in Luke’s bed. Luke is pretending that she’s alive, but it’s very obvious that Giselle is dead. Luke tells him that Hardy killed her.

Max is stitching up Hardy’s gunshot wound while Hardy calls Mike. He tells Mike that Lily has a whole family, and that he thinks they (including Joe) are nearby. Mike tells him he’s on the way, and takes off without telling anyone at the FBI. When Mike arrives by himself, he tells Hardy he thinks the FBI has been compromised, and that someone from the inside has been tipping off Joe.

Lily and Joe are still in bed, and Lily is telling Joe all about how they can take the whole family to Venezuela. She has her own plane, and a place on the beach, and it’s very tough to extradite from Venezuela. Joe tells Lily that there are always options. Lily is upset that he doesn’t want to just pick up everything and leave. One of the French girls comes in to tell Lily there is a problem.

Joe and Mandy are watching a house from their car. The woman finds her young son missing and panics. She sees a man outside and goes to confront. Joe says hi to her, and she is happy to see him.  Her name is Jenna, and she is a member of Joe’s cult.

Hardy thinks that all of the new cult activity is to lure Joe out of hiding. Max is skeptical that Joe is alive, but is willing to listen if Hardy can find some proof. Hardy doesn’t want her jeopardizing her job to help him, but she is stubborn too and says she is helping him whether he likes it or not.

Weston has found some information on Lily Gray. Her parents died when she was young, and she was adopted by a wealthy man. He died, and left all his money to her. Lily is worth 1.4 billion dollars. The twins are boys she adopted after their mother died giving birth. Lily’s business partner, David Roland, is out of the hospital but is refusing to speak to authorities.  The FBI doesn’t know if he’s involved or in danger.

In this week’s episode of The Following, Joe is living in Arkansas under an assumed identity.  The only ones who know who he really is are his girlfriend Judy and her daughter Mandy.  Joe’s new name is Daryl, and everyone thinks he is Judy’s brother, which is kind of mind boggling considering she is a prostitute and he just sits outside on a bench while she conducts her business.

Judy questions him about the cult subway murders, but he claims to know nothing about it.  She tells him that they have a good thing going and she doesn’t want it ruined.  They hug, and Joe has a certain “I’m a lying jackhole” look on his face.

Hardy is using his shamelessly promoted tablet and major name search engine to look up Lily Gray, the survivor of the subway attacks.  He finds that she is an art dealer and goes to see her.  He asks her a bunch of questions that the FBI already asked her, and she admits to him that she looked him up online.  I’m surprised they aren’t already in bed together.

So what I totally missed last week was that the girl the twins killed was not a totally random aside.  They had posed her dead body on a bench for the cops to find.  That went way over my head.  This week, Weston and Mendez determine that she was posed to reflect a certain passage in Joe Carroll’s book Gothic Sea.

Following a season one recap, the whole of the fight between Hardy and his neighbor is shown.  She stabs him and Claire, but Hardy fights back and breaks her neck, killing her.  Hardy later finds out at the hospital that Claire did not survive.

Fast forward to one year later, where Hardy is five months sober (apparently there was a relapse after Claire died) and a professor at the New York College of Criminal Justice.  It is coming up on the one-year anniversary of the “Carroll Cult Killings”.

Hardy’s niece Max wants him to meet her new boyfriend, so he has them over to dinner, along with his AA sponsor and another woman from AA.  Max admits she set up the dinner mostly to help distract Hardy from the anniversary of the murders.  She also thinks that Hardy should ask out the woman from his AA class.

Hardy, as well as Mike Weston, are dragged back into action after some murders on a subway car in New York.  The killers, donning Joe Carroll masks, enter subway car, pose for the cameras, and then stab everyone in the car, leaving only one woman as a witness.  They chant “Resurrection” and say that Ryan Hardy cannot stop them, Joe Carroll lives, and the resurrection is coming.

Surveillance footage shows cult member Alex Lipton and another man putting Agent Parker in the trunk of their car outside of the shelter. A boy wearing a Poe mask shows up at the police station, saying that a woman named Emma gave him $20 to wear it over there. A phone number is discovered inside the mask.

When they call the number, it connects them to a cell phone in the coffin with Agent Parker. She tells them what “little” she recalls while being stuck in the trunk. She “only” remembers going over a railroad track, counting to 700 (which another agent instantaneously determines is just over 10 minutes), turning onto a dirt road and driving for about 5 minutes. She tells Hardy that’s “all” she remembers.

They are able to determine a large general area and head out. They find Alex’s car on the side of the road, with a blown tire. The tire is slashed, meaning they were supposed to find the car. As they are looking around, Alex is in the woods with a gun, and starts shooting at the agents. He kills at least one before Hardy is able to sneak over to him and capture him.

Let me first say how surprisingly difficult it was to watch this episode. After what has happened the last week in Boston, to all of a sudden be watching a show about a manhunt for entertainment kind of threw me for a loop. I live about an hour/hour and a half from Boston, and work less than 20 miles away.

It was a horrible, scary week, and I just wanted to mention that this episode has some activity that brought me right back to that week. I in no way want to seem insensitive by reviewing this episode, but if Fox was okay with airing it, I will do my part and review it.

The episode starts with Joe again watching a tape of Hardy and Molly having sex. Joe keeps replaying a snippet of video where Hardy says “Can’t kill me, I’m already dead.”

As I so stupidly left out of my last recap, Sheriff Nelson (Roderick) of Havenport is offering his assistance on the FBI’s case. He is helping try and track down Joe and his cult. The only problem? Agent Weston is there too. They eventually run into each other, but Roderick manages to escape.

When Roderick returns to the house, he and Joe argue and fight. Roderick blames Joe killing Monroe for the FBI being so close. Roderick thinks they need to leave, but Joe says it’s not time yet. Roderick tells Joe that he will never get his wife back, and Joe attacks Roderick. Joe tells Roderick to pull himself together, and Roderick feels like he is being used.

Hardy holds a news conference offering immunity to any member of Joe’s cult that turns them self in and leads them to Joe. It turns out that Donovan did not authorize this press conference or the immunity, but ultimately relents, as it was a good idea.

Claire takes Joey and tries to leave, but the front gate is locked. She is confronted by Roderick and a bunch of followers, who bring them back inside. Claire is fitted with a tracking device. Joe tells her that trust must be earned.

While investigating the old armory, Hardy gets a call from Joe. Joe is having trouble with the motivation of Hardy’s character in the novel, and wants to hear about the death of his father. Hardy accuses Joe of being desperate, and Joe hangs up on him.

The FBI finds ties to an old militia man, Daniel Monroe. He is now a black market arms dealer. At the safe house, Joe, Vince, and Roderick are also discussing Monroe. Roderick says they can trust Monroe, but Joe wants him dead anyway. Joe is taking Vince and Jacob with him.

When it was announced that Matthew Vaughn was leaving the director’s chair for X-Men: Days of Future Past, the geek community felt an inescapable fear that things might be falling apart. Even the seemingly good news that original X-Director Bryan Singer was coming back didn’t seem to dissuade the growing fear that Fox was once again messing up the X-Men.

Then the online nerd populous started putting two and two together. If the next film was going to tackle one of the most famous comic book time travel stories, and the director was the guy who made the first two great X-Men movies, would we be getting a giant cross generational X-Men X-travaganza?

Well, the answer seems to be a resounding yes, and according to the twitter account of Bryan Singer himself it keeps getting better:

Very excited to welcome #annapaquin, @ellenpage &@shawnrashmore to #XMen #DaysofFuturePast – thank you @BrettRatner for letting them live!

Mother’s Day, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, III, IV), is loosely based on a horrific, true story that took place in Wichita, Kansas 10 years ago – as well as the 1980 Charles Kaufman film by the same name.  The setting changes from an ill-fated camping trip to a tale of home invasion in the remake – we meet the Koffin brothers when they return to their mother’s house after their attempt to rob a bank goes horribly wrong, leaving the youngest brother seriously injured from a gunshot wound.

Upon their arrival to their childhood home, they quickly discover that their mother is no longer living there (having lost her house to foreclosure) and end up crashing what will become The Worst Birthday Party Ever, which is being thrown by the new inhabitants, Beth and Daniel Sohapi.

The brothers hold the home-owner’s and their guests hostage – alternately beating them, threatening to rape them and robbing them of their money, belongings and dignity as they attempt to gain control of their situation.  It doesn’t take long for Mother (Rebecca De Mornay) and their little sister to arrive on the scene, at which point things swiftly make the shift from being merely terrifying to unfathomably shitty.