Trauma doesn\u2019t make sense. It causes you to do things that turn you, from an outsider\u2019s perspective, into a troublemaker, a weirdo, or a straight-up \u201ccrazy\u201d 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\u2019s in this territory where Furious really finds its footing.<\/p>\n
Episode four, \u201cFlash Flood,\u201d 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\u2019s alcoholic ex who beat her to pieces then killed her career as a cop. At least Danny is on her side. Sort of.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s methodical approach has many paths of success, and after seeing her honeytrap creepy CEOs, there is something almost quaint about this attack. It\u2019s not often that you get to see someone annoy their victims into giving up. It\u2019s the closest she gets to unbridled fun on this show, but even that is tainted by trauma, like everything in her world.<\/p>\n
She\u2019s 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. \u201cYou think I\u2019ve never let someone take a few cracks at this pi\u00f1ata,\u201d 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\u2019s been ripped from their hands.<\/p>\n
Nora\u2019s 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\u2019s face as she\u2019s forced to listen to buzzphrases about protecting one\u2019s peace is a brief moment of catharsis, one that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> for her to break out. It\u2019s been a while since she\u2019s 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<\/a>); 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\u2019re women. She\u2019s flinty and laser-focused on the cause, but is also barely holding it together. Only rage and stubbornness keep her afloat.<\/p>\n It\u2019s in Rossum\u2019s scenes with Scoot McNairy, a man who improves everything he\u2019s 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\u2019s daughter. She\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Every time one of Alice\u2019s colleagues dismisses her intuition or mounting evidence, you\u2019re reminded of how long it took for their real-world equivalents to state the bleeding obvious on similar matters. Yes, Furious\u2019 Epstein parallels are obvious, but remember, it\u2019s 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\u2019s struggles. But then she\u2019s taken off the case for \u201cmental health\u201d reasons. As so often happens with victims\u2019 rights, Furious shows the hunt for the truth as an endless cycle of \u201ctwo steps forward, one step back.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Trauma doesn\u2019t make sense. It causes you to do things that turn you, from an outsider\u2019s perspective, into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":582178,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[93,61,60,282],"class_list":["post-582177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=582177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/582177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/582178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=582177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=582177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=582177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}