The Best Character in Furious Was Never Alice or Catherine
Furious has come to a thrilling conclusion, and there's more to come with a second season getting the green light, but we want to take a moment to appreciate the best character in the show.
With the greatest respect to Alice Black and Catherine Grace, real ones know that the MVP of Furious was Nora Washington.
Let’s dig a little deeper on how series creator Elizabeth Meriwether and her star, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, made this Beckett-quoting, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing, delightfully boozy detective one of the great TV characters of the year.
How Nora Washington Became the Best Character in Furious
Where do we start?
It’s pretty much a basic tenet of movies and TV shows: if you're going to have a mentor character, we like it when they’re honourable and dedicated, but it’s even better when they’re salty, rude, impossible to please, and even a little reprehensible, too. At least, we do as long as their hearts are the right place and they get the job done.
For Furious, Meriwether (and Bernstine) created Nora to be all those things; even pushing the boat out a little beyond the usual realms of acceptance regarding the machiavellian lengths she is willing to go for the job. As early as Episode 1, Nora essentially reveals that she uses people — even some of the teenage girls that they're meant to be looking out for — if it means bringing her closer to the end goal of bringing the actual bad guys to justice.
What makes the character so great is that she’s the toughest and smartest of anyone, and the funniest too — an agent who’s seen it all before and can smell the opportunistic phonies (ahem, Ed) a mile away. She also, during a particularly low ebb, sings Meatloaf very badly in a karaoke bar and claims to like smelling bad as it keeps people away from her. What's not to like?
How Nora’s Medusa Story Sets Up the Whole Show
Nora's importance to the drama can be summed up in one scene from the first episode.
It’s revealed early on that one of the many things Nora became an outcast for was her academic background. Throughout the series, we hear her quote Balzac and Beckett, but her main focus in college was Greek classics — which provides the series with its key allegory.
After Tina, the teenage trafficker, ends up in hospital in Episode 1, Nora decides to bring up the story of Medusa — a snake-headed figure from mythology known for turning men into stone. She explains to Alice that Medusa wasn’t always like this and that she was turned into a monster only after Poseidon raped her in Athena’s temple and Athena blamed her for it. In the scene, she’s talking about it in reference to Tina, who she knows was recruiting other girls in order to save herself, but it will obviously apply to Catherine in later episodes, too, not to mention Alice and herself. In this show, everyone has their reasons.
This mythical flare in her returns during the stakeout in Episode 7, when a slightly drunk Nora explains that she has had to sometimes become “inhuman to protect humanity” in her work, but to do so she imagines herself not as a monster but a being with giant wings. One of the central questions that lingers in the series is whether Alice can toughen up to her standards in order to follow in her footsteps in the sex crimes unit. Alice passes that threshold in that same episode when she decides to let Catherine go so that she can follow her to Easton's house — at which point she shouts up to Nora, slightly deliriously, “I got my wings.”
Where You’ve Seen Quincy Tyler Bernstine Before
Speaking on The Watch earlier this week, after the Furious Season 1 finale aired, Meriwether explained that she basically hired Bernstine on the spot after seeing her perform in Doubt on Broadway — a role for which Bernstine earned her first Tony nomination in 2024. For theatre-goers, the actress has been a mainstay on the Off-Broadway circuit since the early 2000s and even received an OBIE award for "Sustained Excellence" in 2019.
On screen, her appearances have been auteur focused, if also a bit sporadic — a small part in Rachel Getting Married here, a few Spike Lee joints there, appearances in Manchester By the Sea and The Leftovers, but aside from playing Tameika in Power, nothing in her filmography so far has been anywhere near as big or impactful as what she’s achieved with Furious.
At the moment, we are still very much in the dark about what direction Season 2 of the show is headed in, but we can rest assured that Alice and Nora will be there. Let’s hope the highbrow quotes, cheesy power-ballads and Hawaiian shirts are still there, too.
