Following Kevin Bacon Again (spoilers)

Kevin Bacon was still quite Kevin Bacon in this second episode, though he was also around a lot less, thus lowering the KBQ (Kevin Bacon Quotient) to dangerous levels.

Honestly, the best part the entire episode was when someone in a hilariously awful Edgar Allan Poe mask attacks Kevin Bacon in a creepy serial killer house (you can tell it’s a serial killer house because there’s writing all over the walls) and it was just sort of laughable and pathetic instead of worrying.

There was relatively little murder of pretty blonde girls this time around (just a bit at the beginning that I barely noticed) and then most of it was flashbacks of Kevin Bacon hooking up with the master serial killer’s wife, or two of the main bad guys hooking up over a romantic dinner where the lady serial killer knifes her mom in the back with great precision, having had her haircut criticized one too many times.

The most forehead-slapping bit was when Kevin Bacon and the utterly worthless police crew walked through the serial killer house and paid careful attention to all the quotable Edgar Allan Poe scrawled on the walls.  Apparently our serial killer mastermind in prison has made a religion or something out of Poe because: “…there’s a pathology to our modern internet-bred minds. It creates a vacancy in our humanity…”

All I can think of is… oh if only the antisocial sector on the internet was actually as literate as this show makes it out to be. Then: and really, we’re going to go with the “internet makes us disconnected and therefore sociopaths” thesis here? Do the writers not read anything but the frothiest of subreddits?

Kids these days, with their internets and serial killings and so forth.

The second most forehead-slapping bit was when they realized (gasp) the main serial killer wants to kill his former wife Claire! So instead of, I don’t know, getting her out of the fucking house in light of the fact that in last week’s episode someone got snatched directly from her own home and horribly killed, they just left her there so daddy’s special little serial killer could take a shot at her and gosh, you almost ended up feeling bad for him.

You’re losing me, The Following, for anything but comedy value. All you’ve got is Kevin Bacon. He’d better keep on Kevin Baconning his tush off or I’m going to give up entirely and watch Law & Order reruns on Netflix because they’re measurably less silly.