In a Vigilante Tale, ‘Furious’ Has No Perfect Victims

Sex-work fiction these days tends to lean to one of two categories: the righteous sort of flick, where a morally upright hero does battle with the outright evil of sex trafficking or the socially conscious reframing of sex work as an institution that suffers from generally unfair stigma.

With the premise of a sex worker turned serial killer who hunts down the Epsteinesque monsters responsible for the exploitation of young girls, the new Hulu series Furious hinted it might combine these genres into something like 2020’s Promising Young Woman. Instead, showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether somehow manages to build something from these pieces that resembles neither, making Furious an impressively nuanced depiction of sex work and abuse as a brain-breaking enterprise from which no one escapes unscathed.

Furious stars Emmy Rossum (Fiona Gallagher from Shameless) as Alice, the FBI agent who ends up spearheading the hunt to find Lola Petticrew’s Catherine who is serially killing predatory men. Alice is not an ambitious go-getter. Nor is she a reluctant hero called out on a Joseph Campbell-esque journey. She took a lateral career move away from the New York Police Department when she made a domestic abuse complaint against her ex-boyfriend Marshall (Jake Lacy) which resulted in no official censure but did result in her being ostracized by everyone except her partner Danny (Scott McNairy).

Alice is still in the hazing phase of her FBI career, answering cranks on the FBI hotline and quietly trying to keep the other junior agents from entertaining their delusions when Danny asks to borrow her to confirm his suspicion that an apparent drug overdose was staged murder.

Alice’s new boss Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), has little-to-no confidence she can actually make any substantial long-term progress against the sexual trafficking of minors, and for good reason. The bureaucracy is as much of a menace as Catherine, as seen in the most recent episode where Nora quite literally describes the FBI as a paramilitary organization where lesser soldiers answer to the chain of command and aren’t allowed to question orders just because they make no sense. There are layers of perverse subtext to corporate HR style sessions about self-care and post-traumatic stress syndrome in this kind of environment, where the fact of teenage girls being raped and murdered is of less concern than maintaining proper social rules of decorum in a stressful, demoralizing job.

For viewers, there’s little mystery to how Catherine commits the murders, since we see her do them. What’s intriguing is why she commits the murders, particularly after we’re introduced to Alden (Steve Way) with equal parts snark and sincerity. Catherine seems to share genuine happiness with him, to the extent she can parse that anyway. As we learn in the fifth episode, Catherine herself doesn’t clearly remember the inciting incident that set her off on the path to revenge. That’s one problem of being a teenage sex worker: In between all the drugs, abuse, and working for men who they’re convinced they love, it’s easy to lose your grip of reality.

Furious is not a straightforward tale of good and evil. It’s the rare fictional depiction of sex trafficking to acknowledge that trafficked girls are almost never perfect victims. It’s often their vulnerable situation — messed up delinquents with awful home lives — that gets them involved in sex trafficking to begin with. On the flip side, Catherine’s status as former teenage sex worker is loaded with ambiguities even without addressing the fact that she’s a serial killer. The camgirl work we see her do is genuinely discomforting because we can see that Catherine is just playing another role, using the same skills she used to commit the murders. These skills in turn were themselves honed when she was a teenage sex worker who had to slink around in the shadows ensuring that the men and women of her daily life only saw what they wanted to see: whether johns, cops, social workers, or random witnesses.

Despite their unforgivable involvement in sex trafficking, the two Catherine victims with whom she shares the most screentime are complex, almost sympathetic characters. Sympathetic isn’t quite the right word. They’re more complexly pathetic, feeling clear guilt over their actions that obviously hasn’t been helped by the fact that they’ve faced no consequences for their bad choices — and probably never would have, in the absence of Catherine’s murderous fury. They still unavoidably come off better than later villains, who refuse even the hypocrisy of self-interested self-reflection as they tend to their garden of indifferent cruelty.

At the core of this show is the cold acknowledgment that every character, even the ones engaged in genuinely monstrous behavior, have some sort of internal rationalization for their actions. Meriwether has an excellent grasp of how people at this level of institutional importance are often quite literally incapable of connecting their own actions to an internally consistent moral framework because they think their public facing lives can act as an excuse for whatever it is they want to do in the bedroom. At one point, Catherine poses as a former sex worker turned activist. Her girlboss disguise is grotesque at it is fascinating, giving visual demonstration that to the idea that sex work is a class affectation, where bravery and resilience are valued only insofar as they’re aimed against the abstractions of society at large rather than specific powerful men.

Meriwether also fully understands that not all men engaged in misogynistic behavior express that misogyny the same way. There’s no indication that Marshall, a blue collar cop, thinks much about gender as an abstract concept at all. He still beat Alice though, which is why she joined the FBI. He claims not to remember the beating, due to the alcohol abuse, and it’s entirely possible that he’s telling the truth. We don’t know, and Alice doesn’t know, and most of the time, it’s not clear whether even Marshall knows. They still love each other, but that love takes on such hurtful, destructive, and toxic forms it’s hard to argue that a reconciliation is worth it, and both struggle to make this argument despite clearly wanting to.

Furious is fundamentally a story about how people can love each other while engaging in acts of unfathomable cruelty to one another. Furious is also the rare case of a show that allows such agency even to its teenage characters, fully recognizing that young adults are also capable of making bad decisions. In the show’s slow drip of exposition, we learn that Catherine herself is desperately trying to prevent a girl from leaving her foster home to do sex work. There aren’t too many younger characters in Furious but they all give off powerful angry teenager running off to join the circus energy. Their behavior is terrifying in its immaturity, and we can see all too easily how such a teenage life could make them as self-destructive as Alice, which isn’t much better than being as destructive as Catherine.

Nora, a mythology buff, reminds us that Medusa has a terrifying head full of snakes that turns any onlooker to stone because of a curse from Poseidon after he raped her. Just because Medusa was the victim of a crime did not mean that what she became and what she did afterward was necessarily good and righteous. This confusing principle permeates Furious, with Catherine presenting less as a hypercompetent avenging angel and more as a clumsy, destructive force of nature, knowing enough about how computers work to destroy video footage of herself but not enough, for example, to delete her browsing history.

Furious is an ugly crime story. It’s no epic cat-and-mouse game, but a trail of sloppy breadcrumbs spread by men and women too shortsighted and self-interested to notice when and how they’re being watched. It’s the serious crime show that a serious crime like sex trafficking deserves. It’s also the serious, complex emotional drama that sex workers and victims of sexual abuse deserve.