Furious Finale, Ending Explained and What it Means For Season 2
Furious, one of the hottest shows around right now, has come to an end (for now) with a thrilling finale, but what's next?
With a second season only officially confirmed last week, fans of Elizabeth Meriwether’s Furious had been curious to see if the show's first run of episodes would end with a satisfying close or leave us on another cliffhanger — but then it kind of did both.
Here’s everything that happened in that nerve-shredding finale and what it all might mean going forward into Season 2.
Naturally, big big massive spoilers lie ahead for the Season 1 finale of Furious!
What Happened in the Furious Season 1 Finale?
The eight-episode arc of this season of Furious has been building to a major showdown and the finale delivered it, with almost all of the central characters descending on Jay Easton’s country home in Connecticut and almost everything still up in the air.
Episode 7 left us wondering who would arrive first, and whether they'd arrive on time to either stop or create a catastrophe. That episode ended with Catherine (Lola Petticrew) making her way up Easton's weirdly unmonitored driveway as Rihanna’s ‘We Found Love’ played victoriously in the background. The show appeared to be setting up a straightforward vengeance kill, but of course it was never going to be that easy.
Most of the finale (which is poetically titled ‘Hart’s Island’, after the New York graveyard where unidentified victims, or "Jane Does", are buried) takes place in Easton’s home, beginning with an eerie scene in which Emma (Hope Davis) tucks her father into bed, having pushed him to the ground in the previous episode, in which it was revealed that he’d used her birthday as the code on his safe of child pornography (and we think our relationships with our parents are tricky).
That episode essentially revealed her to be the Ghislaine Maxwell to his Jeffrey Epstein, yet in spite of that meltdown, she continues to cover her father’s tracks in 'Hart's Island', destroying the remaining hard drives with some helpful tech advice over the phone from Ed (Danny McCarthy), who is also trying to make it to her before Alice (Emily Rossum) shows up on the scene.
First to arrive, of course, is Catherine, who appears in Emma’s greenhouse and starts to piece together the night when Isabel was killed — most of which, due to a mix of drug intake and PTSD, she has forgotten or buried. Emma eventually shoots Catherine, forcing her to run upstairs just as Alice arrives. We then get another Emmy-worthy scene between Petticrew and Rossum (the show really does peak whenever these two are together on screen) before Catherine again confronts Emma, this time in her father’s hidden room, just as Ed, Danny, Choi (Rob Yang) and the local police arrive downstairs. The tension builds as Alice attempts to talk Catherine off her ledge before the shoot-to-kill police break in. Then, just as she's about to snap, the penny finally drops and Catherine remembers that it was her, and not Emma, who killed her friend all those years ago — a mercy killing, perhaps, but a killing just the same.
Shellshocked by this revelation, Catherine agrees to turn herself in as the SWAT team arrive, and so Alice is able to save her. As Catherine is taken away by the paramedics, Alice walks upstairs to pay Easton a visit in his room. The elderly man wakes up and startles Alice by recognising her, calling her a “movie star” in his drugged up state, before apparently having a heart attack and dying. With no hard drives and no Easton, the case that we've followed all season essentially goes cold.
The Furious Finale’s Ending, Explained
The last 15 minutes of the finale offer a thrilling epilogue for the season and a delicious teaser of what we might see going forward.
The long goodbye begins with Meriwether, in very David Simon fashion, basically having all of her protagonists ask themselves, “Was it all for this?” We see the abusive Marshall (Jake Lacy) get his medal and promotion for being shot in the line of duty (in Episode 6). We then see Nora beg Danny for the evidence he got from Alden, but to no avail. We see Alice visit Catherine in prison, where she explains that Isabel has been given a proper burial (hence the episode title). We also see Alice and Danny testing the waters of their romantic relationship in the beach house Danny talked about earlier in the season. What soon becomes clear is that Danny is looking to step away from the job while Alice is ready to go deeper, essentially following in Nora’s footsteps into the basement office where Choi has also apparently been bumped down — good for him!
The central question of the finale, and basically of the second half of the season, has been whether Alice will confront the video of herself from Alden’s hard drive — which would of course allow her to submit it as evidence in a probable case against Jay, Emma and possibly Ed — or if she'll understandably keep it hidden. Naturally, Danny gives it to her for her to decide. The episode ends with her deciding to submit it to the evidence room, with Nora giving her the code — a pass the torch moment between them.
As Alice watches (another phenomenal moment for Rossum), the episode starts to cut back and forth. We see Nora happily threaten Ed in the elevator, knowing that she's got him; we then see Alice’s final conversation with Easton again, this time revealing that she’d stood on his oxygen tube and killed him; and then, best of all, we see her again with Catherine in the prison visiting area, where she's asked, “Did you like the way it felt?” as, back in the evidence room, Alice begins to look through the list of people who downloaded her video. Just before the credits roll, we see her smile.
How the Furious Finale Sets Up Season 2
Depending on how you look at it, or how things went down, Meriwether could easily have ended the entire series right there — in one way it’s an open-ended finish, but the story of Season 1 has more or less been tied up. Now, seeing as we know that this story will continue, and presuming that Alice is still the protagonist, we can allow ourselves to do a little guess work about how a second season might look.
If I had to guess, and barring the possibility of taking True Detective's anthology route, Furious Season 2 will probably see Alice hunt down the perpetrators linked to the videos on the hard drive while uncovering a web of powerful people connected to Easton. How the show will look without Petticrew out in the wild is hard to know, but there’s every chance that Alice will continue visiting her in prison — possibly even asking for some pointers as she comes to terms with the evident thrill she got from taking Easton's life. Given what Nora now has on him, I highly doubt we’ll be seeing any more of Ed — which could mean that Marshall becomes the chief antagonist on the law enforcement side of things.
Whatever the case, we're sure there’ll be plenty of opportunities for Nora, Alice, and Choi to see who can deliver the driest put-downs; and hopefully another Nora breakdown/karaoke scene. God willing, Danny and Alice will continue finding love in a hopeless place. Either way, we will be watching.
