SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from “Hart Island,” the Season 1 finale of “Furious,” now streaming on Hulu.
So what’s the deal with Alice’s little smile at the end of “Furious”? Emmy Rossum’s pleased expression, as happy as we’ve seen Alice throughout “Furious,” is the final image that she and series creator Elizabeth Meriwether deliver to the audience. Not forever, though: Hulu announced last week that “Furious” has been renewed for Season 2.
The smile is in answer to a question posed by Catherine (Lola Petticrew), the serial killer Alice has hunted all season in her capacity as an FBI agent. Earlier in the season, Catherine gave Alice a pep talk about how wonderful it feels to kill men who prey upon women and girls. Now imprisoned, and having figured out that Alice murdered the Jeffrey Epstein-coded predator Jay Easton (Peter McRobbie), Catherine asks insistently, “I said, did you like the way it felt?”
The Season 1 finale mostly takes place at the Easton estate in Connecticut, after Alice essentially sends Catherine there at the end of the previous episode. Emma Easton (Hope Davis) has put her father, Jay, who’s whining about his predicament, to bed, and plots with FBI special agent Ed George (Danny McCarthy) to destroy all the evidence. Catherine, hellbent on learning who killed her friend Isabel (Larissa Campos), quietly enters the greenhouse to confront Emma, who shoots her. But even injured, Catherine is beginning to remember things. When Alice arrives, Catherine says, “You wanted me to come here because you wanted me to kill him,” to which Alice replies, “We don’t get to decide what someone’s punishment will be.”
That’s when Catherine delivers the monologue that seemingly changes Alice’s mind on that issue, as Catherine describes how she felt when killing the men who enabled their alpha, Jay Easton. “When I’m killing him, it’s like I’m eating him,” Catherine says, as Alice listens intently on the other side of the wall, mirroring her. “Like, I’m 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 wanna take that from us. But I want you to feel it.”
Armed with a handgun, Catherine goes upstairs into Jay’s secret room and finds Emma there, but Alice stops her from shooting. That’s when Catherine’s memories flood back, and she remembers that it was she who killed Isabel that night, injecting her with drugs — which ended up being her M.O. with all of her recent victims too. But with Isabel, Catherine was only speeding up the inevitable. After a horrible night spent with Easton and his friends, Isabel was in immense pain and had begun to bleed out — a complication from recently giving birth. “She asked me to,” a devastated Catherine tearfully tells Alice, as Alice cuffs her and they hold hands. Outside, Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) is busting Ed for having colluded with Jay all these years, and he yells, “It was one dead girl! And she would have died anyway.”
Alice slips into Jay’s room, and we see this scene play out for the first (but not last) time. “You’re the movie star!” Jay tells her, half-asleep. “I like your video. It was always one of my favorites.” In this version of the scene, Alice doesn’t have time to wonder what he means. He starts to cough, and Alice calls for help — but, as Nora later puts it, “No hard drives. No evidence. And he’s dead.”
The rest of the finale unfolds from there: Nora attempts to get Danny (Scoot McNairy) to give her the evidence that Alden (Steve Way) slipped to him, we learn that Alice has been suspended and we see Alice and Danny meet up at the Jersey Shore in the freezing cold. “I can’t be rough with you,” Danny tells Alice gently as they tentatively begin an intimate relationship. “You know that.” He also says he’s going to retire — and then gives her the flash drive from Alden, which is full of child pornography Easton had saved. In another scene, as Nora and Alice watch Isabel’s body being moved from unmarked grave on Hart Island to an actual cemetery, Alice hands over the drive. But Nora’s triumph is short-lived after Alice tells her, “I’m on there too. I was 14. And I thought I was in love. And there’s a video. And Jay Easton had it.” Nora asks Alice whether she’s seen it, and when Alice says no, Nora says: “Why not? You want to do this job, you face it.”
When Nora gives Alice the code to the evidence room in the C20 unit, Alice does exactly that, searching her own name and learning that the video of her has been downloaded 50,042 times. This scene has been intercut with Alice’s visit to Catherine in jail, when Catherine says to Alice, “You have a secret.” Which is when we really see what happened to Jay Easton, as Alice not only steps on his breathing tube, but puts her hand over his mouth until he suffocates to death. “I said, did you like the way it felt?” Catherine asks Alice. Alice gives a split-second grin, and the show cuts to black, as Season 1 of “Furious” comes to an end.
Here, Rossum and Meriwether break down the finale in an interview that took place before Hulu officially renewed the show. When asked by Variety if she was already writing a second season, Meriwether began doing a robot dance. Then, when pressed, Meriwether said: “You can write: ‘She responded by doing a robot dance.’”
Emmy Rossum: Women. Women! Check. The elevator pitch is: a female FBI agent hunting a female serial killer. I’m immediately leaning in. It starts very cat-and-mouse, and this character is in this very misogynistic workplace, and everybody’s doubting her — and that feels relevant, even today. Sad we have to say that. But the second half of the movie becomes this intimate character piece of this connection between these women.
Elizabeth Meriwether: I was very scared of it. Like, how do I do this? I was just really fascinated by what a female serial killer’s history would be, and the psychology of a female serial killer. Especially in my old age, my way into a lot of my projects is research. I talked to a homicide detective, I read books about serial killers, and I spoke to an assistant district attorney and some FBI agents. The more I talked to people, the less intimidating it became to write a quote-unquote thriller — because I realized this is a story about people.
As opposed to mapping out everything, and knowing when to put clues in the right place. All of that stuff was challenging, and came later.
Meriwether: There are no motivations in the movie, which I think is really interesting for the time period. That movie would not be made nowadays, because there is such a need from executives to explain everything about why people are doing things. I use words like “tone poem” — it’s a movie that is a feeling, in a very cool way. And there’s even a really interesting scene where Debra Winger’s character gives a fake monologue about why she is the way she is, and then pulls a rug out from it. I love that about the movie, but you can’t do just cat-and-mouse for eight episodes.
Meriwether: That character was the hardest character to write for me. Hope was incredible in going on the journey with me and Cory Finley, who directed Episodes 7 and 8. I still don’t really think we answer the questions that I have about some of the women around these men — that is the part of it that confounds me the most. I have a lot of questions about the women who enable these men, and I don’t think we come up with a definitive answer.
