Summary
Furious gets off to a disturbing but darkly comic start in Episode 1, introducing a female serial killer and the FBI agent hunting her as two sides of the same misogynistic coin.
You can learn a lot from an opening scene. Furious opens, like a lot of crime shows, with a murder. But it’s a deeply unsettling and darkly comic murder that very much lays out the stall of Liz Meriwether’s Hulu series, which has as many twists of New Girl’s DNA as anything about a serial killer, let alone a female one. Episode 1, “Gorgon”, introduces that killer, whose name we don’t know, and then builds around her a world so systemically hostile to women that she almost becomes a heroine.
We have a heroine, of course. Agent Alice Black does the grunt work at the FBI following a slightly disgraced departure from the NYPD, but she’s serious and determined and won’t take no for an answer. To her, the unidentified Jane Doe killer from the opening is very much the bad guy, and it’s the responsibility of the Bureau to bring her to justice, even if she might be taking out bad people and have compelling reasons for doing it.
Our victim, whom the Jane Doe killer offs during Halloween with a syringe full of poison kept in a cute little case festooned with stickers, just so happens to be Caleb Easton, the son of billionaire Jay Easton, so the NYPD and the FBI would rather the whole thing went away. Immediately, we have our dramatic setup – a woman turning against a world that has victimised her, and another woman refusing to stop investigating her even though every man she meets would rather she didn’t. They’re both positioned as rogue mavericks, not entirely dissimilar, but simply manifesting their own traumas in different, opposing ways.
And Alice seems to have her share of traumas. When one of her old colleagues, Danny, requests her help on the Caleb Easton case, she agrees, and we see how she’s treated by the men of the NYPD. Later, it’s implied that this antipathy comes from Alice having had a relationship with a colleague that turned abusive, and which she obviously reported. But she’s clearly not over that, since her “dates” these days come with a physical fight as foreplay, and even then, don’t amount to much beyond a lonely do-it-yourself session. During that, she recalls an old case with a lot of similarities to Caleb’s, and then excitedly – literally, vibrator still buzzing away – calls Danny with her suspicions. This isn’t a woman with a great work-life balance, or a healthy relationship with sex and men.
Outside of Danny, it’s obvious as of Episode 1 that Alice’s main ally in Furious is going to be Nora Washington, a jaded sex-crimes agent who drinks too much and provides a sobering view of the realities of sex trafficking, which boil down to the idea that it’s essentially a crime that is impossible to effectively prosecute because it targets victims who don’t have the kind of orderly lives that investigators need to put the pieces together and secure a conviction. She also makes the point that people being victims doesn’t necessarily make them innocent, which is important to note since it’s very strongly implied that Jane Doe is killing people who abused her. Hurt people hurt people, as the saying goes, but not all of them turn into murderers, and thus even the most horrifying backstory doesn’t quite suffice as a justification.
Nora’s point about all this, though, is that a victim turning into a murderer is mostly inconvenient for society’s perception of women. Victims should be appropriately sad but more importantly quiet; they should slip away unnoticed without taking anyone else down with them. Jane Doe is a killer, but it’s implied that her true crime, societally speaking, is drawing attention to herself, and thus the crimes she’s avenging, which the systems governing society would rather keep quiet.
We even see Jane Doe doing this. We see her navigating the fringes of society, tricking a homeless girl into assaulting her so she can steal her identity, and then leveraging the resources of a domestic violence shelter to get a new ID and track down a rich mark named Oliver Charles. She seduces him easily, and the two sleep together, which, in an interesting stylistic choice, is intercut with Nora explaining to Alice the story of Medusa, the titular Gorgon, who was cursed by Athena to have snakes for hair as penance for being raped by Poseidon. Even in mythology, men get their own way every time.
But Alice has a woman to catch. By the end of Furious Episode 1, she’s closer than when she started, having figured out that Jane Doe is a woman who was once trafficked by a now-murdered man named Adrian Murado, and who has a tell-tale red flower tattoo on her stomach. It isn’t much to go on, but it’s better than nothing.
