Furious Season 1 Episode 7 Review: The Furious Trio Finds Their Wings in Satisfying Penultimate Hour

Critic’s Rating: 4.6 / 5.0

4.6

Furious continues to excel at telling a story about complex women. Flawed women. Messy, broken, and real women.

And in doing so, it’s one of the most compelling offerings in recent years.

Furious Season 1 Episode 7 embodies that well, as the penultimate episode saw its heavy-hitting female trio converge, find their wings, and fixate on a mission.

Every time it feels like I can pinpoint Furious’s strongest performer, someone does something that moves me so much that it shifts.

The hour was a prime example of that. But much of it comes from the dynamics forged between characters, with Alice at the center.

On one end, we have Alice and Nora. Their mentor/mentee dynamic is layered, despite being so new.

They see each other, truly, because they’re cut from a similar cloth. Some other mentor would likely handle Alice with kid gloves or treat her like a train wreck.

Nora hones in on how Alice being a train wreck can be a useful tool or her kryptonite. It’s Nora’s self-awareness that lets her cut through to Alice effectively, without being insulting or grating.

It’s the love and fondness for Alice beneath that rough and tough exterior that has her by Alice’s bedside. She flipped when she knew Alice was exposed and at risk because of Ed’s antics.

Then Alice wakes up, runs things past her, and I was so startled by Nora’s reaction to Alice choosing to save her abusive ex rather than run Catherine down that I laughed.

Nora is a queen because she always says the things people think but don’t feel are socially acceptable to say.

Her advice to Alice was so raw, biting, and honest and devoid of the type of reassurance and coddling that would typically happen if this was any other series.

We use people. That is what we do. That is how we build cases. What do you not understand? We are inhuman in defense of humanity. We become evil to fight evil.

But this isn’t any other series. This is Furious. And Nora was right. They use people for a greater damn good.

And if Marshall’s dumb ass needed to bleed out on the pavement while Alice followed Catherine for a shot at getting to Easton, then so damn be it, protocols be damned.

When Nora calls Alice soft, it is not so much an indictment as it is a plea that Alice harden up for a job that will destroy her. Nora is living proof.

So when Alice circles right back around, loops a drunken Nora into a side quest to track down Elena, Nora can barely contain her pride.

For a workaholic like Nora, who has to navigate a grueling, sexist job that takes bits of her soul, she never had family, but what she has is the ability to mentor the next generation of agents who can continue what she does and carry it on.

It’s a fascinating dynamic in and of itself, something just as compelling to watch as a traditional mother/daughter relationship, and the chemistry between Rossum and Bernstine is just captivating, plain and simple.

Alice pulling a Nora in the hotel room was such a great moment.

She took what Nora told her about how they use people, and she delivered that with gusto, not handling Elena with kid gloves because by now, she and Elena know all too well that this world isn’t kind.

And if Alice can forgo kindness, softness, and sweetness now for a greater good, for Elena’s greater good, then so be it.

Which results in Alice going hard on Elena and revealing the truth about who she really is to Isabel: not a sister, but a daughter, a girl abandoned by her mother.

It’s a brutal summation of her situation, so much so that even Nora seemed to imply that Alice needed to tread a bit lighter, but as harsh as that moment is, she also gives Elena a bit of a gift.

You do what you need to do to get through this.

Her assertion that Elena do whatever she needs to do to get through this rings so raw and true because it’s what Alice did — it’s what Nora does, it’s what Catherine is doing, and hell, it’s a reality check for survivors.

Do whatever you have to do to get by, and basically, do it without apology. The world will judge you no matter what.

It also translates well to Alice’s next run-in with Catherine, where she essentially uses her, points her in the direction of their mutual enemy like a loaded damn weapon, and unloads. That interaction is somehow more compelling to watch than their previous one on Furious Season 1 Episode 6.

This time, they feel even more on equal footing, and Alice isn’t small, or rattled, or vulnerable. She’s embodying everything that Nora gave her in that car — her poetic tale about how she pretends she has wings and can fly, like a righteous fury.

As a side note, I’m obsessed with Nora’s knowledge of mythology and how she applies it to so many aspects of her life. She’s such a gosh-darn NERD, and I live for it.

Nora has flown too close to the sun, as Icarus did, and now she’s falling, but Alice can pick up the mantle for her, and she does.

It’s almost like we got to watch in real time as Alice transformed into her own version of Nora, effed up, sure, effective? Absolutely.

And now Catherine gets to speed up her revenge tour, especially now that she has a hit on her head, essentially, because if the cops get to her before the Feds do, she’s as good as dead for daring to harm their Golden Boy.

Have I mentioned that all the men in this series, except Alden and Danny, are just wildly disappointing? Because they are.

The connection between Alice and Catherine is at the heart of the series, and it’s great to see that in her own way, Alice has made peace with it. I wasn’t lost on me that she lied to Nora about how she vehemently said “No” when Catherine asked her if she wanted her to kill Marshall.

She never answered because she did want that; she just wasn’t willing to admit that under pressure because it’d be acknowledging that she and Catherine are very much the same.

Which is why Nora wasn’t wrong when she said that Alice speaks about Catherine in this awestruck way. Seeing them become partners, of sorts, is what Furious has been leading up to this whole time, and the hour certainly delivers.

The worrisome part is that Catherine is headed to Jay Easton’s home, and Ed and his ilk will be hot on her tail. Also, he’s already warned Emma about everything.

Staying true to the complexities of women, Emma is such a difficult character to watch because she’s as complicit as it gets, and you marvel at her own level of depravity and evil by supporting her father.

We know she has some grit to her; that much was clear in how she pretty much assaulted him in anger and didn’t hold back on those harsh words. But that ferocity has some type of cap on it that keeps her from turning him in or over.

It’s fascinating, because incidentally she’s the type of character who you instinctively want to make a victim. And part of her dynamic with her father suggests he may have lusted after his daughter, so it was beneficial for her to find another young woman instead.

After all, he used her birthday as the combination to the safe where he hid all of his dirty videos and evidence.

But Emma isn’t a victim. She’s a willing participant who enjoys her proximity to power and esteem too much to really care about how morally depraved all of this is.

The way she casually left poor Lacey in the room with that monster and went to her garden house to listen to a song about “staying in the pines,” as if as long as she isn’t in the room when all of that happens, she can be happily unaware and not culpable, was sickening.

Even her lack of reaction to the bruises on Lacey’s wrists said it all.

It’s just fascinating how easily society can make victims out of perpetrators and enablers and demonize actual victims.

Emma and Marshall get slaps on the wrists, eyes turned away, and a genuine belief that somehow they’re not responsible for any of their own actions.

Isabel gets buried in a pauper’s grave, Catherine gets a manhunt and threats of death rather than actual help, and Alice gets regarded as a crazy woman set out to ruin a good man’s career.

The hits kept coming for Alice, too. But my goodness, I’m just glad she has Danny.

Even their dynamic has grown more fascinating to watch. He’s so deeply in love with her, and he has been this entire time, well before we met him.

He loves her so deeply; however, there’s a painful reality he represents in how people struggle to love survivors of sexual abuse.

The parallels between him and Alden have been such an unexpectedly intriguing angle.

Watching Danny interact with Alice after finding that tape had me thinking about what Alden said when he called Danny out for only loving conditionally, on his terms, when the person he loves behaves how he wants them to.

But right now, he’s having a hard time trying to love her without thinking about what she’s been through. He keeps seeing her as the victim that she was and not as the survivor that she is, regardless of what she had to do and become to survive.

He’s doing more to equate the prospect of their intimacy or sex with what she’s survived than she probably is.

He’s struggling, and that’s a very human response, but it sucks for them given Alice is finally in a place where she can voice how much she does love him.

On her part, Alice’s struggle has been that Danny is the one good and pure thing in her life, and she sees herself as a bit of a destructive force of nature — she doesn’t want to ruin him or drag him down with her.

Her stance is totally understandable, too.

The blocking and filming of those scenes between them were great visual touches. Waking up, there was some light coming through, and it really was like Alice was viewing Danny in a new light.

But in the kitchen, as Danny shared the news with her and put up those walls again on his end, the island was between them.

Of course, it was Danny who eventually moved around that, and there’s a promise in the fact that maybe they’ll revisit what they could be.

Alice put herself out there; Danny doesn’t want to shut her completely down. But he lets her know in other ways that they can find other ways to take Easton down because he absolutely refuses to expose her to do it — because he loves her.

Goodness, I’m rooting for those two.

That entire situation certainly unlocks something in Alice, and one of those things was the radical honesty she gives her sister in a moment that was quite satisfying.

Sibling dynamics are complicated. The reality is that no two siblings experience the same parents.

Amy can only see Alice as some hot mess who doesn’t have her life together, but never seemed to know the truth about their mother kicking her out at 14 or that Alice has had to fend for herself ever since.

It was so satisfying when Alice dropped all airs and stopped pretending she cared about her sister because it was the socially acceptable thing to do. It was liberating for both of them.

But Alice’s true liberation will come when she takes down Easton and Catherine arrives. I hope she gives him hell.

The Facts and the Fury:

• Marshall’s mother is so disgraceful. What did she think she’d gain by trying to air out Alice’s business to Danny? Did she really think that would change the fact that her son is trash? It doesn’t!
• Danny keeping his foot on Ed, literally, was so damn satisfying. Hit him again! Hit him again!
• I’m eternally fascinated by how this series explores depersonalization with Catherine, and they do it so consistently. My heart broke for her when she was driving to Easton’s house, and you could tell she was starting to dissociate a bit and couldn’t feel her hands and felt outside of her body.

• No, really, Amy. Take your damn pears! Like, that wasn’t even a cute little story; that was annoying. And it irked me that she just assumed Alice was overdosing of her own free will. Good riddance.
• So, it sounds like the man who impregnated Alice when she was 14 was the one who videoed their interaction, but how exactly did Jay get it? Did they just upload it to the dark web of freaks and spread it around?
• I just want to go out for one good night with Nora and sing bad karaoke. She’s such a blast.

Over to you, Furious Fanatics!

What are your predictions for the season finale?! Are you hoping Catherine succeeds at taking Jay Easton out? Are you as fascinated by the women of this series as I am? Let’s discuss everything below!

Furious’ finale streams next Monday on Hulu!