Furious finale explained by Liz Meriwether, Emmy Rossum, and Lola Petticrew

MichaelAugust 31, 20266 min read

With episode 8, Furious closed the case on the vengeance-seeking serial killer named Catherine (Lola Petticrew). But with that final scene, FBI Agent Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) unlocks a new mystery that might be pursued in a second season.

Where could that lead? Mashable Entertainment Editor Kristy Puchko sat down with Furious creator Elizabeth Meriwether and stars Emmy Rossum and Lola Petticrew to dig into finale burning questions and what could be ahead for Season 2.

Obviously, spoilers from “Hart Island” ahead.

Who killed Isabel on Furious?

Lola Petticrew and Emmy Rossum star in “Furious.”
Credit: Disney / Sarah Shatz

With the trauma of being trapped and sexually assaulted in a child trafficking ring, Catherine has been fighting all season to remember what exactly happened the night Isabel died. In the final episode of the season, she goes back to where it all went down, the posh mansion of Jay Easton (Peter McRobbie).

There, an ailing Jay relies on his daughter Emma (Hope Davis) to clean up his mess. In this case — with cops, Feds, and Catherine incoming — that means destroying any evidence, including Jay’s treasured collection of child porn.

While Catherine killed the pimp who trafficked her, Jay’s son who was there that night, and two of the family’s lawyers, she does not kill Jay. But in searching for the truth, she realizes that it was she who killed Isabel. In a tearful scene with Emma, Catherine realizes that Isabel was bleeding, possibly from postpartum complications but also because Jay beat her in the face. Crying out in pain, she asked Catherine for help. And Catherine administered a deadly dose of intravenous drugs to euthanize her first love.

So, Catherine killed Isabel, but out of love.

Furious dropped a clue to Isabel’s killer in episode 1.

Lola Petticrew in “Furious.”
Credit: Disney / Sarah Shatz

In episode 1, Catherine is swiftly shifting from different identities and using masks to hide her face. But there’s one bit of costuming that singles her out, even from the crime scene of Caleb Easton’s brownstone: that sequined purse.

Alice finds a dislodged sequin on Caleb’s bathroom floor. Later, Catherine will collect other clothing and accessories from other victims. Like, when she meets Becky in Central Park, she appears to be wearing a men’s trench coat (possibly the late Oliver’s), and she takes Mira‘s backpack (though she leaves her alive).

Asked if these trophies were a clue that Catherine killed Isabel too, Petticrew told Mashable, “I think that it is,” noting of the bag, “What I treated it like was an anchor and a reminder at every step of the way that this is what she was doing it for, and who she was doing it for. You know, Isabel, she’s the love of her life. And I think that that physical girlish reminder — even when she’s sort of dressed up and and and being seen by men or the world as like sexy — there’s always this sort of thing that sits upon her that reminds you that she was a child when all of this happened, and a child that was forced into this situation.”

Who killed Jay on Furious?

Emmy Rossum in “Furious.”
Credit: Disney / Sarah Shatz

At first it seems like the fates — not the furies — took Jay’s life. After Alice assures that Catherine’s captured without being killed, she goes upstairs to Jay’s bedroom. There, it seems he dies of natural causes as he gasps for air. However, when Alice visits Catherine in prison, Catherine suspects the truth, saying she knows Alice’s “secret.”

Furious cuts back to that sequence, the one where Jay recognized Alice, but not as an agent on the investigation into the murder of his son. When he saw her, he said, “I know you. You’re the movie star. I like your video. It was always one of my favorites.”

As Danny (Scoot McNairy) discovered from the files Alden (Steve Way) got off Hal’s computer, Alice was the subject of child porn in her youth. Finally, the audience might understand why Alice is so determined to not only join the sex crimes department of the FBI, but also why her eyes keep drifting to the high-security screening room where child trafficking video evidence is stored.

Rossum said of this reveal, “Alice has a lot of secrets…We don’t know why she wants to get into the room. We don’t know that she knows about the videotape. That is information she would have hidden when she was being interviewed by the FBI. They would ask you a question like, ‘Does anybody have anything on you that could be used against you?’ She certainly didn’t disclose her history or what had happened to her as a young teenager. She doesn’t say why — you know, Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) says to her in the first episode, ‘Why do you want to work in the squad?’ She doesn’t give the full answer.”

She continued, “Alice just kind of smiles and doesn’t say anything. And we see her looking at that door. We know she wants to get in that room, right? To see how many people have seen that tape. Is that tape out there? Does it exist? Can they find me? Have people looked at me and my body in that way? So there’s a lot riding on Alice being found out. And she has even more secrets at the end of Season 1 than she did at the beginning.”

By the end of the finale, Alice will tell Nora about the video. What she won’t tell her is that Jay didn’t die of natural causes.

In that flashback, a new camera angle reveals the truth hidden the first time the scene played in Furious. This time, Jay doesn’t just start choking out of the blue. This time, we see Alice’s foot stamp on his ventilator tube, suffocating him in a way no one detected.

But this is not where the finale ends.

Where could Furious Season 2 go?

Emmy Rossum and Quincy Tyler Bernstine in “Furious.”
Credit: Disney / Sarah Shatz

Season 1 of Furious ends with Alice finally getting into that evidence room, and there she searches for her own name. The results don’t show her the video, but rather information on how many cases have included it as evidence (312) and how many downloads of it have been made online (over 50k).

As she looks over a list of usernames, we hear Catherine’s voice asking from prison, “Did you like the way it felt”? Alice smiles, presumably thinking not only of how she killed Jay, but also how there are so many more rapists and pedophiles out there, prime for a reckoning.

Meriwether told Mashable that as an “almost lifelong Law and Order SVU fan, I love the idea of a unit in the FBI that like takes on these cases….but one case over the course of a season.”

She continued, “I love the Nora/Alice relationship, especially as we kept working on the first season. And I felt like there’s so much there to explore and just give them a different case. I think going forward, Season 2 is them working on a different case.”

But Alice won’t be able to leave this case behind her. Merwether noted, “Alice has a lot of secrets, more secrets now, and things that people can hold against her, and things that she needs to unpack about what happened in this season.”