Before I start an episode of Apple TV‘s Cape Fear, I crank up the volume on my soundbar. I want that Bernard Herrmann/Elmer Bernstein/Jeff Russo score to hit like the fist of an angry god. I turn off every light, because I want the ruddy flesh tones and blue-green eyes of these sweat-soaked lunatics to pop off the screen. I turn off the air conditioning, partially because I don’t want to the show to compete with the white noise but partially because if it gets hot while I watch it, well, that feels appropriate. To properly enjoy Cape Fear, you have to give yourself over to it completely.
Boy, does that approach pay dividends here. Titled “The Executioners” after the John D. MacDonald novel that started it all, this season finale plays more like the finale of a fireworks show, with one spectacular scene and set piece after another until the ominously understated conclusion. It’s a sensory experience, a parade of lurid sights and bombastic sounds best represented by a single shot: Max Cady, standing on the roof of the Bowdens’ house in the middle of a hurricane, as the theme song blares. I was grinning from ear to ear. A moment like that is why you make this show — a masterpiece of modern TV horror.
Are there plot holes? Yes, of course, ludicrous ones at times! But in this it’s no different from the vast majority of horror, fantasy, science fiction, and genre fiction generally that we encounter, by their very nature as genre fiction. Stories like this deal in the fantastical, and gaps in logic come with the territory. (Otherwise science fiction would just be science, wouldn’t it?) You overlook those holes for the whole when you get enough material of sufficient compensatory value to make you overlook them. This is why you probably like different Star Wars movies different amounts despite the fact that you can hear explosions in space in all of them.
And wouldn’t you know it, this episode begins with an explosion right there on Cape Fear River. Arriving at his sister Crystal’s houseboat to find that Anna has escaped, he shoots both Crystal and her son Luke — well, “her son Luke”; more on that in a moment — in the gut and dumps them in the hold. Then he locks his elderly father in a dog cage and lights him on fire, along with the entire boat, which he sets adrift. A viking funeral for a family that’s like a Gordian knot of psychosexual abuse…and for his own son, though he doesn’t know that yet.
When Max opens his restaurant the next day, Anna crashes the party, mutilated hand and all, having thrown herself in front of a passing car to get a ride out of the middle of nowhere following her escape from the Cadys. So does Noa, who in these last two episodes more than makes up for her earlier lack of judgement with a willingness to face Max Cady down without flinching. (You can now see why CCH Pounder took the part.)
Together, the two friends blow up his whole spot. Anna plays the surreptitious recording Natalie took of Max’s daughter Neveah copping to his involvement in her crimes. Noa hijacks Max’s PowerPoint presentation by playing recordings his lover Amy made of him encouraging her to commit suicide to get him out of jail. Infuriated, Max throttles Anna in front of a phalanx of cameras and gets decked by cops, hitting his head once again in the process.
For a while, everything is coming up Bowden. Natalie and Zack reunite back at the house, where they are soon joined by not only Anna, released from the hospital after getting her hand taken care of, but Tom, released from prison after his semi-repentant associate Lexi pulled some strings on his behalf. The two are on the verge of separation, but they are, at least, alive.
But Max plays off a cop’s sympathy for his headaches and escapes. A couple hours later, detectives show up at the Bowdens to alert them to the situation and sweep the premises, finding nothing. Of course, they don’t look at the house, nor do they stick around until the Bowdens themselves are ready to evacuate from the hurricane’s path. And like an evil Batman, Max leaps down from the roof and directly onto Zack as he gazes up through a window.
Yeah, bad decisions are being made all around.
With a box cutter, some zip ties, a syringe full of that brainwashing drug, and Tom’s own shotgun, he subdues the entire family and conducts a show trial of Tom and Anna, during which the following, definitive version of events is established:
Yes, Anna had information that she suppressed that could have led to Max’s exoneration, because by that point she worried he was her unborn baby’s father, believed him to be a monster, and never wanted her child to know him. Yes, Tom knew that info too. No, neither of them secretly thought he was innocent and just wanted to get rid of him — they sincerely believed he, not Crystal, killed his wife.
His wife, but not his son. It’s true that Crystal butchered Melissa and let Max take the blame. (Whatever went on between the two of them when they were younger is hinted at in the childlike terms of being mean, but dear god, one can only imagine.) But she carved her baby out and stole him, leaving that huge scar down the boy’s torso. Noa dug up just enough info on the birth for Anna to finally put it all together, and use it to persuade Max of the terrible truth as well. The son he’s been hallucinating all this time was alive, until he killed him.
An astonishing variety of horror-thriller business is going on during all this. The hurricane sends a tree hurtling through a window, causing Max to call on his gods as his witnesses. Natalie slowly burns through her zip tie, and the skin of her own wrist, with a lighter in order to escape. Zack is forced by Max to bite into his own tongue. There’s a whole block of knives right there on the counter the whole time for god’s sake. (Chekov would have blushed.)
In the end, it takes all four Bowdens to defeat their tormenter. Anna breaks him with the knowledge that he burned his own son alive. Natalie shoots him in the leg and head with a nail gun; he survives thanks to his metal plate, though she wouldn’t know about that and looks at him like he’s the goddamn Terminator. (He honestly might as well be at this point.) Zack realizes he’s being mindwiped again, rallies, and decks Max. Tom and Anna get in on it as Natalie frees them, using knives to stab him. Tom knocks him into the pool, where he and Anna hold him under until he loses consciousness, with Natalie screaming “kill him!” all the while.
But they don’t. “Let him die in a cage,” Anna says. She and her husband fish the man out of the water so he can live out the rest of his life in hell.
The series ends with an ostensibly idyllic scene, with the nuclear family eating grilled burgers in the backyard by the pool. But it’s a glass half empty/glass half full kind of idyll.
Natalie doesn’t open the letter she gets from a DNA lab with her paternity test results, and calls Tom “Dad” for the first time…but that information will still be there on her bed when she goes back inside, and will always be there even if she burns the letter up. That ghastly reporter who followed her mom’s case and then fell in love with Max will always be peddling bullshit she can watch on the internet, too.
Zack smiles when he’s snapped out of a reverie…but he does have to be snapped out of it, and it doesn’t seem like he’s just zoned out in the normal teenage way. Max and Neveah absolutely fried this kid’s developing brain, and he’ll carry physical and psychological scars from his contact with them forever.
Tom is the grillmaster, the husband and father who proved faithful, who defended his family but without, in the end, becoming the kind of monster he fought. Yet the motion of the foliage in he corner of his eye has him jumping. Even if the existence of Max’s murderino groupies and eventually parole-eligible daughter weren’t factors, it’s clear he’ll be leaping at shadows for the rest of his life.
And Anna? Well, she’s “the psychopath,” in Tom’s words, who ordered a burger with no bun or cheese or ketchup. It’s a joke, but does the truth come out in jest here? Would it have been morally worse to kill Max during a life-and-death struggle, or to save him for the express purpose of inflicting decades of 1984 Room 101 “worst thing in the world”–style torture on him until he dies? She certainly wasn’t being merciful. Was she being sadistic?
And what does that one last flash of inverted red-and-white imagery mean, when Anna looks over her shoulder as the family sits down to eat? Those kinds of shots have meant everything from hinting at the violence to come in the show’s opening shots to revealing a dismembered friend in the very pool around which they are now gathered.
(I’d have moved. I’d also have asked the cops to stick around for an extra 15 minutes until we were packed and ready to leave, just in case they missed the lunatic who was standing on the roof. I’d have yelled “Hey Mom, Dad, there’s someone on the roof” when I heard someone walking around on the roof. If I were the cops I’d have warned the Bowdens about Max’s escape before “a couple of hours” had elapsed. I’d have done a lot of things differently. But again, this episode gave me Javier Bardem on the roof in a hurricane, and I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth.)
Maybe the best way to see these flashes are as visual representations of the show’s titular emotion: fear. What is Anna afraid of, in the end? Has she been permanently traumatized by what Max did…or by what she did?
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.