Breaking Down the Savage Season 1 Finale of Furious

Warning: This post contains spoilers for the finale of Furious.

By the end of the eighth and final episode of the first season of Furious, billionaire Jay Easton (Peter McRobbie) is dead, Catherine (Lola Petticrew) is in prison, and Alice (Emmy Rossum) has secured a full-time position working under Nora (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) in the Bureau’s basement-level sex crimes unit. But not all was as simple as it seemed, as creator Elizabeth Meriwether’s cat-and-mouse thriller still had a final twist up its sleeve.

Over the course of its first seven episodes, Furious tracked NYPD homicide detective-turned-probationary FBI duty agent Alice’s hunt for serial killer Catherine, a sex trafficking survivor targeting wealthy, high-profile men involved in her past abuse. Along the way, we learned Catherine’s primary motive was not simply retributive justice, but rather a desire to uncover the truth about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of her best friend and first love Isabel (Larissa Campos) at the Easton estate over a decade earlier. With the help of Nora’s corrupt boss Ed (Danny McCarthy), Jay covered up Isabel’s death to shield his involvement in a prolific child sexual abuse and trafficking ring. Catherine is convinced Jay himself killed Isabel, but due to the severe memory distortion she suffers from as a result of her trauma, she can’t fully remember what happened on that fateful night.

After Catherine’s fiancé Alden (Steve Way) gave Alice’s former partner Danny (Scoot McNairy) a flash drive containing years of incriminating evidence against Jay and his associates, it was revealed there was a folder containing an illicit video of a then-14-year-old Alice being abused by one of the men within Jay’s network. Episode 7 then ended with Alice tracking down Catherine and, instead of arresting her, manipulating her into driving out to Jay’s Connecticut estate while Alice followed closely behind in order to orchestrate an incident that would allow Alice to search Jay’s compound and arrest him without handing over the flash drive.

Who killed Isabel?

Although Episode 7 led us to believe Jay’s daughter Emma (Hope Davis) was going to be exposed as the person who had killed Isabel, Furious had a much more tragic reveal on the way. While Emma was anything but innocent considering she spent years procuring underage girls for her father and destroyed evidence of his crimes to protect their family, in the finale, she helped Catherine remember that Catherine herself was the one who ultimately injected Isabel with the drugs that killed her.

On the night Isabel died, both girls had been brought to the Easton house to be abused by Jay and his men. However, Isabel had only recently given birth to her daughter Elena (Chloe Carrillo) and started hemorrhaging and crying out in pain, which led to Jay hitting her. Isabel then asked Catherine to end her life and put her out of her misery, and Catherine complied. In the present timeline, after Catherine finally came to terms with what actually happened, Alice arrests her. While the other cops who had arrived then take over the scene, Alice goes upstairs to find Jay and ends up witnessing him dying of respiratory failure—though we will soon learn that she did more than just witness his demise.

How does the finale end?

Since Emma had destroyed all the evidence at the house and Jay was no longer around to be interrogated, it initially seemed like everyone in Jay’s circle was going to get off scot free while only Catherine went to prison, reinforcing the show’s overarching message about our flawed justice system. But after weighing the personal cost of exposing her video, Alice decided to hand the flash drive over to Nora so she would at least be able to take Ed down.

While visiting Catherine in prison, Alice learned that Catherine had caught on to the fact that Alice had killed Jay that night by purposefully stepping on his breathing tube to cut off his oxygen supply. Alice also decided to take Nora’s advice and watch the video of her abuse in order to face her trauma head on. The finale then ended with Alice using the FBI’s search database to look up a list of everyone who had ever downloaded her file, implying Alice may have acquired a taste for the same method of vigilante justice Catherine had been so fond of doling out. And since it was announced on Aug. 27 that Furious has been renewed for a second season, it seems like we’re eventually going to get to see Alice attempting to balance her devotion to her role as a FBI agent with her newfound thirst for vengeance against those who wronged her.

We also get a satisfying closing note to Alice and Danny’s relationship, as they decompress from the events of the season during a romantic getaway at the beach house he mentioned several episodes back. As to what will happen between them in the future, Rossum tells Entertainment Weekly it’s open-ended. “Now all of a sudden, they could be together, but he’s also processing not being really able to hold the totality of who she is and her secrets now that he knows the tape and has seen part of it,” she says. “So I think it’s really complicated, and I think getting to watch the human toll on him, the potential partner of somebody that has been a victim of violence and sexual violence is really interesting.”