The Furious Finale Takes an Even Darker Turn

Spoilers below.

The Furious finale wraps up almost all loose ends and ends on a devastating note that feels in line with the darkness the series exposed. Throughout the season, the intention of Catherine’s (Lola Petticrew) killing spree has been to punish those who harmed her but also to find out what happened to her best friend Isabel (Larissa Campos) on the night that she died. All the while, FBI agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) has been on her tail, reckoning with her own painful past.

The episode starts where the previous one ended, with Catherine standing in front of Jay Easton’s (Peter McRobbie) house, preparing to walk inside and possibly kill him. When she enters, she finds Emma Easton (Hope Davis), Jay’s daughter. Emma was present the night that Isabel died, Catherine realizes. In fact, as authorities recently found, her DNA was found on Isabel’s body. For years, Emma has been a facilitator for her father’s abuse of girls and young women.

When Alice arrives at the house, she sees that Catherine has just been shot. She searches for her in the Easton home, calling out to her to drop her gun. She and Catherine have a conversation through the walls of the house. Catherine asks if Alice ever killed someone, to which Alice responds “no.” Catherine proceeds to explain what it’s like:

“It’s power, watching someone die,” she says. “There’s this moment, right before they go, when you’re not scared at all. And I was always scared. But when I’m killing someone, it’s like I’m eating him. Like swallowing him. Like everything he’s ever done is disappearing inside me and I have all the fucking power in the world. And they don’t want us to have that. They want to take that from us. But I want you to feel it.”

As a sex worker who was trafficked as a teen and has no home or family, Catherine has been stripped of power all her life. Men have used her to prove their own power; she wants to know what it’s like to be on the other side.

Alice finds Catherine confronting Emma in the private room of Jay’s office. As the two speak, Catherine begins to regain her memories of Isabel’s death, which she now knows happened at this very house. She goes to the room where she remembers being with Isabel that night, and Emma explains that Isabel had been heavily bleeding from complications after childbirth. Jay angrily refused to call for medical help and then hit Isabel.

Catherine finally remembers what happened that night. Isabel was in tremendous pain, and Catherine sat with her. She slowly recalls that Isabel asked her for help to die peacefully. There were drugs in the room and Catherine injected Isabel with fentanyl out of compassion. Emma bolts out of the room, but Alice listens to Catherine recount the story and then handcuffs her. The FBI arrives, but Alice orders the officers not to shoot Catherine.

Alice then enters Jay Easton’s bedroom, where he’s sleeping. He wakes up and sees her over him. Jay recognizes Alice from the abusive videos he’s watched her in; he even calls her “the movie star,” to Alice’s horror. Their encounter doesn’t last long, as Jay begins to cough and his heart rate drops. Alice calls for medical assistance, but Jay dies on the scene.

Alice goes to the Jersey Shore, meeting Danny (Scoot McNairy) at the beach house he mentioned renting earlier in the season. They kiss on the beach. Danny, who’s done being a cop, gives Alice the USB drive that contains the copies of Jay Easton’s incriminating files. An abusive video of Alice as a teenager is on there, and Danny wants her to decide whether to turn in the evidence.

Alice chooses to turn the flash drive in, letting Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) know that there is footage of her on it from when she was 14 years old. Nora, tough as ever, tells her that she needs to confront her past and watch the video. Later, Alice goes into the locked room in the FBI office that’s used for viewing sensitive materials and plays the video. She breaks down crying at the computer—it’s just one of Rossum’s many moving moments in her performance.

When she collects herself, Alice looks up how many times the video has been downloaded. It’s over 50,000. As the episode ends, she scrolls down a seemingly endless list of names of all the users who have viewed it. The screen then cuts to Alice speaking with Catherine in the prison visiting room. Catherine asks her if she liked how it felt to kill.

It turns out, Catherine knows that Alice has a secret. She read the police report of the night she was arrested but focused on how Jay Easton died upstairs. A flashback of that moment reveals that Jay didn’t go into cardiac arrest out of the blue; Alice had stepped on his oxygen wire and suffocated him before calling for medics. She killed him.

In Furious, the crime is not as simple as “men are the bad guys taking advantage of women”—although that is still part of it. Women are not just victims; they are also trying to enforce justice, whether through the traditional legal system (Alice) or their own rogue, violent methods (Catherine). They are trying to expose men in power (Nora) or protect them and, in effect, protect themselves (Emma). The way these women digest and respond to abuse is complicated, just as it is in real life, and sometimes these responses make them act like bad guys too.

What does seem uncomplicated and true is that people who abuse their power should not be able to get away with it, let alone get rewarded for it. And yet, it still happens. That’s why it’s so maddening to see Alice’s abusive ex Marshall (Jake Lacy) receive a medal after he attacked her, or Nora’s superior Ed (Danny McCarthy) remain in his high-ranking job despite being in cahoots with the predator they were after. When the obvious wrongs are so blatantly ignored, how could you not be filled with rage?

Furious is not a satisfying female revenge saga; there is no Beatrix Kiddo doing the exploding heart technique on her abuser before the credits roll. Instead, the women have to barrel through one horror after another, often resorting to destructive methods to be able to carry on another day. Alice killed Jay Easton, but she didn’t, as Catherine described, swallow him whole and make all his bad deeds disappear. He was just one man in a ubiquitous system of abuse, which lives on from the high ranks of the NYPD to the 50,000 faceless internet users who viewed Alice’s video. We might not know what Alice will do about it, or whether her actions will be “right,” but it seems like all we can do—like when these things happen in real life—is get angry.