Spoilers below for Episode 10 of Cape Fear. Season 1 is now streaming on Apple TV.
After 10 episodes of acid-tripping, toe-eating, grave-sleeping craziness, Cape Fear reaches its inevitable gonzo climax this week with a jam-packed hour filled with fire, wind, rain, and the entire Bowden family put on trial. The full season of the Apple TV series has swung wildly from incredible melodrama to clumsy wheel-spinning, but this week’s finale – titled “The Executioners,” in a nod to the novel on which the whole Cape Fear universe is based – mainly sees the show stick the landing, even if the denouement is a frustrating ploy for a Season 2 renewal.
When we last saw Anna, she was swimming away from Max Cady’s deranged family, having jumped off his sister’s houseboat after uncovering a slew of their buried secrets. After Anna escapes, Max arrives for a big ole’ miscreant family reunion and castigates his father, sister, and maybe-product-of-incest son for letting her get away. Enraged, Max pulls a gun and shoots both Crystal and possible-son Luke in the stomach before pistol-whipping his father and locking him in a cage. Max then proceeds to dump gasoline over the whole boat and set it ablaze, his family trapped inside.
In a show full of shocking moments, it’s great to see Cape Fear up the ante (and body count) so early in the finale. We think we’re building up to a drawn-out series of major revelations, but instead Max Cady just burns everyone alive. It’s a testament to what the show does best: shocking, over-the-top moments that are at once unhinged and vital to the show’s appeal. While I would have appreciated some further explanation of the entire Cady family’s twisted back story, the quick execution of an entire boatload of pivotal characters grants new, major insight into Max’s depravity and sets the stage for the season’s final confrontation.
After escaping, Anna finds her way to a road and is promptly hit by a car. She pops up and bums a ride back to Savannah while Tom makes bail thanks to his erstwhile paramour Lexi, who still believes he’s an asshole but “just not a murderer.”
At Max’s restaurant opening (yes he’s still hellbent on this weird little side project), Anna shows up brandishing what we initially think is a gun but ends up being a bluetooth speaker. She holds it up, “Say Anything”-style and plays Nevaeh’s recorded confession (thanks Natalie) followed by a video clip of Max urging Amy to kill herself from all the way back in Episode 1. Since Max is famous, naturally the press is at the event and hears every word. Enraged, Max chokes Anna before the cops tackle him to the ground and haul him away.
As literal storm clouds gather overhead (there’s a hurricane coming, remember), the entire family reunites at home. Soon, the cops show up to inform them that (Surprise!) Max overpowered the SINGLE officer they had driving him to prison and is once again on the loose. They literally tell the Bowdens “Sorry, we fucked up,” before peacing out.
With the hurricane bearing down and Savannah under an evacuation warning, Tom convinces Anna to take the kids out of town while he stays behind to kill Max. As they begin to pack up, we’re given what is simultaneously the most incredible and laugh-inducing shot of the entire series: Max Cady, who the cops had searched for but not been able to find at the Bowdens’ home, standing on top of the roof, smiling menacingly while a hurricane builds overhead. It’s the perfect encapsulation of the series as a whole: a visually stunning, shocking image that’s at once thrilling, incredulous, and laugh-out-loud funny.
Max jumps off the roof and slams into Zack, who was looking out an open window at the exact wrong time, before taking the boy hostage. Max forces Natalie to tie her parents to chairs and then injects Zack with a superdose of the mind-control drug he had given him earlier. Max then proceeds to put Tom and Anna “on trial,” claiming they conspired to send him to prison for “their own personal reasons.” He threatens to have Zack bite off his own tongue (which he promptly starts to do) before Anna spills it all.
Anna confesses that, during Max’s trial, there was a leak that the jury was deadlocked and, because she was terrified of him, Anna forced Max into a plea deal. There was a chance that the jury would have found him innocent but, fearful that Max was Natalie’s biological father, she wanted to put him away. Anna then goes on to detail how she suspects that Luke is actually his and Crystal’s son. Max claims this couldn’t be possible because Crystal was incapable of having children (notice how he never said that it wasn’t possible because he hadn’t slept with his own sister).
After a violent interlude in which Max has yet another seizure and pleads to his god, Shangó, for a verdict for Tom and Anna, Anna puts the pieces of the entire, seedy Cady family mystery together: Crystal was not Luke’s mother, but rather Max’s wife Melissa was. Max didn’t kill his wife and son. Instead, Crystal killed Melissa out of jealousy and ripped the baby from her, claiming the boy (Luke) as her own. Max wasn’t responsible for the murders, it was Crystal all along and Max inadvertantly burned his child alive on the houseboat.
It’s a great sequence in which many of the series’ myriad loose plot threads are tied up neatly during a climactic, tense moment. Although revealed mainly through exposition-heavy dialogue, the scene is miles better than last week’s terrible revelatory phone call between Nevaeh and Max, quickly answering numerous questions and immediately propelling the action.
As Max wails in agony, Natalie manages to escape and shoot Max in the head with a nail gun. Zack comes out of his drug-induced stupor and attacks Max. Anna manages to stab Max in the back before Tom chases him to the back yard and tackles him into the pool in an attempt to drown him. As Natalie yells “Kill him!” Anna jumps into the pool and calmly steers Tom away from doing just that, telling him it would be better to let the man who’s been maniacally tormenting her family “die in a cage.” As they pull an exhausted and broken Max out of the pool, the Bowdens huddle together as the rain pours down.
It’s an extremely unsatisfying moment in what, to this point, had been a stellar final episode. Not having Max Cady meet his end is an obvious ploy for a Cape Fear Season 2 renewal. After all the Bowdens had been through, after all the lost appendages, strangers living in their walls, false incarcerations, jobs lost, and reputations ruined, to think that they would let Max Cady live is borderline laughable. The Bowdens, as shown time and time again throughout the series, are not good people, and it’s unbelievable to think that they’d let their tormentor see the light of day.
Despite this, “The Executioners” is an entertaining, serviceable finale to an action-packed season of television. Even though it ends with an annoyingly overt nod to a potential continuation (the last shot is Amy Adams’s Anna literally LOOKING OVER HER SHOULDER while her family enjoys a barbecue), the major revelations, shocking character deaths, and tight climax bring a mostly satisfying end to the show.
If there’s one consolation to the frustrating final moments of the episode, it’s that we may one day be graced with more gloriously colorful, mindbending, and outright insane interactions between the Bowden family and the man who nearly destroyed their lives. It seems impossible, after all they’ve been through, the Bowdens would interact with Max Cady in the slightest and instead would pack their bags and immediately get the hell out of town.
But, having watched all 10 episodes of Cape Fear’s first season, we know that if a maniacal, malevolent psychopath somehow waltzes back into their lives in Season 2, the Bowdens won’t be able to stay away.
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