Furious Recap: A Hopeless Place

What do you think was the response when Rihanna’s team was approached to use her hit track “We Found Love” as basically the theme song for Catherine’s killer crusade in Furious? I bet you they were like, “Hell yes.” It’s interesting that the show has used it prominently three times now, and every time it somehow gets more poignant and relevant to the narrative. In my mind, the conclusion of this episode utilizes it perfectly: the energy of the synthesizer-heavy buildup ratcheting up the tension of Catherine’s final stand right before bursting into her manifesto, “We found love in a hopeless place.” Damn if I didn’t sob and sob right along with Catherine as she started walking down Jay Easton’s driveway.

Television shows don’t generally use existing pop songs over and over as a repeated musical motif, but Rihanna’s song is a particularly clever choice here. The music team, including Kristen Higuera as music coordinator, fully knew what they were doing as they selected this banger for Catherine’s theme. Friends, when I looked up the release date of the single and found that it dropped mere months before Isabel’s murder, I sobbed yet again, imagining Isabel and Catherine bopping around in the confines of the horrific (and hopeless) Candlelight Lounge, singing to one another, as Isabel’s pregnant belly bounced between them. The song repeatedly reminds us that these memories are what Catherine is fighting for, what she’s seeking vengeance for, and the reason that no amount of suffering is enough for either Jay Easton or his daughter Emma.

The biggest bombshell in this episode is that Emma Easton was likely the person who murdered Isabel. After Danny tells Alice that he won’t turn over the USB drive that Alden gave him because it has a video of her on it, he goes to reopen the Isabel Luna murder case. Knowing what he knows now about how Jay and Caleb Easton were with her on the night of her death, he asks the medical examiner to run a sample from under Isabel’s fingernails against Caleb Easton’s DNA. He does, and it turns out that the sample matches Caleb’s to the tune of 24 percent. Now, if you paid even the scantest attention in high-school biology, you know that this is huge even before Kevin tells Danny that it means the sample came from Caleb’s sibling.

Now, Emma is clearly complicit in everything that’s going down with her father, but she’s also clearly been in an abusive and codependent relationship with him for her entire life. When we check in at the Easton residence, Emma is dutifully clearing the house of staff. When she cracks open the door to reveal a frightened girl named Lacey on offer for her monstrous father, I almost threw up. Her offer of hot cider is particularly twisted, as if she’s pretending Lacey is simply a guest in her home and not a prisoner.

Furious drops the ball a bit in the interactions with Emma and Jay Easton, turning them into one-dimensional caricatures instead of complex villains, but honestly, this show isn’t really about them. There are monsters all over the world, every day, who abuse and murder young women — this point is driven home when Nora tells Alice that “all the Jane Does” are buried three and four plots deep in a local cemetery — and we don’t need to sympathize with their motivations in order to understand their actions. Jay Easton is particularly one-dimensional when, later, he screeches that he needs his tapes of child pornography in order to, just, like, live his life (reprehensible and also somehow juvenile), and tells his daughter that absolutely nothing is going to happen to him even if the cops do find his stash. Naturally, he believes this because nothing has ever happened to him before. (Refer back to: “He talked his way out of it, of course.”)

But something can happen to Emma. Emma is finally waking up to her maladaptive attachment to her father and what it could mean for her if he’s caught. Unlike men, women don’t get to get away with bad behavior (nor should they), and Emma is right in the crosshairs of this investigation, especially since her DNA is on Isabel Luna’s body. It’s tempting to draw comparisons to Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, as she was complicit in recruiting women for him, but Emma’s involvement comes with another wrinkle: Emma was clearly sexually and physically abused by her father as a child, and then somehow became his concierge and protector while also fending off all the internal shame and guilt and trauma from both her childhood and her current adult involvement with him. Emma’s situation is not simple, and Furious attempts to illustrate her internal conflict by showing us her coping by potting flowers as her father rapes and tortures a child, zooming out to show a glorious greenhouse, the verdant full bloom directly contrasting with the horrors going on behind closed doors just inside the house. But as much as Hope Davis works this scene, sorry not sorry, I have zero sympathy for Emma, and I hope she burns.

This episode is all about confronting the nefarious pervasiveness of sex trafficking. Along with directly seeing a child who has been abused in Jay Easton’s house, we also see the fallout of Danny finding Alice’s video on the USB drive from Alden. That USB drive had hundreds, if not thousands, of videos on it, and Alice was on one of them. We find out that she was not raped by Jay Easton, but another man filmed her while she was being raped, and it’s clearly been circulated among networks of monstrous men, much like they’re collecting trading cards or coins. These girls are not people to them; they’re objects to be used and abused and cast aside, much like Isabel Luna was after her death and Alice was before she was taken in by Marshall’s mother.

Okay, so, let’s address the Alice of it all. In the wake of her (and Marshall’s) near-death experience, she’s reevaluating what matters. When she wakes up in the hospital, Nora chastises her for saving Marshall’s life instead of going after Catherine and apprehending her. I truly do not think Alice could have caught up with Catherine in her drugged state, even if Marshall hadn’t shown up to attack her, but Nora’s making a larger point here. The people in law enforcement aren’t really the good guys; they use people and abuse people in the pursuit of truth and justice. “We are inhuman in defense of humanity,” she says. Letting Marshall die so they could use Catherine to get to Jay Easton was ostensibly the most positive outcome in that situation, but it would have harmed everyone involved. There’s truly no righteous path to justice.

Alice takes this to heart, and she goes home with Danny by her side. He dutifully stays with her to make sure she’s okay throughout the night, but in the morning, he’s unprepared for her admission of love. He tells her about the USB drive and what’s on it, and Alice reels. She says that he can submit it, and he says he won’t because he loves her, too. However, he can’t get the image of her face in the video out of his head, so he can’t be with her right now. This is painful and unfair to Alice, but I get it. Danny follows through on his promise to pursue the case in any way possible, reopening the Isabel Luna case and getting some solid info, and he even beats up the evil Ed George as he tries to blackmail him into giving up the USB drive.

Ed George is totally the unsung villain of this show, and it’s fun to watch him flounder here as all his usual tricks fail. Also, he’s on the flash drive because of course he is. Marty probably is, too. The meeting between all the horrible men in law enforcement at the top of the episode had me screaming into my couch pillows as they placed the blame on the botched shelter operation with Nora and discussed how they were going to kill Catherine the minute they found her. (Dead girls can’t testify.) When Frank Choi is the most reasonable man in a room, you know that things are way off.

Nora is sidelined, and so she goes to sing karaoke — she’s decent! — and drink her sorrows away in a Hawaiian shirt and no bra. Sounds fun! She’s anticipating that they’re going to retire her because of her drinking problem, but then Alice brings her some intel about Catherine, Elena, and Big Man. “You’re using me. Good,” says Nora as she drunkenly realizes what Alice is doing. Alice has found Elena, and she asks Nora to go with her to find her. Nora happily accepts, as long as she can sing in the car.

While they’re casing the hotel, Nora tells Alice about her experiences raiding rooms in the past. She tells Alice that she would imagine that she had big, muscular wings growing out of her back. “You go inside one of these places and see the things you have to see; you can’t stay human, you have to become something else. A creature from a different world. That’s why I drink. I don’t want to lose my wings,” she says. The idea of becoming something else entirely in order to be a crusader for justice inside a broken system that resists change is so incredibly frustrating, but it makes me love Nora even more. (Shout-out to the Noras of the world!) And then! When Big Man arrives with Elena in tow, the diminutive Nora takes down the giant man in less than a minute, all without a bra on! This woman might just be a goddess on earth. Please, if there’s a season two of Furious, let her be in it.

Inside Elena’s room, Alice plays bad cop. She reveals that Isabel wasn’t Elena’s sister, but her mother, and intimidates her into calling Catherine on the burner phone she gave her. It’s clear that Alice’s previous traumas are triggered by the sight of Elena, a 14-year-old girl in a sex-trafficking situation, and so her coping mechanisms also come to the surface here too. Alice is basically talking to a version of her younger self as she snarls, “You don’t need her. You don’t fucking need anyone. You do what you need to do to get through this.” For what it’s worth, this is the exact opposite of how Catherine and Isabel operated when they were in the same situation. Alice never found love in her hopeless place, and so she had to fend for herself, never learning that love and affection don’t have to come with a side of excruciating pain.

Elena buys Alice’s line and presses the call button on her phone. And what luck! A phone rings in the bathroom, and it’s Catherine. (Why a Gen-Z girlie has her phone on ring is beyond me, but it made for a fabulously exciting reveal, so let’s go with it!) Alice barges into the bathroom while Nora runs after Elena. Alone with Catherine, Alice continues to play bad cop, growling in her ear that she has nothing, the USB drive had nothing, and that her worst fear is going to come true: Jay Easton is going to die, comfortably in his bed. Catherine is furious, confused, and bereft. “What the fuck is this?” she whispers. Alice spins her around and asks her what she would do if she let her go. I cannot get this line reading out of my head. Emmy Rossum delivers it with layers upon layers, one part antagonistic, two parts soothing, and three parts directive, eventually giving Catherine a road map for successful revenge, even if it might mean her ultimate demise. Catherine quickly realizes what’s happening and beams from ear to ear, racing out of the room as fast as she can. (Lola Petticrew has the best smile on TV, no argument.)

As Alice races to her car in pursuit of Catherine, Nora calls after her. Alice is pumped, shouting her plan into the air. They’re going to follow Catherine there and search Jay Easton’s “whole fucking house” because they’ll have cause due to Catherine’s presence. “I got my wings,” Alice says before slamming her door and speeding away. Nora is gobsmacked and, like, pretty impressed.

The episode ends on Catherine pulling into Jay Easton’s driveway, ready for her final showdown. As “We Found Love” pulses in the background, she takes her first steps toward her fate, determined to do whatever it takes to honor her murdered friend.

• The scene with Alice and her half-sister is devastating. I’m starting to question whether Alice’s father sexually abused her prior to her being trafficked, and whether or not Alice’s mom blamed her for the abuse, resulting in her complete abandonment of both husband and daughter.

• At one point, Catherine briefly considers selling the engagement ring that Alden gave her, but doesn’t. She may have killed his mom, but she still has affection and respect for him. If she stays alive, I hope Alden gets to visit her in jail.

• I know that a lot of chatter surrounding Furious is about Catherine and Alice and their cat-and-mouse relationship, akin to Killing Eve, but I actually think the growing relationship between Nora and Alice is the more compelling one. These two women doggedly pursue justice, maybe occasionally in ways that stretch ethicality or legality, but they are on the side of the victims, always. As the season winds down, I’m seriously hoping that Hulu renews this show and that Nora and Alice are at the center of it all once again.