Warning: The following story contains spoilers for the season finale of Furious.
The truth is finally out on Furious, and with it comes a role reversal for its leading ladies, FBI Agent Alice (Emmy Rossum) and serial killer Catherine (Lola Petticrew).
It may have been Emma Easton’s (Hope Davis) DNA under Isabel’s (Larissa Campos) nails, but it was Catherine who killed her. And the reason Alice wanted to work in the FBI’s C-20 division is because she knew there was a video of her having sex as a teenager floating around.
In the finale titled “Hart Island,” Catherine turns up at the Eastons’ home, confronting Emma with the few memories she did have of her final moments with Isabel in Jay Easton’s (Peter McRobbie) secret room. Emma flits back and forth between being helpful by sharing her part in Isabel’s death and how far she went to help her father, with showing various shades of evil, from telling Catherine, “You weren’t a little girl, you were a teenager, and that’s a big difference,” to telling Catherine she can shoot Jay, to shooting Catherine instead.
Alice breaks her promise to Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) and Danny (Scoot McNairy) and enters the house alone after she hears the gunshot. And as the three women face off, Catherine slowly remembers what happened all those years ago: Isabel had recently given birth, was drugged at the house, bleeding and in so much pain that Isabel tells Catherine it’s OK and Catherine injects her with one final shot.
“Catherine goes from being so angry and dead inside and wanting to kind of kill everybody to realizing that she’s still a person; she is capable of love [and] that was an act of love,” series creator and showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether tells Gold Derby.
Although Ed (Danny McCarthy) slows progress down by getting various police forces to argue over who has true jurisdiction at the Easton mansion, Danny ends up being part of the team to storm into the house after Emma runs outside yelling that Catherine tried to kill her. Alice has already cuffed a bleeding Catherine, and Danny makes it a point to tell the officers to put their guns down.
But although no more blood is shed, not everyone makes it out of the house alive. Alice heads to Jay’s bedroom, where he immediately recognizes her from her video. She steps on his medical tubing and puts her hand over his nose and mouth, suffocating him while yelling for help that he’s in respiratory failure.
“The murder at her hands is going to be another one of these secrets that she keeps,” Rossum tells Gold Derby. “Why she wants to work in C-20, why she’s so interested in getting into that room, to me was very fascinating. I knew why she wanted to get into that room from way before the pilot.”
Killing Jay closes the door on Catherine’s revenge plot, even if she wasn’t the one to do the deed. She ends up in jail, but seemingly feeling freer than ever, as she finally has the answers, and therefore the closure, that she needs. Emma ends up isolated and alone, presumably about to face charges herself, which Davis feels is what she deserved.
“I didn’t think Emma should be killed, but I don’t think living is any sort of reward for Emma, and it seems right that she’ll live in a hell of her own making,” explains Davis.
Alice, on the other hand, has now given into a similar darkness to what was driving Catherine at the start of their story. Even though she does take Danny up on the offer to spend some time at his friend’s beach house, while there she has to face some of her demons since he knows about the video and believes she, too, has known about it the whole time. Nora also pressures him to hand it over so she can use to keep Ed under her thumb. Ultimately, it is Alice who chooses to turn it in, which does give her boss the leverage she wants, but also leaves her with the task of sitting down to watching and truly facing her past. It’s not enough for her to just watch, though — she records all of the usernames of those who downloaded it.
Gold Derby: Emma is such a complicated kind of evil character. Was she inspired by anyone in particular? How and why did you decide her fate didn’t have to be death, unlike the others involved in trafficking these young girls?
Meriwether: She was inspired by women who have enabled men like this. There have been lots of them, and I am fascinated by those women and what’s going on in their hearts and minds and souls. Those scenes were tough to write and figure out. Hope is incredible and just went with me and Cory [Finley], who directed. We would do takes one way and then we would do a take completely differently, just because it was like, “How do we find this character? What is the tone like? Where is her headspace?” Honestly, she was the hardest character for me to get inside of her head. But I guess I made a decision to let it be a little bit mysterious. The greenhouse and her putting her hands in the dirt and stuff like that, instead of her explaining it, I just wanted to show the things that she did to ignore it [and] the lies that she told herself to get herself through the day.
Why does she not die? That’s such a good question. I feel like there was something interesting about the fact that she got away with it and her penance is the fact that she has to live with it. And that was also based somewhat on real life — just being in a prison of her own making. People like her do get away with stuff. And Catherine had gotten to a place where she wasn’t really killing anymore.
I didn’t necessarily mean that Catherine had to be the one to kill her.
Yeah, but in my mind, it was like, “Why is Catherine not just killing her?” And that was because I think Catherine’s taste for murder slows down over the course of the show. So by the time she gets to the Easton house at the end, she isn’t really in a place where she’s wanting to kill people as much, so I think that was part of it.
It does feel like leaving her alive does speak to a specific statement about justice and who gets what they deserve and who doesn’t. Catherine’s in jail; she was a victim but then she became a perpetrator. But then Ed still has his high-powered position and Marshall gets a commendation. There’s still a lot of bad people getting away with things. Did you feel like you needed to make a statement because of the way the world is?
Definitely a huge part of the thinking was that we need to show the ways that this doesn’t work for a lot of people. Or the way we want it to work, we’re trying to make it work, and people just get away with things. I was trying to dramatize the ways that it always feels like an awkward fit to the truth or what we think of as justice. I think awkward fit’s probably the most kind way of saying it.
There was so much violence in this world, but ultimately Isabel’s death was a mercy killing. What inspired that decision and what psychological research did you use to work through why Catherine would internalize that as the kind of trauma that needed to be buried, especially when she had memories of so many other horrible things?
We talked to a lot of people. I spoke to a woman who’d been trafficked, social workers, FBI agents who spent years speaking to people who’ve been trafficked. And then on top of that, I was coming off of Dying for Sex, where I’d done an enormous amount of research into trauma and memory and recovering from trauma.
This is another huge problem with addressing these cases in the justice system, but memory is so strange when it comes to trauma. The way that people remember things is just not reliable, and it’s because of what trauma does to your brain. So I wanted to show that, and I wanted to dramatize that setting out on a course of vengeance is not going to ultimately end up where you want it to end up. If you decide that you are the judge and the jury, you end up in a place where you realize that you completely misunderstood the thing that you feel like you are avenging. I thought that was interesting. … From murder to love was her trajectory, and it felt like the right endpoint.
And then there’s the flip side of that with Alice in a way because she gets to a point where she does make her first kill. But that scene doesn’t play out in full for the audience until Alice visits Catherine in jail and we see it as her memory. Was that always how it was written, or did that decision to hold it back a little longer come in the edit? What made you want to wait?
It was in the script, and then we edited it in so many different ways. We tried putting it in the middle of the episode; we tried everything because there is something a little strange about it. I still have notes on it! If I could continue to edit everything, I would. But it’s not a device we use anywhere else on the show, so we really tried a bunch of different things. The guy who edited this, Steve Welch, edited all of New Girl, and I’ve worked with him forever. We really went around and around on it.
I think, honestly, when we moved it up, it felt like the rest of the episode couldn’t really be with Alice knowing she’d done that and not have her address it in some way. It felt like the endpoint of this story, where, like I said, Catherine’s journey is from murder to love, and Alice’s journey is from, “She’s inside of the criminal justice system, we’re going to do this the right way” to doing that.
Based on where the show leaves Alice, gathering information on all of the people who downloaded her video, it feels like this is not really the true end, just the start of something new. She says something about the video when she finally talks about it that I’d love for you to confirm whether it’s true because we know Alice is a good liar. She says, “I was 14 and I thought I was in love.”
I can’t answer that.
Is that because it’s a spoiler for a potential second season or because you haven’t decided yet?
I don’t know what I’m allowed to say about that either. But you’re right to point it out, and the question is a really good question.
Do you feel anything in this experience has healed Alice? Do you feel like she might actually be healthy enough to embark on anything with Danny, or is he just a distraction and she still has too much other work to do on herself?
You’re asking really good Season 2 questions, so I hope that we get one. But I kind of want the audience to come up with their own answers on some of that because I feel like it’s interesting. Is what she did healing, or is it sending her down a destructive path? I think that is a good question, and I’m interested in people’s reactions to it — in nice, respectful comments.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
