Summary

Cementing its place as the best show — certainly the best crime show — of the year, Furious delivers a note-perfect finale that provides tons of short-term payoff while also leaving the door tantalisingly open for more.

Some shows are just perfect. It’s a big word, that, and people tend to use it either too loosely or too sparingly. I’m in the latter camp, ordinarily, but for Furious, I’m willing to make an exception. And even though technically the word “perfect” means entirely without flaw, which I don’t think necessarily applies to this or indeed any show, there’s something about this entire story holistically, capped off by a note-perfect ending, that can only be described as perfect. 

I’d already said that Furious‘s long-term legacy would be defined by this finale, but I needn’t have worried. It ties up every loose end and character arc and delivers tons of short-term emotional payoff, and the performances are as exquisite as ever. But it also tees up Season 2 in a way that I genuinely wasn’t expecting, and that is, in hindsight, the best possible way of doing so. Understandably, then, there’s a lot to go over. 

Ugh, Emma

Since Jay Easton is such a cartoonishly evil monster, it’s easy to forget about the complicity of his daughter, Emma. But we mustn’t, and more to the point, Catherine won’t let us anyway. It was, Danny informs Alice while warning her not to rush inside Easton’s house without backup, Emma’s DNA under Isabel’s fingernails. At the same moment, it’s Emma wiping Jay’s remaining hard drives and arming herself with a gun from his safe. It’s Emma whom Ed is trying to warn over the phone, and Emma that Catherine instantly recognises when she enters the house. 

Being back in Jay’s home immediately starts to jog Catherine’s foggy memory. She recalls being greeted at the door by Emma, who, by her own admission, would lay the red carpet out for the girls Jay brought home to abuse. She put out pretty flowers and made the place clean. She gave the girls drugs, if that’s what they wanted (and, presumably, even if they didn’t). She was totally complicit, and her excuse — that teenage girls are apparently a wildly different concept from “little girls” — holds no water whatsoever, especially for Catherine. 

Catherine Remembers Who Killed Isabel

Catherine and Emma wrestle off-screen, and in the tussle, Emma’s gun goes off, summoning Alice to the property. Emma is still in the greenhouse. She shot Catherine, apparently in self-defense, but then Catherine took the gun and fled into the house. Alice follows, giving Emma time to slope off, but it allows Catherine to remember more and more. She recognises Jay’s secret room. She feels the memories flooding back. Lola Petticrew is phenomenal here as Alice tries to compel her to put the gun down so the police don’t shoot her on sight when they burst in, and Catherine rails against the injustice of being unable to decide what fate people deserve when all of her choices have been taken away from her throughout her life. 

Here, Catherine articulates the psychological motive behind her killing spree. It isn’t just revenge — it’s power. Taking someone’s life is the only time when Catherine feels powerful and in control; the only time she has ever felt that way. And this is a sentiment we’ll return to later, since it’s very important. 

Meanwhile, while the police and FBI pile up outside, Alice pushes Catherine to remember more and more. The two of them are with Emma in the secret room, where Catherine recalls drugs on the table and Isabel bleeding on the floor. She’d just had a baby. Jay had hit her, refused to get her help; Emma had been summoned to fetch Catherine at Isabel’s request. Catherine recalls the blood on Emma’s feet. She remembers Isabel squeezing her hands so tightly that the feeling went away, explaining why her fingertips are still numb. Emma claims Isabel was alive when she left the room and dead when she returned, implying that Catherine was responsible for her death. 

It seems like a cruel accusation, but Alice sees the truth in it. Catherine remembers everything. In a very neatly edited sequence, Alice gets on the floor close to Catherine’s face while she recalls fatally injecting Isabel with heroin to put her out of her misery. Intermittently, Catherine sees Alice as Isabel. Catherine killed Isabel, and then erased the memory because it was too painful. Alice consoles her while Emma rushes outside to summon the police, but despite her claims that Catherine’s wielding a gun, Alice shields her to make sure she isn’t shot.

Getting Away With Murder

While Catherine is being tended to, Alice heads upstairs to arrest Jay Easton. When she wakes up, he recognises her, claiming that her video was one of his favourites, but he starts having some kind of respiratory attack, and by the time medical help arrives, he’s dead. Thanks to Emma’s efforts, all the evidence against him has been destroyed.

Ed helped, obviously. Even after Nora confronts him about openly trying to call Emma while the FBI are assembling outside, he’s resolute in his position because he believes he’s safe. One dead girl, who apparently would have died anyway, was worth it for the intel that Jay provided. I’m not sure about the truth of that, and neither is Nora. 

Danny gets a commendation for his efforts. So, too, does Marshall, who was apparently injured in the line of duty while trying to catch Catherine. Nora attends the ceremony, but only to ask him to pass over the evidence from Hal’s hard drive, which she earlier intuited he was keeping secret. He won’t give it up, though. He’s loyal to the end. 

Alice’s Happy Ending

Alice, meanwhile, has been suspended. She goes to see Catherine in prison, ostensibly to tell her that Isabel’s body will be moved from Hart Island — the finale’s title, and the place where Jane Does are buried in unmarked graves — to a marked grave in a cemetery. But Catherine knows why she’s really there. She has a secret, apparently, which we’ll get to in a minute. 

Alice goes to the beach with Danny after all. They kiss, and presumably more, and seem to get their happily ever after. In a lovely touch, Danny still sits outside the shower while Alice is washing to make sure she feels safe. He’s quitting the force, too, having decided he’s had enough of having to look at things he doesn’t want to. On that note, he hands the USB drive to Alice, so she can do what she needs to do with it. 

Naturally, she gives it to Nora, along with a confession that there’s a video of herself on there. Nora asks if she watched it, since if she wants to do this job, she has to face it. When Alice joins Nora’s team at the FBI, Nora slips her the code to the room where sensitive materials are reviewed, and tells her to search for “Alice”. She does, and weeps while she watches the video. Emmy Rossum is — and has consistently been — remarkable in this. 

A Killer Setup For Season 2

Alice does indeed have a secret. And much like how Alice immediately detected that Catherine was the one to put Isabel out of her misery, Catherine can sense that not all was as it seemed with Jay Easton’s death. In a flashback, we see that his respiratory failure was caused by Alice standing on his ventilator wire. While she was calling for assistance, she was suffocating him with her hands. 

And by all accounts, she was enjoying it. It seems like Catherine was right about murder making one feel powerful, especially one who has been consistently denied power throughout their lives. And the thing about power is that it’s addictive. Furious ends with Alice looking up everyone who ever downloaded her video. There are over 50,000 of them. Her eyes light up, and she can’t help but smile as she looks over the list of potential victims.

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