Summary
Furious builds sympathy with its villain by intently focusing on her headspace and methods, while continuing to draw uncomfortable parallels with the woman hunting her down.
Maybe this is a bit of a leap, but it occurs to me that it’s much easier being a serial killer if you’re a woman. I’m not saying they should do it more often, obviously, but the odds do seem to be in their favour. Jane Doe – whose real name we still don’t know, but IMDb credits her as “Catherine” – is basically given a blueprint by her victims. As it turns out, rich men who already have the material things they want desire to possess things they know they shouldn’t, namely people. In the premiere, Catherine manipulated her way into Oliver Charles’s swanky apartment, and in Episode 2 of Furious, she manages to stay there by colluding in the illusion that she’s now just another piece of his property.
The fact that Oliver is seduced by supplication and a baby-doll voice should give away Catherine’s motive here: revenge. Throughout the episode, which largely takes place in Oliver’s apartment as Catherine continuously drugs him and befriends his neglected daughter, Mira, who shows up unexpectedly since she’s in town for a debate tournament, we learn that Oliver paid Catherine for sex when she was only 15. He later points out that she never told him her age, but the obvious counterpoint is that he never asked. Even as an adult woman, Lola Petticrew, who plays Catherine, doesn’t look particularly advanced in years. At 15, she must have looked like a toddler.
I’m not sure where we’re supposed to stand on Catherine. She’s a serial killer, of course, which is generally shorthand for “bad guy”, but she’s killing people who inarguably deserve it. It’s a similar approach to the one that the latest season of Cross took, now that I think about it. On some level we are supposed to be rooting for Catherine, but we’re also supposed to be a bit fearful of her. She doesn’t reserve her ire for people who have wronged her. Like the Anya Taylor-Joy character in Apple TV’s Lucky, she’s willing to do whatever she needs to get what she wants, as we see with how she blackmails Becky from the domestic violence shelter.
We also get to see her interact with Mira, which is similarly manipulative, but has a slightly different contour to it. The big question is whether Catherine feels sympathetic towards Mira or sees something of herself at that age in her, which are slightly different propositions. Furious doesn’t make it especially clear in Episode 2. There’s a thing about Oliver refusing to allow Mira to cut her hair short, which makes Catherine think back to his own compliments about her hair when he slept with her as a teenager, so the mirroring is quite explicit. There’s no indication that Oliver abused Mira; he was just a selfish, absentee father, but Catherine does seem rather protective of Mira and supportive of her interests. Her debate topic is whether it was right or wrong for Emily Dickinson’s poetry to have been published posthumously against her wishes, so even the throwaway subtext is about women’s agency being stripped from them.
But on the flip side, Catherine kills Oliver while Mira is in the apartment, pursues Mira like a maniac when she discovers her cooking the home surveillance equipment, and then, after Mira has found her father’s corpse, explains to her why he had to die. Now, granted, Mira claims she wants to know, but if Catherine’s point is that she was never truly capable of consent as a teenager, then it’s a bit rich for her to be taking Mira’s word for things like this. There’s no way a girl kneeling at the foot of her murdered father’s bed really wants to hear his killer explain how he was a pedophile. Still, at least she gets the haircut she wanted.
There’s an interesting thing to note in Catherine’s dialogue with dying Oliver, which is that she asks him if he recalls another girl who was with her on the night he assaulted her. Whoever that girl is, Catherine is either still looking for her or trying to avenge whatever happened to her, so it’s something we should probably be keeping an eye on.
Catherine and this mystery girl were presumably two among very, very many who fell between the cracks of an indifferent system; treated like animals in places like the Candlelight Lounge, used and abused by wealthy, unscrupulous men, and never avenged in any meaningful sense because none of the men faced charges or ended up serving time. Educational classes about sex trafficking had to suffice, but Catherine’s point to Oliver, which is obvious to the audience, is that those classes were a waste of time because the men involved obviously knew what they were doing at the time. Oliver might have convinced himself that Catherine not revealing her age gave him some kind of plausible deniability, but he knew. It would have been obvious.
Being victims of men who get away with injustices is the primary thing that unites Catherine and Alice, who was forced to leave her job for reporting an abusive co-worker who continues to live his life happily while Alice’s has been completely derailed. In many ways, Catherine is exploring the avenues of revenge that are closed off to Alice. She suffered the punishment her abuser should have and continues to visit torments upon herself by being so sceptical of the frameworks that might support her – Internal Affairs, whom she never notified about the situation, and her co-workers like Danny, who believed her but whom she never truly confided in – that she never sought actual help.
The Danny thing is a bit complex, since he still has a working relationship with Alice’s ex, Marshall, even if he’s generally disliked within the NYPD for taking Alice’s side at the time. But you can feel Alice’s frustration at the lack of resolution in all these areas bubbling to the surface constantly. It’s there when she openly accuses Caleb Easton of being a pedophile in front of his sister and father; it’s there in her lack of personal hygiene, since she forgoes the shower because Marshall used to drag her out of it and beat her. Danny becomes a tentative ally, warning her that she stinks and then, later, when she’s drunk, volunteering to sit outside the shower so she finally feels safe enough to wash. It’s a very grim moment when you think about it, but it’s also pretty sweet.
Catherine very much dominates this episode, but Alice and Nora do make a breakthrough. Even though Caleb wasn’t on the list of confidential informants in the Candlelight Lounge case, they’re able to figure out that his car was in the background of the CCTV footage, and the vehicle was reported missing by his lawyer – Oliver Charles. Of course, they’re too late to save Oliver, but a pattern is emerging, and that should bring them closer and closer to the girl with the poppy tattoo who is killing her way around town. Given Alice’s experiences, though, will she be more or less inclined to bring her to justice?
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