Trauma doesn’t make sense. It causes you to do things that turn you, from an outsider’s perspective, into a troublemaker, a weirdo, or a straight-up “crazy” person. Pop culture often flinches when it comes to portrayals of the realities of things like PTSD, mostly because it makes for uncomfortable viewing. Who wants to see the ways that trauma taints us? But it’s in this territory where Furious really finds its footing.
Episode four, “Flash Flood,” sees Alice bringing together the NYPD and FBI for the investigation. They now kinda believe her theory about one killer being behind multiple overdoses, but the reveal of a photograph of Jay Easton (Peter McRobbie) surrounded by underaged trafficking victims throws a spanner in the works. As does the presence of Marshall, Alice’s alcoholic ex who beat her to pieces then killed her career as a cop. At least Danny is on her side. Sort of.
Catherine has a new name, a new wig, and a new target: the father of an unemployed waster who does weird things like order tinned fish on a first date. (Is this a new red flag we have to worry about, ladies?) This job offers a fun new way to ruin the lives of her abusers, like negging their families into submission. Catherine’s methodical approach has many paths of success, and after seeing her honeytrap creepy CEOs, there is something almost quaint about this attack. It’s not often that you get to see someone annoy their victims into giving up. It’s the closest she gets to unbridled fun on this show, but even that is tainted by trauma, like everything in her world.
She’s not alone. Alice turns to another sexual encounter with an anonymous man who she cajoles into some roughhousing. After one hookup where her consensual beating leaves a few visible marks, Nora is surprisingly unfazed. “You think I’ve never let someone take a few cracks at this piñata,” she jokes. The women share a brief and morbid connection over kink and catharsis. Everyone needs a coping mechanism for this job, a way to reclaim the power that’s been ripped from their hands.
Nora’s other emotional crutch is booze, which she poorly conceals in her Stanley cup. After realizing that her involvement in the case dates back many years, she tries to confront (or warn) her former superior. The setting for this? Hilariously, a mental health seminar for traumatized cops. The look of seething awareness on Nora’s face as she’s forced to listen to buzzphrases about protecting one’s peace is a brief moment of catharsis, one that’s quickly tossed aside when the status quo is reinforced. How maddeningly familiar to hear the rhetoric of self-care get turned into a defense for those who cause all the pain.
Emmy Rossum got her start in acting as an impeccably elegant figure who seemed to have emerged from a fashion spread, but it took getting grimy and blue-collar on Shameless for her to break out. It’s been a while since she’s had a role as meaty or scene-stealing as Fiona Gallagher (pour one out if you were one of about 16 people who saw her in Angelyne); Alice feels like the version of Fiona who got a gun and a badge but double the trauma. In the rol, Rossum embodies the tropes of a classic hard-bitten cop but with the weary knowledge that such figures are viewed differently when they’re women. She’s flinty and laser-focused on the cause, but is also barely holding it together. Only rage and stubbornness keep her afloat.
It’s in Rossum’s scenes with Scoot McNairy, a man who improves everything he’s in through his mere presence, that she truly shines. Alice and Danny, whose friendship is at its most tenuous as the episode begins, team up to interrogate Emma (the ever-underrated Hope Davis), Easton’s daughter. She’s a pro at dealing with the police, clearly, dismissing the photo of her father as a Photoshop hit job. Danny has his own issues, largely his lack of money to fund care for his disabled son, but he is trying. He cannot for the life of him understand why Alice would choose violent sex over therapy, but he listens, his feelings for her barely concealed by his bitterness at his lot in life. But he and Alice do make a great team, cracking pitch-black banter amid the chaos and bouncing off one another in interrogations.
Every time one of Alice’s colleagues dismisses her intuition or mounting evidence, you’re reminded of how long it took for their real-world equivalents to state the bleeding obvious on similar matters. Yes, Furious’ Epstein parallels are obvious, but remember, it’s not as though he was ever a unique figure in the matter of powerful people having the means to abuse vulnerable girls and women with impunity. Alice hopes that justice will provide some sort of cleansing for her and Catherine, the pair of them mirroring one another’s struggles. But then she’s taken off the case for “mental health” reasons. As so often happens with victims’ rights, Furious shows the hunt for the truth as an endless cycle of “two steps forward, one step back.”
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