I feel like someone’s mom came into the office this week and was like, “Okay, enough fun and games now; time to get to work. You can watch the latest Game of Thrones after you’ve written a scene where the FBI does something competent.” I mean, there were still plenty of the shenanigans that have come to be the reason I most enjoy watching this show — oh, Joe, please never stop with the furious, frustrated typing — but at least backup was finally called! And it eventually showed up and everything!
Okay, so in the beginning I was definitely convinced that we were going to spend the whole episode with Roderick as Snuffleupagus to Weston’s Cast of Sesame Street. I was shocked when Weston saw him as quickly as he did; less so when he then immediately let Roderick walk calmly through the police station and get away. Roderick goes to Joe, freaking out about how it’s just a matter of time before Weston and the tech lady get bitten by a radioactive mouse in the computer lab, morph into one gigantic web-savvy super-being, combine their assets in order to come up with the $19.95 to pay for a month-long subscription to a reverse cell-phone look-up site, which they will then use to track down the address of Ravenclaw House.
Joe is less worried about this; he’s impatient to get back to his keyboard-banging, and also, he and follower Aaron are supposed to configure all the television sets to one universal remote control today. Roderick says he’s tired of waiting for Joe to do the plan that they’re always talking about without ever coming out and saying what it is. Maybe neither of them was listening when the plan was first proposed, and so both of them are just faking knowing what it is, hoping that the other one will let a clue slip so they can figure it out. Although, if that’s the case, Roderick won’t ever know the plan now. He and Joe get into a fight. Joe pulls a Claire and tries to strangle him but then throws him to the ground. Roderick starts crying and accuses Joe of using him, and Joe tells him to knock it off. “Or what,” Roderick says, “You’ll kill me?” Uh, yeah. Because your boss is a serial killer and that’s your No. 1 favorite thing about him, remember? Like, if you found him on OkCupid, the stats would be all screwed up because he would be both 100 percent enemy and friend.
Jacob runs into the room and tells Joe that he needs to see something. He goes and stands with all of the follower extras (including one lady with dyed red hair who really wants a speaking role) and watches Hardy doing a press conference on TV. Hardy offers a one-time deal of immunity, which is news to his colleagues back at the latest makeshift headquarter office. “This plan is crazy!” says Call Me Nick. “Yeah, so crazy that it just might work,” says Agent Parker. And then they do a hip-bump. Probably.
Claire is walking around the property with Joey, telling him that everyone in the house is a bad guy, but don’t worry, her friend Hardy is a good guy and he taught her all sorts of things about how to keep people safe when they used to hang out. Does Joey know where the vodka is kept in the house? That was No. 1 on Hardy’s list. Also, some white wine wouldn’t hurt, either. While Joey is trying to remember, Roderick comes storming out of the house, pushes Claire to the ground, grabs Joey, and drives away.
Roderick takes a girl he knew from his poli-sci days hostage and tries to flee town. They come across a road block, and he shoots two cops and then, later on, almost shoots her but he gets caught. He’s brought in, where he tells Hardy that he has Joey. Hardy thinks, Oh man, Claire’s really never going to let me live this one down. She’s going to make so many jokes about it the next time I see her. Hardy unplugs the video camera in the surveillance room, while reading detailed instructions written on his hand by the tech lady about how to do so, and offers Roderick a deal. Roderick takes him to Joey, and Hardy lets him go. Roderick agrees, and Hardy and him climb into Hardy’s car, but only after Roderick makes him throw away his guns and cell phone. It’s really says something about how often Hardy has done something foolish on this show up until now that this scene feels entirely believable.
They drive to some house. Roderick and Hardy go inside. Joey’s tied up in a closet or something, and Hardy gets him loose and tells him everything is okay now. Joey resists the urge to roll his eyes while Hardy is directly looking at him because that would be impolite. Roderick is reaching for a gun, but it turns out that Hardy either for once planned ahead or this is an old plan he made from a couple episodes ago that he is just now getting around to executing. Weston busts in. Roderick aims his gun but then gets shot by people outside. It’s Jacob and two random followers who we will never get to see go over their flashback homework with Joe in prison because they die in this scene. I’m pretty confused about how any of the followers knew about this house in the first place, but maybe that would’ve been explained in the flashback as well. Maybe the whole reason Joe let these two followers become part of the gang is because they owned a house with a couch whose cushion had a hole that was just perfect for hiding a gun in.
Jacob doesn’t die, though. He manages to grab Joey and is holding him hostage in the woods. Hardy tries to convince him to let Joey go, “He’s just a little kid with a totally screwed-up dad and a mom who is possibly already dead who just spent the past few weeks with people who looked like the most normal folks in the world but turned out to secretly be killing machines. He’s got his whole life ahead to feel the trauma of this. Let him go.” Jacob sees the wisdom of this and tells Joey to stay quiet while Jacob puts on his invisibility cloak. Hardy walks up, sees Joey but no Jacob. He’s appeared to have vanished into the night. None of the backup cops are able to find any sign of Jacob, either. It’s going to be pretty funny next episode, though, when Jacob, still wearing his cloak, pulls all sorts of pranks on them like juggling their lunch and firearms in the air and stuff.
Jacob goes back to Ravenclaw and somehow his failure to bring back Joey is not as bad as that guy who had to let Joe kill him because he didn’t bring back Claire. Jacob just goes to his room and plays some Scrabble with Ghost Paul. When Paul plays a word that Jacob knows for a fact isn’t in the official dictionary (because of all the Words With Friends he used to play), he doesn’t challenge it, which, as far as he’s concerned, more than makes up for the pillow-smothering. Emma tries to cuddle with Joe, but he’s being all unavailable with her. “What is wrong with you?” she asks, her face all crumpled. I’m not sure how many times I’m going to have to explain to these people the inherent problems of falling for a man whose hobbies include building a cult based on a foundation of murder; trying to write a book about his murders, past, present and future; and murdering them.
Then Claire comes in and tries to give it a shot. She tells Joe that she’s willing to try and learn to love him again as long as he lets Joey go. She gets up really close and stares at his eyes, “You know I’m on Justified, right? Is Emma on Justified? I didn’t think so.” Joe, powerless against this logic, goes in for the kiss. Claire stabs him with a shiv from Pottery Barn that she found in the garage. She doesn’t finish the job, though, and she’s dragged off to her room. Joe calls Hardy up and tells him that he’s having the worst day. Follower Aaron erased all of his DVR’d shows when he was setting up the new remote, and some of them had already expired on On Demand! Which means it’s time for Claire to die.
A girl walks into the police station, saying she’s one of Joe’s followers come to turn herself in. She looks like a typical, cute, twentysomething girl, so obviously she’s a cold-blooded sadist. The cops surround her, pointing guns, telling her to put her hands up. She does, but she also jumps on Call Me Nick’s back and stabs him in the eye. So much for the theories about his being one of Joe’s followers. Or Weston for that matter. Parker still could be, though, right? It sort of tracks, even though Jacob beat her up last week. Insert double-meaning Poe eye reference here.
