Summary
As demented as expected, the Cape Fear finale shows off a lot of the great craft that has underpinned this odd little adaptation, but ultimately the sheer mania is its defining characteristic.
I don’t recall ever enjoying a show so much that I wanted to end so deeply. Cape Fear is very strange, and has been since the beginning, so I suppose it’s only right that its finale is very much the best and worst of it. It’s impeccably shot and staged, and Javier Bardem is acting his ass off, but it’s also bracingly dumb and really, really silly. We’ve already made the point that renewing this for Season 2 would be stupid, but there was no way we were ever going to get a totally conclusive ending, and Episode 10 — titled, fittingly, “The Executioners”, after the original novel — doesn’t even pretend like it’s going to provide one.
Boating Barbecue
Picking up from where we left off, things are not going well for the Cady family. With Anna having jumped into the water and somehow swum to safety without anyone noticing, the Cady clan are left to turn on themselves like hungry dogs. Max, furious about them having lost Anna, shoots Juliette and Luke in the gut and dumps them in the hold, and pistol-whips Robert and locks him in a convenient cage.
Naively, I assumed that Max wounding Crystal and Luke instead of killing them outright meant that they’d survive. But no such luck. Max douses the entire vessel in gasoline and sets it on fire, burning everyone who had made his life a misery to death. Just like that, he’s the last living Cady, with even Luke having suffered for the sins of his mother.
Needless to say, my predictions for who might survive this finale were way off.
Anna Turns the Tables
After barbecuing his entire family, Max heads to open his new restaurant, “Melissa and Adam”, named after his dead wife and son. However, Anna, having slipped away from the boat and hitched a ride back to her car, arrives to spoil the party in highly dramatic fashion with a Bluetooth speaker that plays audio of Nevaeh confessing to Natalie that Max was responsible for everything she did.
Noa is also on-hand to provide an assist, playing recorded video of Max coercing Amy into suicide way back in the premiere. This was presumably acquired from the USB drive that Crystal had. Natalie had recorded her pillow talk with Nevaeh after their little tryst in jail. Together, it’s enough to send Max into a frenzy, and he chokes Anna in full view of the crowd until he’s tackled by a security guard, taking another bump to the head, and promptly arrested.
Storm Warning
With Zack having reunited with Natalie and returned to the family home, and Tom being bailed out by Lexi, the entire Bowden clan is reunited just in time for Max to break out of custody. For maximum dramatic effect, there’s also a storm underway, which Max later implies is the Orishas endorsing his revenge mission, since he’s way off the reservation at this point (not that he was particularly even-keel before).
The police turn up to apologize to Tom for wrongfully arresting him in the first place, and also to have a look around and make sure that Max isn’t there, but then they inexplicably depart having decided the coast is clear, without noticing that Max is stood on the roof in the rain like Batman. This is supposed to be a serious shot, but it’s very funny.
Quick as a flash, Max is inside holding a box cutter to Zack’s neck. He manages to grab the shotgun that Tom was planning to shoot him with, and then takes the entire family hostage so that he can stage a sham trial to determine whether Tom and Anna are guilty of having conspired to send him to prison for their own personal reasons.
Due Process
Max ties Natalie up with plastic zip-ties and ignores her efforts to manipulate him by playing up the whole “daddy” angle, and he drugs Zack into a stupor, rendering him so compliant that he’s able to instruct him to do demented things — like biting off his own tongue — to make sure that Anna and Tom play along.
The truth of the matter, unsurprisingly, is that yes, Anna did take her opportunity to have Max imprisoned. As it happened, there was a leak out of the jury room that the jury was deadlocked, and Max was looking at potentially being acquitted. But since she was frightened of him and, perhaps more importantly, was worried that he had gotten her pregnant, Anna did what she had to do. And so did Tom, who still maintains that he and Anna never slept together during Max’s trial, which is a really weird thing for him to feel like he has to reiterate in this context.
Max, with some help from the thunder — no, really — determines that the Bowdens are guilty and deserve capital punishment, but Anna distracts him by dropping the bombshell that Noa had earlier sent her Luke’s birth certificate, which indicated that Crystal apparently had an unsupervised home birth. Since Max had mentioned that Crystal was unable to conceive children due to an accident, this only means one thing. Luke was Max’s child with Melissa. When Crystal killed her, she cut the kid out of her and claimed him as her own. In burning up the boat, Max killed his own son.
Water Sports
Needless to say, Max doesn’t take this news especially well. While he’s distracted, Natalie, who had been burning through her restraints with a lighter despite the fact that burning plastic stinks and someone would have noticed, manages to free herself. Max pursues her, and she fights him off with a nail gun, taking a chunk out of his head that reveals the metal plate beneath in an obvious homage to The Terminator.
While this is going on, Zack is also inexplicably able to fight through the drug haze and realise that Tom, not Max, is his father. He attacks Max and manages to free Anna and Tom so they can all fight him together. Eventually, Tom body-checks him into the pool, and Anna jumps in to help him drown Max. However, despite Natalie shouting “Kill him!” like a psycho, Anna tells Tom to relent so that Max can die in a cage.
On some level, this constitutes a happy ending for Cape Fear Season 1. The Bowden family is safe, reunited, and exonerated. Max is back in prison (presumably). But the fact that Natalie has the unopened test results that may or may not prove that Max was her father, and Anna looks deeply uncomfortable at the family barbecue, it seems like the influence of Max Cady is going to live on either way.
