So far, many of the killings in The Following have been somewhat random. Why did a house full of sorority girls need to be slaughtered? What about the people who Carroll killed before he was originally caught? What did they ever do wrong?

Well, this week The Following took on the theme of revenge, an often written about topic of Edgar Allen Poe. Not everyone who died in tonight’s episode was killed randomly; these people got what the had coming their way (in the eyes of Joe Carroll).

When we left The Following last week, a man wearing an Edgar Allen Poe mask poured gasoline onto a seemingly random stranger and lit him on fire. This seemed like the work of a complete lunatic, but we were treated to a little back story on the victim, this week.

The man who was burned to death was a book reviewer for a major Washington newspaper. Ten years earlier, he reviewed the story written by Joe Carroll, and shredded it to pieces. Hardy said that it was one of the most ruthless reviews that he had ever read and it really took its effects on Carroll’s Career. He was targeted because he hurt Carroll professionally, and paid the price with his life.