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.”
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.”
When Nora gives Alice the code to the evidence room in the C20 unit, Alice does exactly that, searching her own name and learning that the video of her has been downloaded 50,042 times. This scene has been intercut with Alice’s visit to Catherine in jail, when Catherine says to Alice, “You have a secret.” Which is when we really see what happened to Jay Easton, as Alice not only steps on his breathing tube, but puts her hand over his mouth until he suffocates to death. “I said, did you like the way it felt?” Catherine asks Alice. Alice gives a split-second grin, and the show cuts to black, as Season 1 of “Furious” comes to an end.
Here, Rossum and Meriwether break down the finale in an interview that took place before Hulu officially renewed the show. When asked by Variety if she was already writing a second season, Meriwether began doing a robot dance. Then, when pressed, Meriwether said: “You can write: ‘She responded by doing a robot dance.’”
Emmy Rossum: Women. Women! Check. The elevator pitch is: a female FBI agent hunting a female serial killer. I’m immediately leaning in. It starts very cat-and-mouse, and this character is in this very misogynistic workplace, and everybody’s doubting her — and that feels relevant, even today. Sad we have to say that. But the second half of the movie becomes this intimate character piece of this connection between these women.
Elizabeth Meriwether: I was very scared of it. Like, how do I do this? I was just really fascinated by what a female serial killer’s history would be, and the psychology of a female serial killer. Especially in my old age, my way into a lot of my projects is research. I talked to a homicide detective, I read books about serial killers, and I spoke to an assistant district attorney and some FBI agents. The more I talked to people, the less intimidating it became to write a quote-unquote thriller — because I realized this is a story about people.
As opposed to mapping out everything, and knowing when to put clues in the right place. All of that stuff was challenging, and came later.
Meriwether: There are no motivations in the movie, which I think is really interesting for the time period. That movie would not be made nowadays, because there is such a need from executives to explain everything about why people are doing things. I use words like “tone poem” — it’s a movie that is a feeling, in a very cool way. And there’s even a really interesting scene where Debra Winger’s character gives a fake monologue about why she is the way she is, and then pulls a rug out from it. I love that about the movie, but you can’t do just cat-and-mouse for eight episodes.
Meriwether: That character was the hardest character to write for me. Hope was incredible in going on the journey with me and Cory Finley, who directed Episodes 7 and 8. I still don’t really think we answer the questions that I have about some of the women around these men — that is the part of it that confounds me the most. I have a lot of questions about the women who enable these men, and I don’t think we come up with a definitive answer.
Rossum: By letting Catherine go, she knows that she’s taking a huge risk, but she knows that she needs to do that. And she already has such a fluid relationship with protocol, right? The closer that she gets to Catherine, the more is woken up inside her that has been subconsciously and intentionally repressed. She remembers everything that happened to her, unlike Catherine. But I think that she has disconnected from that — that’s her survival mechanism.
She wants to do this job. But you can tell from the first episode, her eyes are on that keypad. She wants to get in that room. She knows, at least in my belief, that there is this tape out there that could be in that room, and it’s this thing that’s been eating away at her. And this opportunity to go work at this FBI office and potentially get in there is not just because she has this burning desire to get justice for others, but also because she’s wondering if this tape is out there. Who’s seen it, and what’s to be done about that?
Meriwether: Was the smile in the script? [Rossum nods.] I was gonna give it all to you, Emmy.
When I saw the first cut of it, I was like, “This is awesome.” That quick look. So yes, Emmy nailed it. And I honestly never looked at a different take.
Rossum: I don’t think she went up there with the intention to kill him. I think Catherine has introduced this idea, right? Like, she says, “I know that there is a bit of you that wanted to kill Marshall. I know that there’s a bit of you that wants power.” They’re on opposite sides of the door; they’re literally mirroring each other. Then when Alice goes upstairs, seemingly to find Jay, he says that absolutely despicable thing to her, and I think the switch just goes. She’s like, “Fuck this guy. Nora’s right: He’s gonna die peacefully in his bed.”
Meriwether: Hopefully, the show has taken her on that journey. In the first episode, Nora’s like, “Does it matter if Adrian Morado died? He was a bad man.” And Alice is like, “Of course it matters! That’s our job.”
Alice is becoming Catherine, Catherine is becoming Alice. Catherine’s heart is opening up, and in some ways Alice is closing off, and getting darker and stronger. That was the dream.
Meriwether: I mean, I wish I could tell you that I had it all planned from the beginning, but I really didn’t. I wrote the first two episodes, I didn’t know where it was going, and I just kept digging in and working on it, and then going back and rewriting. And then when that clicked in, you just get that feeling that that’s the right thing.
Catherine stops being able to kill after she kills Hal [Campbell Scott] in Episode 5. She’s starting to get the feeling back in her fingers. She is starting to imagine having a life for herself, and not dying. Her heart is opening up. She’s getting her body back. So if she had figured out that somebody else had killed Isabel and then killed that person, I think that would have messed up the story we were trying to tell. And I found it really moving that to go on this mission of vengeance and then realize that you’re at the center of it — I don’t know. It stayed with me. And that’s how I knew it was right, because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It felt really sad.
Rossum: It was a long day. Lola and I — who actually never worked together that much — we are both very unguarded performers. We’re both like, unzip us, and here are our guts. You’re with another performer that approaches the material that Liz has written so unflinchingly and so raw, and these are two people who have been so closed off and who are really, really probably craving a friend, right? A female friend.
We’ve seen Alice be so closed off from people, but also at moments with victims or witnesses, just have a real access to empathy that is not performative. There is this really deep connection between them.
Meriwether: I rewrote it so many times, and I was so worried about that scene. Because also, as a comedy writer, writing a four-page scene where it’s just a person holding a gun, I was like, “What am I doing here? I should not be the person writing this!” I was really intimidated. Because it’s really just a series of monologues, and it’s a lot of dialogue. And you have to buy that everybody is scared, and that’s why they’re still there, and they still feel like Catherine could shoot somebody.
You also have to buy that Alice cares enough about Catherine to want to help her get to this place. But I was just so blown away by all three of those women in that room that day watching them, because I felt — honestly, going into the day we were shooting it — guilty, because I was like, “I’m giving them an impossible task as actors to be able to pull this off.” I was so blown away by Lola’s ability to, as Emmy just said, unzip themselves and let out their heart and their guts. And then I was so blown away by Emmy — because the instinct in a lesser actor, I think, would be like to match Lola where Lola was. But Emmy kept it about Lola, and knew that her character’s moment was coming later in the episode.
But it was just one of those just invigorating days as a writer, because you know the people you’re working with are just making it so much more.
Meriwether: I think what’s happy about it is that she’s alive. Her journey in my mind was that she is convinced that she’s doing this as a suicide mission. And then kind of her journey midway through is realizing that she actually wants to live, and Alice helps her get to that place where she feels like she actually wants to continue to live. So to me, that’s her ending place.
Rossum: She has probably added a new secret to her arsenal of secrets. She enters C20 the first time with the secret of what’s in that room, which is her tape. And then gets on the squad, which is her mission the whole time, with a new secret, that she’s taken a life. When your worst fears are confirmed that that tape exists and that 50,000 people have watched your childhood trauma, I think there’s almost a peace at knowing you were right — and now, what do you do about it? And she got what she wanted, which was to get into that room and to get onto that squad. But I think that you know she’s on the next mission.
Meriwether: I want to hear Emmy’s feelings about Alice always, because it’s so informative to me. I never felt like we should be fully rooting for violence from either character. And I do feel like Alice’s choice to kill Jay in the end is a choice that makes sense for the character and where she is. But I also question if going forward, that choice is something that traps her a little bit.
Meriwether: I don’t know if we would get Lola back, honestly. I do think a hypothetical next season would pick up in C20 with Nora, working on a new case.
Meriwether: Well, you’re asking really good questions that I am asking myself, in my classic process where I don’t have a plan for the future. What happens in Season 1 works for Season 1 and the characters, and I’m trying to figure out what the future would be. And I don’t know yet!
Rossum: I think he is wonderful and kind, but ultimately the character is limited in terms of the full scope of who she is, and how he could be with somebody that has that level of chaos and pain in their history? He’s very sensitive, and he said, “I don’t want to keep looking at that.” Like, “I gotta go.”
And, of course, I identify so much with the character, and I’m so fused with her by this point that I’m, like, angry and trembling on her behalf just thinking about this imaginary relationship, you know? Like, how could you be in love with somebody, but actually love them so much that you can’t hold all of the pain that they have? When they can hold it just fine!Emmy, you’re down to keep playing Alice?Rossum: For as long as Liz will write her!