Summary
Furious continues to explore deeper down a rabbit hole of dysfunction and trauma in “Flash Flood”, which proves that the supposed heroes are no healthier or more stable than the villains.
Man, there’s a lot of dysfunction going on in Furious, isn’t there? And I don’t just mean with the serial killer. If anything, Catherine’s mission seems the most straightforward and reasonable of everyone’s. We understand what she’s after, and while killing people isn’t exactly a good thing, we can relate to the anger she feels. On the law enforcement side of the spectrum, though, things are much more complex. People are burning the candle at both ends, sustaining themselves on a cocktail of supremely ill-advised habits and salves, lying to each other to protect their secrets and the frayed connective tissue of whatever relationships they might once have had. Episode 4, “Flash Flood”, despite not featuring a murder, feels like the bleakest instalment yet.
And the best, possibly, though it’s only by a matter of degree. The performances continue to be uniformly excellent, and the dynamics remain complex and challenging in largely the same ways. There’s just a bit more forward momentum here as Alice makes major progress in the case, figuring out both who Isabel was and, by extension, who Catherine is. But the roadblocks are now coming from a most unlikely source, and the investigation is liable to take more out of her than it already has, which is a not-insignificant amount.
After her encounter with Marshall, Alice needs support. Danny, though, is unavailable on account of visiting his son, Liam, who has a learning disability and is in a full-time care facility, a fact that Danny doesn’t reveal to Alice until later. In lieu of any other options, Alice turns to her usual coping mechanism, which is a violent one-night stand. It can’t be a healthy way to conduct relationships, and it doesn’t do much for Alice’s office reputation, turning up for work with a split lip and a black eye while suddenly working with the ex-boyfriend whom she outed as being an abuser.
Alice clearly has an ally in Nora, as she has since the premiere. But even that’s starting to fray. Initially, they’re on the same page, doing the hard yards and shopping around the picture of Isabel Luna, albeit a version of it with the faces of Jay and Caleb Easton cropped out for security purposes. It doesn’t lead to much, but the intention is there. Nora even combs through years of seized child pornography looking for facial recognition matches. There’s no wonder she drinks.
But this relationship starts to fray in “Flash Flood”. Through an old report of a dead girl matching Isabel’s description, Nora realises that she worked the case herself under her old boss, Ed George, and that she might have let Isabel’s killer go free. Naturally, she doesn’t share this detail with Alice, but we’ll return to it later, since her handling of the whole thing is exceptionally poor and unexpected. For the meantime, she continues to let Alice and Danny do the “brickwork”, which includes re-interviewing Emma Easton, Jay’s daughter and Caleb’s sister.
As they have been since the beginning, the powerful Easton family are to be treated with kid gloves. This time, though, in a nice inversion of the events in Episode 2, it’s Danny who goes off the rails, showing Emma the photograph of her father with a minor sex worker on his knee. Of course, Emma pretends the photo is some kind of fake, but it’s obvious that she knew her dad and brother were into some sketchy stuff. She won’t be any help. More brickwork it is.
Furious Episode 4 takes Danny and Alice to the orphanage where Isabel spent some of her childhood, and from where she fled at the age of 14, potentially while pregnant. The woman working there also names her overprotective, obsessive best friend – Catherine Grace. From a photo of the two together, Alice intuits immediately that this is their Jane Doe killer. They finally have a name, and the outline of a motive.
Speaking of Catherine, while all this is going on, she’s seducing her next victim. Blanchard is a dorky bisexual Gen Zer who is intrigued not just by Catherine’s comeliness – or so he claims – but also by her history as a sex worker, part of the dating app backstory she has cooked up to ensnare him. Blanchard is easy enough to manipulate into bed, and once she’s there, Catherine refuses to leave. Of course, Blanchard is too young to be her real target, but his father, Hal, fits the bill much better.
Hal is so desperate to avoid his family finding out how he and Catherine know each other that he walks right into her trap. While he walks her out of his building, she stabs him in the leg with one of her usual narcotic concoctions, and walks him to his minivan. She doesn’t kill him, though. For now, at least, she’s keeping him alive, at least while she spends some time with Alden, with whom she’s now officially in a relationship. There’s someone for everyone. Hopefully the fact that Alden has settled on a serial killer doesn’t come back to bite him.
As for Nora, she has a little too much to drink, has a conversation with Ed George, her former supervisor, and then makes the risky decision of speaking to Marshall about his latest encounter with Alice. He mentions her “unprovoked” appearance at his home the previous evening; she knows he’s lying, obviously, but she also sees an opportunity to oust Alice from the case, which she’s inclined to do now that the investigation has led her to Isabel’s murder, and thus Nora’s connection to it. It’s a huge, risky pivot for the Nora character. I don’t for a moment think Alice will do as she’s told, but in going rogue, she risks alienating one of the few people who, until this point, seemed to have her back.
