Furious Series-Premiere Recap: The Most Violent

Furious
The Gorgon
Season 1 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★★

The opening scene of Furious is incredibly unsettling. A man, clearly dying, desperately wriggles his way across a carpeted floor while his torturer hands out Halloween candy on his stoop. It’s a bold move for a person who is mid-murder, and it’s even bolder when she dips in and out of the house to grab candy while a kid and his mom wait outside the front door. Hiding in plain sight isn’t easy, but this woman is managing to do it. Even though she’s wearing a cheetah mask, her instability radiates through her stilted voice. The mom rejects the loose candy corn that the woman eventually brings back outside, saying they can only accept “wrapped candy,” but it feels like it’s less about the candy and more about the lady handing it out.

After the mom and kid leave, the woman heads back inside, watches her captive stumble down the stairs, and tells him it’s time to die. She cradles his face, carefully removes a syringe from a bedazzled metal case, and expertly administers the injection. As the man takes his last breaths, she says, “I don’t really like listening to you. I don’t like the sounds you’re making. But I love your smile.” She seems unbothered, unstressed, and even joyful at times as she executes this man. This woman doesn’t yet have a name, but in a pop-culture landscape so populated by men hunting, torturing, and killing women, having the script flipped so boldly kind of puts us all in her mind-set: a rogue woman daring to seek vengeance in an unfair world. 

Furious is a series created by Liz Meriwether, who is best known for her beloved sitcom New Girl but also recently told stories about two complex, real-life women in The Dropout (Elizabeth Holmes) and Dying for Sex (Molly Kochan). While she often works in a comedic tone, Meriwether has continuously demonstrated that she has an expert-level grasp on the multifaceted relationships that women have with other women, themselves, and the world at large. Her shift to procedural crime drama hasn’t seemed to dampen this insight — if anything, it takes it to a more serious level, looking at the complexities of systems that are basically designed to ignore and malign women and girls and then putting a microscope on how certain females might move through a world that doesn’t see them the way they deserve to be seen.

Our Jane Doe takes full advantage of not being seen. When we meet her mid-murder, she is a petite, pretty, almost childlike blonde, and she (rightly) banks on the world seeing her as a victim. Lola Petticrew plays her with an unhinged whimsy, leaving us questioning whether any of the emotions we see her express are genuine or just a mask she puts on to get what she wants. 

We’re quickly introduced to Jane Doe’s counterpart, Alice (Emmy Rossum), a disgraced NYPD homicide detective who has taken an entry-level job at the FBI. Alice is not a person who puts on airs to please others; quite the opposite. When we meet her, she’s taking her job as a duty agent very seriously, even preventing her bro colleagues from egging on a mentally ill woman who calls about the White House hacking her. It’s grunt work, but Alice endeavors to treat every single individual as a person worthy of help. 

So when her old colleague Danny (Scoot McNairy, always endearing) asks for her help investigating the suspicious overdose that opens the episode, she heads over even though her dick, misogynist FBI boss discourages her participation. (And asks her to stop at Costco for snacks on the way back. If I could punch fictional characters through the TV screen, this guy would be getting smacks, not snacks.) When Alice gets to the murder scene, she predictably finds a whole bunch of stuff that no one else has picked up on — a single sequin in the pocket-door track! — and her interest is piqued when it’s suggested that a woman could have committed this crime. Complicating things is that the dead man is Caleb Easton, the son of prominent NYC billionaire Jay Easton, and both the NYPD and FBI want to wash their hands of this case as quickly as possible. 

Alice is committed to her work, but she also has a complex past. We see her stop by a fancy restaurant for drinks for her sister’s bridal party, where she tells the girls that she has two guns on her and that she could hurt everyone at the table. Sure? But this violence-forward version of herself might be a form of protection, as we also learn that she was in an abusive relationship with a co-worker and the dissolution of that relationship may have been what caused her exit from the NYPD. Later, we see her on a “date” with a guy who she invites to attack her before getting busy, but after they tussle, she decides that she just wants to get herself off instead. Mid-wank, she realizes that she had previously worked on a case similar to the Caleb Easton case where there was a mysterious overdose involved. Alice doesn’t even take a second to compose herself before she calls Danny with her theory, and she immediately heads over to the precinct to do more research. 

Meanwhile, Jane Doe is doing some wheeling and dealing of her own. She gets a homeless girl named Jinny to beat her up, steals her bag, then impersonates her when she checks into a domestic-violence shelter. The worker who checks her into the shelter is smitten; she fast-tracks an ID for her and allows her to borrow her computer, which Jane uses to locate a rich lawyer named Oliver Charles. Shortly thereafter, Jane has secured a job at a fancy catering company (it helps that she’s so very pretty) and is approaching Oliver (oh, hi, Rob Delaney!) with a tray of appetizers. 

As Jane is locating her next victim, Alice is investigating her last two marks. She suspects that Jane murdered a man named Adrian Murado, an ex-con who may have been trafficking her prior to going to jail. Eventually, she questions a young man who saw Adrian’s girlfriend leaving the house, and there’s a humorous exchange in which the kid admits that the girl flashed her vulva to him, helpfully explaining the difference between a vulva and a vagina in the process. There’s hope for the boys today! When she flashed him, he saw a red-flower tattoo on her stomach, which seems like a pretty vague lead, but it’s a lead nonetheless. 

Alice teams up with a sex-crimes agent named Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine, captivating) to discuss the Murado case, but Nora denies remembering anything. She does, however, share some very depressing wisdom about her line of work, saying that it’s nearly impossible to get charges to stick because the justice system wants everything neatly organized, and these girls don’t live neat lives. They’ve often been locked up in a room for ages on drugs and are in love with the men who forced them into these lives. It’s a horrifying picture of the state of sex trafficking in America and does track with what we’ve seen in the wake of the release of the Epstein files. Come to think of it, Easton and Epstein sound a bit similar … hmm.

Despite Nora’s initial surliness, Alice wins her over a bit by offering her blazer to a young witness who is supposed to appear in court the next day. Shocker: The girl — who is only 15 — gets attacked that night, and Alice gets a call from the hospital because her card was in the blazer pocket. While Nora and Alice sit by the girl’s bedside, Jane gets closer to Oliver. As she seduces him, even agreeing to sign an NDA (LOL), we cut to the hospital where Nora shares more pearls of wisdom. Nora’s story about Medusa is interspersed with Jane and Oliver making moves in the bedroom. Medusa is raped by Poseidon, but because Poseidon raped her in Athena’s temple, Athena takes it as an affront and blames Medusa, cursing her by turning her hair into snakes. Nora is using Medusa as an allegory for the state of sex workers in general: These women and girls are victims, certainly, but just because they are victims doesn’t mean that they are innocent. “Victims of violence are the most violent,” Nora opines. 

But then Nora says that “women are supposed to be hit and raped and go away quietly, not start murdering people.” This speech seems to be setting up the crux of the narrative here: Jane is presumably hunting and murdering men who have exploited and raped women, possibly her specifically. She’s almost gleefully violent, but is seeking vengeance such a terrible thing when the systems designed to protect do nothing but protect predators? In contrast, why is Alice the one at a new job when her cop boyfriend is the one who hurt her? (TBD on this being the whole story, but why does the man always get to stay while the woman has to leave?) 

Late into the night, Alice reviews a memory stick full of evidence related to the Adrian Murado case and finds a gas-station surveillance video in which he’s dragging a small, shrieking blonde woman out of the store. At one point, her dress rides up and the very distinctive red-poppy tattoo is visible. Moments later, we see the tattoo on Jane’s bare stomach as she canoodles in bed with Oliver. “Got you,” Alice whispers. 

Loose Sequins

• In my life as a therapist, I took a training on sex trafficking a handful of years ago, and the thing that stuck with me most was when the trainer said that sex trafficking was on the rise owing to the fact that, unlike drugs or guns, a body is a product that can be sold over and over and over again. It’s a disturbing reality, and the idea that these women (and men) are broken down into forever-renewable commodities with no support system beyond the people that treat them like property is a testament to why it’s so hard to help the victims. 

• Love Nora’s impromptu “All My Life” karaoke moment. 

• Was that Hope Davis for a split second in the Easton Family Endowment video? More Hope Davis, please!