Furious Goes Out With a Smile

Spoilers follow for Furious through season-one finale “Hart Island,” which premiered on Hulu on August 31. 

Usually on Furious, when someone asks FBI agent Alice Black how she’s doing, the answer is: pretty crappy. That’ll happen when you’ve been run out of the NYPD for the misdeeds of your abusive detective boyfriend, treated like a nuisance by your new employer, and nearly killed by said boyfriend — and you then realize that a tape of your teenage self being raped has been circulated online by a pedophile network. In her last moments onscreen in finale “Hart Island,” though, Alice (Emmy Rossum) is practically gleeful. She’s felt power, and she’s felt it through killing a man who hurt her. And no one understands that feeling quite like Catherine Grace (Lola Petticrew), the serial killer Alice helped put away — and is now confiding in.

“There is no reason that Alice has to go to that jail cell to tell her, ‘I’m glad you’re married, and I’m gonna do right by your dead friend and make sure that she gets a marked grave.’ That’s an email,” Rossum laughs. “Alice really does like to flirt with danger. She invites men over to be violent with her. She goes to visit the killer in jail right after she’s basically been inspired by her to kill someone. There is a moth-to-a-flame thing going on with her, where she is getting juice from these things.” 

By the end of this season of Furious, Alice has proved her wherewithal and resourcefulness to her superior, FBI agent Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine). She’s tracked down Catherine, guided her into a confession of mercy-killing her best friend, and secured evidence against billionaire pedophile Jay Easton (Peter McRobbie) that will hopefully bring down other men with whom Easton was trading sex-trafficked girls. The secret that the medical emergency that killed Easton was at Alice’s hand would derail her hard-won career if it comes out. But the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it smile on Alice’s face in the final moments of “Hart Island” — which cut between her visiting Catherine in jail and gossiping about her first murder, and her in the sex-crimes unit’s video-review room, looking at a list of the 50,000 usernames that have downloaded the video of her rape — is ambiguous and tantalizing.

Remember what Catherine said to the first man we saw her kill: “I don’t like the sounds you’re making. But I love your smile!” And remember too how often men tell women to smile as a tactic of control and submission. There’s some burn-it-all-down nihilism in Alice’s expression, a smile that’s primarily for herself. It feels like a long-time-coming character turn, given how much violence she’s personally faced and how aware she’s become of the ways both the NYPD and the FBI — any agency led by men, really — can be compromised by misogyny.

“For a lot of the time, Alice has kept her fury at bay. She’s really white-knuckling it,” Rossum says. When killing Easton, Rossum says that as Alice, she felt “this bigness inside … like unearthing the shadow parts of yourself. She’s offered that chance, and she walks through that door.” 

Rossum says that as of now, the names aren’t a kill list for Alice; maybe they could be in a second season, but that’s for series creator Elizabeth Meriwether to decide. (“That’s a lot of revenge,” Bernstine cracks when I ask for her interpretation of the scene.) For now, what’s undeniably unsettling about Alice’s smile as this season’s closing moment is how it communicates her jagged mind-set, her divided mentality after using her FBI credentials in search of her own idea of justice. Is Alice smiling at all the information she now has at her fingertips in the evidence room? Is she smiling because finally, in Catherine, she has a confidante? Is that smile fed by the fantasy of what hunting down even one of those men could feel like, and how it would compare to cutting off Easton’s oxygen? 

Meriwether notes that the smile isn’t necessarily a sign that Furious approves of its protagonist’s drastic measures — “I’m hoping that there’s a complicated feeling about what she did” — and that Alice’s actions could be grappled with from a number of narrative angles in Furious’s just-announced second season (which had yet to be confirmed when we spoke). Does Easton’s death make it harder for Nora to bring down her corrupt boss, ASAC Ed George (Danny McCarthy), who was helping cover up Easton’s crimes, or is the threat of the flash drive enough to keep Ed in line? Could Danny Kelly (Scoot McNairy) somehow learn that Easton’s death was an act of fury from the woman he’s been in love with for a decade? Now that Alice has joined Nora’s sex-crimes unit, what does having access to so much evidence of men’s misdeeds do to her mentally? Could Alice dive more fully into vigilante activity if she believes that she’s gotten justice for young women like Catherine by killing Easton?

“In the beginning, she really believes,” Rossum says. “She says to Nora, ‘It’s our duty to get justice for every victim.’ And by the end, she doesn’t believe that you can get it the normal ways.”