The Joy of an Unlikeable Woman: Why FURIOUS Made Me Feel Exhilarated
Warning: This piece contains spoilers.
Disney+ has just released FURIOUS, a gripping new crime drama following FBI agent Alice Black as she becomes consumed by the hunt for Catherine Grace, a female serial killer.
But FURIOUS is far from a simple game of cat and mouse. Alice and Catherine are both driven by their own ideas of justice, operating on opposite sides of the law while pursuing a similar purpose. As their lives become increasingly intertwined, the boundaries between justice and revenge, victim and villain, and right and wrong begin to blur.
As a mental health research assistant, I naturally found myself looking deeper into each character. There is plenty that could be said about FURIOUS through a psychological lens. But that wasn’t what stayed with me.
Instead, I kept questioning who I was actually rooting for. Every character seemed flawed in one way or another. It was a far cry from the television shows I usually watch, where I can almost instantly find someone to cheer on. But who do you root for when, technically, they could all be considered villains?
And somewhere amongst the murder and fury, I noticed something unexpected.
Why did FURIOUS make me feel sort of… exhilarated?
I Am Supposed to Hate Her… Right?
The show begins with a man crawling across an apartment floor. A woman wearing a Halloween cat mask watches him as she casually gathers sweets for a child waiting at the door. When she returns, she injects the man with something and watches him die.
We later learn that the woman is Catherine, a serial killer with a long list of victims. Soon after, the case lands on the desk of Alice, a former police officer turned FBI agent who left the force after her childhood sweetheart, also a police officer, assaulted her.
I instantly thought: perfect. The lines are clear. Cop and killer. Good and bad. Someone to root for and someone to hate.
Right?
Wrong.
FURIOUS makes it almost impossible to keep either woman neatly on the “good” or “bad” side of the line.
Let’s start with Catherine. Her victims are not random; they are predatory and powerful men connected to the abuse she endured after being trafficked into sex work as a teenager. With each man she kills, she also hopes to move closer to discovering the truth about what happened to Isabel, her best friend, who was trafficked alongside her and died in suspicious circumstances that Catherine seems to have blocked out.
But it isn’t only Catherine’s motivation that complicates how I see her. Just as she begins to frighten me, she dances furiously when nobody is watching, plays with stickers and carries Isabel’s sequined bag as a relic of their friendship. Then there is Aldan, Catherine’s romantic interest, who draws out an unexpectedly loving side of her.
Then there is Alice. If Catherine complicates what a villain can look like, Alice complicates what we expect a “hero” to be. She represents the law, investigating Catherine’s murders.
But as the series progresses, Alice’s pursuit of justice becomes tangled up with her own fury, trauma and desire for control.
One scene that particularly stood out to me was when Alice invites her former abusive boyfriend over to “talk.” Perhaps naively, I expected this to be the moment when she finally confronted him, said everything she needed to say, and walked away with some sense of closure.
Instead, she traps him and pours alcohol over his face, knowing he is a recovering alcoholic. When he eventually leaves, in his underwear and covered in liquor, she asks her neighbour to report a suspicious-looking drunk man to the police.
It is calculated, vindictive and cruel. And I thought this was Alice. She was supposed to be the “good” one. But she wasn’t.
And this is where FURIOUS really got me.
With Catherine, I began with someone I thought I was supposed to hate and slowly found reasons to care about her. With Alice, I began with someone I thought I was supposed to trust and slowly found reasons to question her. I wanted Alice to stop Catherine, but I didn’t necessarily want Catherine to be caught. Neither woman would stay in the box I had put her in.
Why Do I Need Them to Be Likeable Anyway?
The more I thought about Alice and Catherine, the more I realised there was another assumption hiding underneath my response: I kept trying to justify why I was allowed to like them.
We have spent decades being fascinated by complicated male protagonists who behave terribly. Think Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper or Dexter Morgan: men who lie, manipulate, cheat, exploit and, in some cases, kill. Their moral failures don’t make them less compelling. Quite often, their flaws are exactly what keep us watching.
Yet I noticed myself doing something different with Alice and Catherine.
With Catherine, it was: yes, her victims are predatory men connected to the abuse she suffered, but she still kills them. Yes, terrible things happened to her, but she can also be frightening and ruthless.
With Alice, I found myself doing almost the reverse. Yes, she is trying to stop Catherine, but she can be vindictive and cruel. Yes, she is on the side of the law, but her choices can be morally questionable.
Why did I need the “but”?
Maybe neither woman needs me to defend her. Maybe I don’t need to prove that Catherine is secretly good, or that Alice remains morally right, before I am allowed to find them compelling.
What If Suffering Doesn’t Make You Better?
Part of what interested me about these characters was how they disrupted the kind of story I have come to expect about suffering.
There is an idea sometimes described as the “perfect victim”: someone whose suffering is easiest to recognise when they behave in ways that preserve our sympathy for them. On television, that can mean a woman who is understandably damaged by what happened to her, but never becomes so angry, bitter or difficult that her behaviour threatens our sympathy.
There is nothing wrong with stories about survivors who heal. But I realised how much they have shaped my expectations of what surviving something terrible should look like. I want to see someone go to therapy, rebuild their relationships, forgive, grow, perhaps even use what happened to them to help others. I want their suffering to produce wisdom, resilience or purpose.
It’s an idea we have explored before at Inspire the Mind in our series on victimisation, including in “Why Survivors Don’t Need to Be Inspirational.” The piece challenges the expectation that survivors should turn what happened to them into something positive or inspiring, an expectation I realised I had brought with me while watching FURIOUS.
Pain is easier for me to sit with when I know it eventually becomes something meaningful.
But neither Alice nor Catherine gives me that comfort.
Obviously, these are fictional examples, and experiencing trauma does not inevitably lead someone to violence. But Alice and Catherine made me confront an uncomfortable question: why did I expect them to respond to suffering in ways that preserved my sympathy for them?
That doesn’t mean their suffering excuses their actions. FURIOUS asks me to hold two truths at once: I can have compassion for what happened to someone while still holding them accountable for what they do to somebody else.
Perhaps this is where my interest in mental health inevitably crept back in. Understanding why someone behaves the way they do doesn’t require placing them neatly into the category of innocent victim or irredeemable villain. People rarely fit into either box. Someone can be harmed and harmful, vulnerable and cruel, sometimes all at once.
And I found watching women occupy that morally uncomfortable territory surprisingly refreshing.
The Joy of an Unlikeable Woman
By the end of FURIOUS, I realised that the question I had been asking from the beginning, “Who am I supposed to root for?” was probably the wrong one.
Maybe I wasn’t supposed to choose between Alice and Catherine or decide which woman was secretly good, and which was secretly bad. Maybe I was simply being asked to care about characters whose choices I couldn’t always defend.
And perhaps that is what I found so exhilarating.
The women in FURIOUS don’t make themselves easy to like. They are angry, selfish and vulnerable. They hurt people. They make choices that are difficult to defend. Yet the story still treats them as people worth understanding rather than problems that need to be made more palatable.
Maybe the joy of the “unlikeable woman” isn’t that she’s unlikeable at all. It’s that nobody is asking her to earn the right to be interesting by behaving well.
She doesn’t have to turn her suffering into wisdom. She doesn’t even have to make it easy for us to root for her.
Sometimes, she can simply be furious.
