Furious has made many things clear throughout its fiery first season (it was renewed in the lead-up to the finale): trauma is messy, and its impact can spread like wildfire; being a victim doesn’t always make you easy to root for; the system is broken and trying to play within its rules is futile. For Alice and Catherine, two sides of the same coin and two women bound by their wrath, there’s another even bleaker truth that they’re finally ready to admit: Doing the wrong thing is fun.
In “Hart Island,” the race to the Easton estate is on. Catherine has a head start, but Ed has already warned Jay Easton to dispose of any evidence he may have held onto (which, of course, he had). His daughter Emma is on clean-up duty. Danny and Nora are speeding to the location, eager to get there before the FBI. It’s Alice who gets there first, her motives unclear. “We don’t get to decide what someone’s punishment should be,” she tells Catherine, but we’re eight episodes in and it’s a tired line. We’ve seen Alice’s stubborn adherence to the rules fall apart time and time again. She can’t sell it anymore, but the fantasy is worth clinging to, somehow.
Furious is a distinctly post-#MeToo show, but it’s also an undeniably post-Epstein one too. The writers have not been subtle in drawing parallels between Jay Easton and the late sex trafficker—although there are, unfortunately, many other notorious abusers with whom one could draw comparisons. Easton hasn’t been a massive presence onscreen. Whenever we see him, he’s a frail and pathetic figure, unable to do anything for himself but petulantly demanding everything from others. He asks his daughter Emma for a head rub while she rushes to destroy the images of CSAM he huffily held onto. Easton is undeniably a monster, but he’s not one bad apple. It is his circle of enablers, hangers-on, and wannabe power players who inspire equal revulsion.
What to make of Emma Easton? “I’m a victim here too,” she claims to Catherine during their confrontation in her beautiful greenhouse. This is her solace from her father’s crimes, the ones she abetted without a second thought. It may be true that she is also a victim, but it rings hollow, with Hope Davis nailing that note of haughtiness amid the wobbling panic in her voice. Emma was the pretty face of the operation, the one who made everything look nice and wiped away the blood. As Catherine finally pieces together her broken memory, Emma reveals poor Isabel’s fate.
Again, credit must go to Davis for treading a very fine line, showing Emma’s self-serving panic and the hints of arrogance amid her regret. Yes, she seems sad over what happened, but not overtly so, certainly not when compared to Catherine’s own agony. She may hate her father, but she likes convenience, and it takes so little to deride a victim’s innocence. “There’s a big difference,” she says, between little girls and teenagers, and she won’t let Catherine call herself the former. In a show full of gut-piercing moments, this is one of the most fatal.
Lola Petticrew’s always had the flashier role in the show, the cunning killer with a justifiable agenda who veers between theatricality and terror. But that doesn’t make what she has to pull off here any easier. Gone is the schemer with a bevy of wigs and actorly skill. Now, left bleeding on the floor after Emma shot her in the shoulder, she looks like a little girl waving a toy gun around and begging for her mind to stop betraying her. And here, she makes her greatest confession: “It’s power, watching someone die.” We know she’s enjoyed the results of her fentanyl kills, but it still shocks to hear her say it out loud. “It’s like I’m eating him,” she says, with a glimmer of the old Catherine from the first half of the season in her eye. Moreover, she wants Alice to feel it.
It seems that she won’t get her moment when she sees Easton in bed and watches him die a free man, his last words having been complimenting her as an “actress” in one of his favorite videos. If Furious has taught us anything, it’s that those with enough money can do whatever they want with zero consequences. As Catherine is marched off to jail and Marshall gets a commendation for being injured in the line of duty, the NYPD and FBI seem back to the status quo. At least Danny has matured enough to offer Alice his love and support. He can’t be her dominant sexual partner, but he can wait for her by the shower. It’s as close as we may get to true love in a series like this, and Danny is the spark of optimism that maybe men can reject a rotten system that upholds their supremacy.
In the sensitive materials room of the FBI’s basement, Alice finally sees the video of her young self. We don’t hear it. All we see is Alice’s reaction, with Rossum absolutely killing it in these stunning close-ups of her eyes and face. For a few seconds, she looks directly down the lens, and we, the audience, are suddenly culpable. That would have been a pretty honest finale for Furious to end there. Fighting a dirty battle in the name of good is tough work, but someone’s got to do it, even if it breaks them. Now, however, it seems that Alice has a new plan. She’s seen the names of the hundreds of people who have downloaded that video. As the flashbacks to what actually happened to Jay Easton reveal, Catherine was right: It felt good to kill.
The about-turn of Furious setting up future seasons of more righteous vengeance against the worst men alive is not unexpected, but one cannot help but worry that it might be an oversimplification of the show’s wonderful nuances. What has made Furious so special is its rejection of easy answers and its understanding that “the ends justify the means” is a corrosive ideology that can hurt as much as it can heal. Engaging in a corrupt game means rolling in the mud with the pigs, and that can elicit many conflicting emotions. Will pure satisfaction be the primary one going forward for Alice and Catherine? We can but hope that season two continues to take the hard way out.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.