TV Recap: "Furious" Episode 2 — The Killer Makes Her Next Move
FBI agent Alice Black has connected two suspicious overdose deaths that she believes to be the work of the same killer. Meanwhile, that unnamed femme fatale is in pursuit of her next victim. That’s where the second episode of Hulu’s Furious picks up.
Episode 2: “My Life Had Stood - A Loaded Gun” — Written by Elizabeth Meriweather
Prominent lawyer Oliver Charles (Rob Delaney) is dressed and ready for work. The catering waitress he slept with the night before, who goes by Jinny (Lola Petticrew), is still lounging in his bed as he offers to get her an Uber home. She asks if she should bring the NDA with her, reading her copy. “It’s like you own me,” she says, reviewing the jargon. He defends himself, saying the verbiage protects them both, but she cuts him off. “I want you to own me,” she clarifies. “I want to belong to you.” He blames the drugs for his behavior last night, but she tells him she liked it. She wants to stay at his place today, pointing to his security cameras and suggesting that he watch. He agrees under the terms that she clean his apartment in the nude while he’s gone.
In her apartment, Alice Black (Emmy Rossum) seems afraid to step into her shower. She avoids it, getting dressed and sending the bodega video to Danny Kelly (Scoot McNairy), who calls her in a whisper, telling her a tattoo isn’t proof. Asked why he’s whispering, he tells her his lieutenant doesn’t want any more work done on this case. The deceased’s billionaire father, Jay Easton donates to police pension funds, and there’s no concrete evidence linking his son to a trafficking ring. Kelly looked up his record, and since being sober, Caleb’s only police activity has been reporting a vehicle as stolen. Black asks him to send her the details anyway. Kelly changes the topic, asking Black if she’s going to her sister’s engagement party. She refuses to answer unless she can talk to the Eastons.
Alice’s boss, Mason Adkins (Alex Morf), is once again annoyed that his duty agent is being requested on the Easton case. He insinuates that she has gone behind his back again.
At the Ashcroft & Charles Law Group, Oliver Charles steps into a conference room with two women (Bella Coppola and Lana Autumn Schupbach) to discuss his work to help fund education for girls. He brings up his daughter, talking about how important the cause is, when his home security system alert him to an intruder. He steps into the corner, looking at his security system, watching Jinny cleaning his living room. She looks at the camera as she strips for him.
Oliver returns to his apartment for lunch, finding Jinny freshly showered on his bed. Lying with her, his fingers trace over her red poppy tattoo, and he suddenly has a feeling he’s seen it before. Jinny throws him mentally off balance by clamming up, running to the bathroom and locking herself inside. He has to go back to work.
Black heads to the basement of the FBI to meet with Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) in the sex crimes division, C20. The officer who made the report at the bodega was never spoken to, so Washington agrees to introduce her.
Tim Baker (Frank Pando) isn’t thrilled when Washington and Black apprehend him in the street to ask about a 14-year-old report he filed. He remembers the case, though. The man, Murado, said he was the girl’s dad. The girl seemed high and told him she wanted to stay with her dad. Washington asks him what was across the street from the bodega, a loaded question because she then informs him that it was across from The Candellight Lounge, a “massage parlor” that cops liked to visit to blow off steam. Black asks Baker if he ever verified that Murado was the teen’s father. He blows them off and walks away, frustrated.
“You told me you didn’t remember investigating Murado,” Black turns the frustration around on Washington. Nora comes clean, sharing that she had been trying to shut down the massage parlors for years. Being her philosophical self, she quotes Balzac — “Laws are spiderwebs through which the big flies pass, and the little ones get caught.” Sensing distrust, Black asks Washington why she doesn’t trust her. “Because I don’t know if you’re still a cop,” Nora responds, wondering why Alice left the NYPD. The conversation is interrupted by a text from Danny asking Alice to meet him for drinks later.
Back at the office, Oliver checks his security cameras and notices that Jinny has left.
At the undisclosed shelter, Jinny is upset to find that Becky (Chloe Troast) has already given her bed up. She begs her for help, saying her boyfriend is going to kill her. Becky wants to help, but says the physical part of their friendship needs to stop, saying she could lose her job over it. Jinny agrees… if Becky gives her drugs back. Becky refuses, until Jinny pulls out her phone and shows her compromising pictures of the two of them together in bed, taken without her knowledge. Jinny also increases her request to some items Becky must steal from the janitor’s closet, including sanitizer wipes and bleach.
Jinny returns to Oliver’s apartment with bags of groceries, plus a sequined bag she didn’t have on her before. He asks where she was, and she says she just went out to get groceries, as she busies herself with a sticker-covered metal case from her purse full of vials and a syringe. “I feel like I’ve met you before,” Oliver tells her. Jinny confesses that they have met, as she turns around and stabs him with a needle, injecting him with something that limits his mobility. After a second dose, she informs him they met at a party. She was only 15. He paid to have sex with her. All he can respond with is a groan.
Alice arrives at the bar to meet Danny. “Marshall’s here,” he warns her. It’s not enough time for her to back out. The infamous ex rounds a corner, and Alice stands face-to-face with her old abuser, Marshall Connelly (Jake Lacy). Alice immediately turns to leave. “I didn’t know he was gonna be here,” Danny promises as Alice runs away.
The next day at her desk, Alice looks up the Candlelight Lounge and finds a list of informants with plea deals. The names have been redacted by Nora. She gets a text from Danny that Caleb Easton’s sister is willing to talk to them, offering to drive. Before heading out, she heads down to talk to Washington, asking if Caleb Easton was a redacted informant. She says the police shut her investigation down as soon as she started poking around. Black wants to look further into it, but Washington reveals she doesn’t trust her. So Alice comes clean about her reasons for leaving the NYPD: She was in a relationship with a detective who abused her to the point of hospitalization. When she told her lieutenant, everyone she worked with and knew growing up stopped talking to her. “I’m not a cop anymore,” Black promises. She saw photos of the Candellight Lounge raid where girls weren’t allowed to bathe, weren’t fed regularly. Washington vents about how none of the men paying for services faced any repercussions, save for having to attend a class about human trafficking. Alice argues that if Caleb Easton was one of the redacted informants, they have a case. Nora agrees to make some calls.
In Oliver Charles’ kitchen, Jinny pounds chicken breasts flat. She gets a call from Becky, who is freaking out about giving her drugs back. Jinny tells Becky that her boyfriend is going to kill her if he sees her on the phone. “I can’t get you a wig,” Becky complains, not even sure where they sell them. Jinny hangs up on her in frustration. Oliver, meanwhile, is on the floor, trying to crawl towards her with his limited mobility as Jinny puts the chicken on the stove. When he grabs her ankle, she gets him back to bed and administers another dose. But a fire alarm calls her back to the kitchen, where Jinny is stunned to find they aren’t alone. “Is my dad here?” Mira (Riley Vinson) asks.
Alice and Danny pull up to a mansion upstate after a silent drive. He begs Alice to talk to him, repeating that he didn’t know Marshall would be at the bar. When she reluctantly accepts his apology, he warns her that she stinks, asking when she last showered. He offers her some scented hand sanitizer as a perfume before they go inside.
Emma Easton (Hope Davis) asks the authorities if her brother suffered. She didn’t know much about his life and had no idea he was using drugs again. “I think he was depressed,” she reasons. Her brother had told her he met someone and seemed happy. “He said she’d just gotten out of an abusive… relationship, I think?” she adds. When Black asks why her brother left the bench in 2012, their interview is interrupted by the billionaire himself, Jay Easton (Peter McRobbie), wheeled in by a nurse. He says Emma needs to take him to a doctor, thanking them for helping figure out what happened to Caleb. Black is surprised by how quickly Kelly complies, turning cold. “He did suffer,” she tells Emma, explaining that there was no food in his system when he died, and his killer withheld food and water for days while injecting him with drugs. “Is there any reason why someone would’ve wanted to hurt him?” she asks, met with stunned silence. She asks more targeted questions, watching Jay look out the window as she mentions the Candlelight Lounge or any solicitation charges. “We are not going to continue this conversation at this time,” Jay tells them, asking that any follow-up questions go through the family lawyer. As they get up to leave, Emma tells Black that she smells terrible.
Black and Kelly bicker on their way out. She accuses him of visiting the Candlelight Lounge. He defends Tim Baker, adding that he warned him to stop working with Black. Danny shares that his family situation is complicated as he puts on a tie for Amy’s engagement party, which he’s forcing Alice to attend. “She’s not my sister,” Black says, reminding him that she hadn’t talked to Amy until she was 20-years-old.
For all of Alice’s reluctance, Amy (Elise Kibler) is excited to see her and Danny at her engagement party. Amy tells Alice that their mom wants to talk to her. “Who?” Alice asks. She and Danny bicker there, too. Black is mad that Kelly backed down, and he’s mad that she doesn’t understand that he’s scared of losing his job. He’s not sorry for defending her when things went south with Marshall, but tells her nobody at work will talk to him now, and when she’s not talking to him, he feels like he lost everyone over it. A lot of people don’t believe her version of events because she just left and Marshall is still around.
A few shots later, Black loosens up, even dancing with a man at the party. Amy talks to Danny about how Alice stayed with her after the breakup and would avoid anything that reminded her of Marshall. “He used to pull her out of the shower and beat her up,” she informs him. Danny had no idea. Alice never told him these details.
Jinny, having told Mira that her father is sick in bed, eats the chicken she made with her victim’s daughter. She pretends to be his on-again, off-again girlfriend. Mira doesn’t see her father often, but is in the city for a debate tournament. Jinny compliments Mira’s long hair, and finds that Oliver’s daughter hates it. “I’d kill to cut it off,” she says, but her father told her guys like girls with long hair and has been encouraging her to get a boyfriend. Jinny offers to let Mira say hi to her father. Opening the door to his bedroom, we see Oliver’s scared eyes as he hears his daughter, unable to move or speak.
Alone in the kitchen, Jinny pours two glasses of wine. When she hears a phone alert from Mira’s backpack, she takes it and puts it in the oven, turning it on. She meets Oliver’s daughter in the bathroom, offering her some wine. Mira tells her about her debate speech, which questions whether Emily Dickinson’s sister should have published the author’s poems when she specifically asked that they be destroyed after her death. As Jinny helps curl Mira’s hair, Mira talks about wanting to be a lawyer someday like her dad. Jinny seems to consider burning the girl’s neck with the iron, but instead shows her a trick, touching her fingers to the hot metal to get a reaction from the girl. “You’re not gonna believe it, but I don’t have any feeling in my fingertips,” Jinny tells her as she touches it more. Mira asks why. “I was injured when I was your age,” Jinny says.
Danny helps a drunk Alice into her apartment. After she prays to the porcelain gods, he sits with her on the bathroom floor, apologizing for what he said and wishing she would talk to him. “You never asked me what happened,” she says, asking why. “I just thought you’d tell me when you were ready,” he resigns, offering to sit there, protecting her while she cleans up. Alice finally takes a shower.
After Mira is asleep, Jinny goes to Oliver, telling him how awesome his daughter is. She tells him about a girl who was with her the night he paid to sleep with her. She knows her was high and drunk and probably doesn’t remember all the details. With his drugs wearing off, he begs Jinny not to hurt his daughter. She promises no such thing, but acknowledges how scared he must be as he gives him a little water. She remembers him telling her how beautiful her hair was. “When you were done, you brought me a glass of water.” Oliver starts to cry, swearing that he didn’t know how young she was. She responds by administering two more doses with the syringe.
Alice wakes up in her bed, finding that Danny slept over on the couch. Nora rings Alice’s bell, coming in with the declassified informants and meeting Danny. Caleb Easton wasn’t on the list. Danny reveals that he had Caleb’s computer searched, and nothing suspicious came back. Alice looks into his stolen car report, a black Mercedes-Benz, and realizes that’s the same type and color car that can be seen outside the bodega in the security footage. She matches the partially visible plates to the report and confirms that it was Caleb’s car. Reading the report, the car was listed as missing by Easton’s lawyer, a man named Oliver Charles.
Mira wakes up in the morning to find Jinny cleaning the apartment. All of the security cameras have been pulled down, and there’s a bad smell emanating from the oven. Looking inside, Mira sees all of the cameras, servers, and her phone inside. Freaking out, she yells for her dad and runs to his room. “I’m sorry, Mira,” Jinny approaches. “He’s dead.” Jinny brings up Mira’s debate topic, confessing that she didn’t go to school and doesn’t know much, but it seems to her that the right thing was not to publish the poems. “They were hers, and we all took it away from her,” Jinny says. “That feels like the right answer.” Mira asks if Jinny is going to kill her. “I met your dad when I was your age, and he hurt me, Mira,” she explains. “He’s not a good man.” Mira asks what he did. Jinny isn’t sure she really wants to know. Mira says she does.
The building’s super (Hector Deliz) enters Oliver Charles’ penthouse apartment after ringing the bell and not getting a response. As he moves through the place, he calls out to whoever may be inside, saying Oliver’s ex-wife called him to check in when she couldn’t reach their daughter. Getting to the bedroom, he finds the apartment’s tenant dead in bed. His daughter sits on the floor at the foot of the bed, a pair of scissors in her trembling hands. Her hair has been cut short. She looks at him with tears in her eyes.
To be continued in Furious Episode 3, “Memory Distortion.”