Alas, Poor Scrappy: For some fans, Tom's death. Even though he brought a lot of it on himself, he was one of the few major characters on the show who actually was a good man, not a Designated Hero. Considering he got acid to the face before his death, and the fact that not even Max cared the slightest about his death, was very harsh, even for him.
Many fans were disappointed when Joe and Ryan's climactic fight in Season 1 abruptly ended with Joe becoming trapped in a ring of fire and presumably dying in an explosion. However, this was subverted when Joe turned up alive in Season 2, leaving open the possibility for a more epic showdown.
Lily Gray in Season 2. For all her power and resources, she dies rather easily, and her big confrontation with Joe never even happens.
Joe Carroll in Season 2. Again. After a brief fight with Hardy, Hardy knocks him to the floor and points a gun at him. Carroll has a Villainous Breakdown and begs Hardy to kill him. He doesn't, and Joe is arrested shortly afterwards.
Dr. Arthur Strauss in Season 3. Despite being the Big Bad for the entire series, not to mention Joe's mentor, he's killed very unexpectedly by Theo the second he turns his back on him.
Joe Carroll again, presumably for the final time in Season 3. In the end, it isn't a gunshot or an epic fistfight that kills him. After his hostage situation is resolved, he's quietly led to the public execution chamber and lethally injected as he stares lifelessly at Ryan.
Arc Fatigue: Fans are starting to get frustrated over the subplot involving Joe and Ryan's relationship (and Joe Carroll in general). Even after he dies two-thirds of the way into Season 3, he is still on the show shoving the new and/or more plot-relevant subplots to the side. It's created a situation in which neither fans who wanted him written out for Season 3 and feel he no longer fits in the show (obviously he was not) nor fans who love the character and want him to stay (he appears only sporadically and is almost totally Out of Focus) can be satisfied with his role in the show now.
Awesome Music: Many episodes end with dark metal/electronic/ambient background songs. These have included:
Broken Base: Joe's death. Some people thought his death was very underwhelming; others thought it was a proper way for him to go. Some people are upset about his death and believe the show is doomed without him; others are glad that he's gone and believe the show can finally move forward. And then there are those who, understandably, believe that He's Just Hiding. Although the fact that the show has been cancelled, rendering the third season the final one, remedies some of the complaints and makes the questions of his possible survival unlikely.
Complete Monster: Professor Joseph "Joe" Carroll is a Serial Killer and falsely charming cult leader corrupting other killers. With a massive number of bodies behind him, Joe even raises his own son to become a murderer and tries to kill his ex-wife when she interferes. When his cult is dismantled Joe joins another one, killing their leaders and taking over to twist even more into following him in the ways of killing, and ushering in yet another spree. When a televangelist outs him on his show, Joe takes revenge by kidnapping the man's son as well as a church full of people and forces the televangelist to kill an innocent woman before slitting his throat. Attempting one final escape after his arrest, Joe kidnaps a group of people and threatens to kill them lest hero Ryan Hardy admit he loves killing as much as Joe does.
Crosses the Line Twice: When Micah is on the floor gurgling as he dies from poison, Carroll nonchalantly shushes him.
Designated Hero: As detailed above, Ryan and anyone in his orbit will inevitably become this as time goes on, since the show seems to share his warped views on justifiable force in the line of duty. However, the show now seems to be more aware of this, and a big deal is being made about how far Ryan has fallen almost to Joe's level. In one of his final confrontations with Joe before the latter's execution, he even admits that he gets satisfaction from pulling the trigger on the killers.
The murder twins have been nothing but brutal, twisted, sadistic psychopaths since their first appearance on the show, but that doesn't stop some of the fanbase from squealing over them, even as they torture Mandy, and some of them were actually horrified when Weston beat one of them to a pulp.
Some of the minor cult members count to the point where the fanbase will become delighted as they murder innocent people.
Theo Noble. One of the most dangerous serial killers on the show with a body count as high as Joe Carroll's, and he's the one character almost every fan of the show adores about Season 3. Some even like him more than Joe.
Jacob Wells. It helps that he's one of the few cult members who isn't Ax-Crazy, who's Affably Evil, and whose character is fleshed out the most in Season 1.
According to Charlie, the mercenary Bo is not part of the cult. He has "useful skills," but he's too unstable to be an actual member. Think about that. There are people out there that the Carrollists consider too crazy to join them.
Joe Carroll was always good at manipulating people, but he's taken a scary level in competence with the second season. It doesn't take him long to insinuate himself into the Korban and assume a position of power. And it coincides with his admission that he's a terrible writer. The thing that caused the rift between Joe and Roderick was the fact that Joe was more concerned with his new art project than tending to the daily workings of his cult. And now, Joe doesn't have that distraction any longer. He's not deluding himself anymore with the idea that he's any kind of artist. Now he's a full-time psycho.
Genius Bonus: Many of the main characters share the last names of classic authors (Hardy, Carroll, Parker, etc.). What significance this has, if any, has yet to be demonstrated.
Allison Mack's guest appearance on a show about a cult became this post-NXIVM.
Joe Carroll mentions to Hardy that when he dies, so will Hardy. Not even two weeks after Joe's death, FOX cancelled the show. Meta Lampshade Hanging doesn't even begin to cover it.
Many people believed that Joe Carroll was still alive at the end of Season 1. They were right.
Claire got this treatment in Season 2, and was indeed revealed to be just hiding halfway through the season, having been placed under heavy witness protection.
After the Season 3 episode "Evermore," the fandom became rife with speculation that Joe secretly survived his execution. Sadly, given FOX's cancellation of the show, this is unlikely.
Carroll gives his mission statement at the end of the pilot; his ode to Poe, ''The Gothic Sea", was "clearly too avant-garde. Lost in literati pretense. Now my new story... will play to a much wider audience." On April 4th, 2013, The Following's rival showCult was cancelled due to a perceived lack of viewership, while The Following was renewed for a second season, thus demonstrating the validity of Carroll's belief that a straightforward tale of sex and violence would appeal to a much wider audience than something requiring much more investment. Meta beyond imagination.
Not only that, but its other rival show, Hannibal, which consistently got praise from critics for being more "avant-garde" than a lot of broadcast shows (including The Following), did rather poorly in the ratings itself, even for NBC. Like The Following, it ended up getting cancelled in 2015.
Joe's meta, future-predicting nature reaches its head near his death. In the episode featuring that event, he makes it clear that when he dies, so too will Ryan. A few weeks after the episode aired, FOX announced that the series has not been renewed for another season. Crosses over with Harsher in Hindsight for fans.
Sam Underwood has said that during the audition process for Season 2, Mark and Luke were advertised as only one character with a Split Personality, in order to avoid spoilers. Come Season 3, and that's exactly what Mark has become.
Ho Yay: Ryan Hardy and his old friend Tyson; their episode is practically dripping with Ho Yay. Tyson even refers to them as "married"!
A lot of fans guessed that Carroll was still alive before they even showed him in the season two promos. They were right.
Likewise, many fans were proven correct when Claire turned up alive in the middle of Season 2.
Jerkass Woobie: Mark and Daisy. They're both serial killers for sure, but they're also both very lonely individuals who have lost their loved ones and have no other friends or people to relate to.
Pfft! Yeah, like they're really gonna kill off Debra Parker after she was Buried Alive. ...Oh,wait.
A lot of fans were convinced that Claire really died in the Season 2 premiere, since the writers tend to kill off characters left and right. It turns out that Mike helped her fake her death before putting her under Witness Protection.
Even some of the most diehard fans of Lily and the murder twins were horrified when they tortured and killed Mandy before setting her dead body up to eat with them at dinner.
Theo murdering his wife and leaving his children behind.
Paranoia Fuel: From what the show implies, anyone could be part of Carroll's cult. They are also terrifyingly good at getting into people's homes, even if police are stationed inside.
Replacement Scrappy: Gwen for Claire. Unlike Claire, who proved to be a bit of an Action Girl when necessary and was a key character for the plot, Gwen is just a normal, boring, nosy Satellite Love Interest who constantly whines about Ryan's job and isn't relevant to the plot at all.
Emma. She's a Manipulative Bitch who has no problem having sex with virtually every man she runs into, including Carroll. She leaves Paul and Jacob to die after the FBI storms their hideout, she doesn't give a damn about anyone except Carroll, and she's more than okay with doing anything he tells her to do, even if she knows it's not right. But what really turned her into The Scrappy was when she slashed Jacob's throat, even after he practically begged her to come run away with him.
Tom. Some people already didn't like him for getting in the way of the Mike/Max relationship and for having little chemistry with Max. Then he started playing with the Idiot Ball, and he constantly committed one dumb act after another until he wound up putting Mike's life in danger, and ended up getting killed in the process.
Squick: When Joe kills the Reverend in Season 2 (his first kill in over a year), he basically has an orgasm. Yeek.
Take That, Scrappy!: In Season 2, the new Followers don't think much of Emma.
"Why don't you like Emma?"
"No one likes her. She's unlikable."
Later, in Season 2's penultimate episode, Emma's Rasputinian Death at the hands of Claire: stabbed in the gut, thrown out a window and then finished off with a wooden stake.
Tom's death for many fans. He ended up digging his own grave by thinking Mark and Daisy wouldn't double-cross him after giving up Mike.
Debra's death disappointed a good amount of viewers who hoped that she would have been revealed to be a Follower.
The show has a habit of killing off interesting Followers (Louise, Jacob, Roderick) and keeping idiotic or boring ones around (Emma and Joe himself).
Possibly Fridge Brilliance: the "interesting" ones are the ones whose unstable personalities are causing conflicts with Joe's Master Plan. Getting rid of them steers things relatively back on track, and leaves Joe with people he can more easily control.
Special mention to Jacob's death. He spends the entire first season trying to decide if he really wants to be in the cult, and then, when he finally leaves, Emma unceremoniously kills him for no reason other than pure shock value. Waste indeed.
Season 2 has Carlos, who gets stabbed in the neck for no reason at all, and Giselle, a fairly competent Dark Action Girl who easily could've replaced Emma's role in the show as The Heavy.
In Season 2, Lily Gray's death disappointed some fans who wanted her to confront Joe and maybe even become the main Big Bad for Season 3.
In Season 3, some fans were hoping for Neil Perry to stick around for quite a while, since he was a calm, Faux Affably Evil killer who never rose his voice and was brushing against a Hero Killer status. Instead, he commits Suicide by Cop in the second episode he appears in.
Dr. Arthur Strauss was set up as the Big Bad for Season 3, and considering that he's Joe's mentor, he could've proven to be a terrifying villain. Instead, he was garroted to death in the episode directly after the one where he finally got out of prison for arguably the same reason Jacob was killed: shock value. That being said, Theo Noble, his best student and the one who killed him, is turning out to be as terrifying and competent a villain as Strauss could have been.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Early on in Season 3, Tom finds out via laptop recording that Mike executed Lily Gray. Instead of delivering this information to the FBI as evidence or even using it as blackmail against Mike, he's forced to smash the laptop, and this bit of detail is all but forgotten about. The laptop itself, however, did play a key role later on when Tom is forced to kill an FBI agent because of it, and he ends up delivering Mike to Mark in exchange for the incriminating evidence against himself.
Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The villains are Ax-Crazy homicidal maniacs who gleefully commit very brutal on-screen murders and we see a lot of the story from their point of view; by and large they are selfish, unrepentant and prone to Moral Myopia, and their competence ranges from Villain Sues to Big Bad Wannabes (Joe himself starts as the former and devolves into the latter). The heroes, though, are not the most comfortable people to follow either: Hardy is a vengeful Knight Templar prone to Protagonist-Centred Morality who allows the villain to dictate his moves; the FBI have many fair What the Hell, Hero? critiques to make of him, but they tend to be incompetent and stupid in their own right as both they and Hardy get many minor characters killed; Agent Weston and others become steadily more brutal due to Hardy's influence; and civilian characters (whether major like Claire or one-shoters) are out of their league and make dumb decisions to varying degrees. It becomes difficult to root for anyone the longer the story goes on, particularly since the series so often relies on Fridge Logic and Diabolus ex Machina to move things forward. As a result, the ratings took a big knife to the gut in season two (and cut down to less than half in season three), albeit no more so than anything else that aired on Fox in calendar year 2014.
Jacob Wells, the only cultist who had a heart, who eventually knew what was right from wrong, and who was arguably one of the nicest villains in the entire series.
Ryan himself definitely qualifies, with his dark and troubled past (even before he ever met Joe Carroll), his guilt at not catching Joe sooner, his inability to save Sara, his reputation as a loose cannon amongst law enforcement, his alcoholism, and his inability to let anyone near him demonstrate how utterly broken he is.
Little Joey becomes this throughout the first season.
Mandy. Yes, she did choose Joe over her own mother and join Lily rather than simply fleeing the compound, but she's still nothing more than a young girl who was under the influence of her cult member-mother and the cult leader himself, whom she lived with and became attached to.
Preston Tanner. His possible lover is murdered right in front of him, he's kidnapped by the Korban cult, he's forced to kill a woman so Joe won't kill him, and then he gets to watch as his father slits his throat right in front of him. And then Joe shoots him in the head because he couldn't stand him crying. And all because he was the son of a man who called out Joe on live TV.
that during the audition process for Season 2, Mark and Luke were advertised as only one character with a Split Personality, in order to avoid spoilers. Come Season 3, and that's exactly what Mark has become.