‘Furious’ Season 1 Finale Explained: How to Become a Gorgon

Hulu’s utterly gripping crime drama, Furious, ended its first season in a way that felt both profound and inevitable. The penultimate episode saw Catherine (Lola Petticrew) entering Jay Easton’s place with intent to kill him, and Alice (Emmy Rossum) close behind. There was never going to be a happy, let alone tidy, ending to this engrossing story of injustice’s ability to turn victims into monsters. Even knowing that, the first season finale was devastating and left open a fascinating hook for a potential season 2.

Let’s rip the band-aid right off: Jay Easton (Peter McRobbie) is dead, but not by Catherine’s hand. Though Catherine’s mission to take out Jay and his network of ghouls has driven the plot of Furious, it’s Alice that cuts the head off the snake, so to speak. It’s cathartic for everyone involved, including the viewers, but that’s just one of many revelations the finale lobs. After a tense confrontation with Jay’s daughter/Ghislaine-esque concierge Emma (Hope Davis), Catherine finds herself in Jay’s dungeon with Alice.

Together the two women put together what happened with Isabel Luna (Larissa Campos): mere days after giving birth to Elena, Isabel was forced back into service and ended up bleeding profusely. Emma called Catherine to be with Isabel in her final moments. Seeing Isabel in pain, Catherine injected her with a fatal dose of heroin. This might have been Catherine’s first kill, in some technical sense, but the blame for Isabel’s death really rests with Jay and Emma.

After Catherine is arrested, Alice and Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstein) have Isabel’s body moved to a marked grave and place Elena with a caretaker. Alice and Danny (Scoot McNairy) consummate their romance. He still posts up just outside the shower so Alice can bathe. On Nora’s advice, Alice watches the video of her assault on Jay’s thumb drive of victims, definitively confirming that she and Catherine shared this particular trauma.

After she watches, Alice searches through the usernames listed in 50,000+ downloads of the video. Furious cuts back to Alice’s conversation with Catherine in which Catherine asks, “Did you like it?” in regards to her murder of Jay. Alice smiles enigmatically, implying that the kill not only felt good, but that she’ll be tackling the username list in the same fashion.

It’s difficult to find fault with Alice’s turn. Furious suggested this outcome when it revealed Alice as another victim of Jay Easton. If Catherine was driven by that trauma to become a killer, why wouldn’t Alice? In fact, the series did such a thorough job of illustrating how women are victimized that it seems like the only shot that either woman had at justice is through violence.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out in season 2. It would seem Alice is our new avenging angel on the loose and with Nora still working at the FBI, conflict seems inevitable. Marshall (Jake Lacy) got a damn medal for being shot in the line of duty, his abuses once again ignored. Perhaps Alice will deliver some justice to him too, along with the other men who participated in Jay’s ring. Furious confronted viewers with the horrors that made Catherine a gorgon, and next season we may see Alice walk the same bloody path.