Disney 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.”
Courtesy of Disney 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.”
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