‘Furious’ Penultimate Episode and ‘Lanterns’ E2. Plus, ‘Lioness’ S3E4 With Van Lathan.

The Watch

The Watch explores the penultimate episode of 'Furious,' the second episode of 'Lanterns,' and a deep dive into 'Lioness' Season 3 Episode 4

Key takeaways

• The recurring use of 'We Found Love' by Rihanna underscores emotional resonance and tragic arcs in 'Furious,' blending pop culture with narrative power.
• Visual and tactile details—like hand movements during trauma—are used consistently across characters to signal psychological states, enhancing realism and empathy.

Main topics

• Narrative structure and emotional manipulation in 'Furious'
• Visual storytelling and character psychology

Notable quotes

"We use people. That's what we do." – Nora to Alice, reflecting on writerly manipulation of audience empathy.

Conclusion

The episode underscores how exceptional storytelling transcends genre con

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:05) I need supports to have to clear the room. Speaker 1 (0:08) Stand up and walk now. Speaker 2 (0:11) Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at TheRinger.com. Joining me in the studio, he would argue Christ was the first political assassination. Speaker 3 (0:23) It's Vandy Greenwald! What's up? Speaker 2 (0:26) What's up, everybody? Monday for The Watch, and we are going to be talking about Lanterns. We're going to be talking about Furious, but we're also going to be talking about me and Van's beloved Linus. They call this podcast Between Third Chairs. Between Speaker 1 (0:40) Third Chairs. Us. Yeah. In a really intense battle for third chair of the big pick. So what Speaker 2 (0:46) we're going to do is I recorded with Andy a little bit last week so that we could talk about the Sunday shows, but Van, it's awesome to see you. Speaker 1 (0:54) Yes. Speaker 2 (0:55) And we're going to be back a little bit later in this podcast to discuss Lioness right after this. Speaker 2 (1:03) Andy, we're here to talk about the seventh episode, the penultimate episode of Furious. I want to get your thoughts on the second episode of Lanterns, although I imagine I'll talk about it a little bit with Van. Sure. Speaker 2 (1:16) Why don't we start at the ending of Furious? So obviously spoilers for this penultimate episode that aired last night. We've got the finale coming in a week. And triumph is a weird thing to ascribe to this series, like feeling triumphant at the end of it. And obviously like with another episode to go, I think there are a lot more shoes to drop and probably a lot more tragedies to befall one, if not more of our characters. But as Catherine approaches Jay Easton's house, As we've found out, the Epstein-Gilain-Helaine relationship between Jay and his daughter. And Rihanna's We Found Love begins to play again. Speaker 2 (2:03) I was, I, it is a testament to the show that I was like, fuck, fuck. Yeah, let's go. Like, like that's not an emotion that I expect to experience while watching the series about what this is about. But I think that there's something very powerful about, about like the, the recurrent theme of that song. And also like this arc for this character, even if it does wind up being tragic. When Speaker 3 (2:25) we talked last week about why the show is spectacular, we were talking about. And I think we were talking about them in the sense of, well, you know, rip from the headlines, murder mystery shows have to hit these certain beats. And I think it almost could take on the power of defensiveness to trying to explain why some things about the show might feel familiar and why that's actually a good thing in this case. I think it's important then when you're talking about an episode as spectacular as this one, which continues in my mind to elevate the show into the very top echelon of series of the year. Speaker 3 (2:58) It's not just detective tropes that this is playing with. It is playing with, first of all, comedy. Speaker 2 (3:05) It Speaker 3 (3:05) remains incredibly funny and remains capable of dropping jokes like Choi's, you know, just... face, but also like his one-liners or his incredulity moment to moment inside of what should be an otherwise incredibly tense episode. But playing with the same kind of like adrenaline manipulation that some of our favorite action movies do. And this was based on an 80s movie, but the sense that like, oh, wait, they're going to team up now. Speaker 2 (3:33) Wait, Speaker 3 (3:33) they're going to tear down the patriarchy, just the two of them, rip apart a system, use people as Nora teaches her to do in a way that might get the kind of victory that only happens in TV shows and movies. It's incredibly canny. And when she says, when Nora says that to Alice, it's what we do. We use people. I couldn't help but think that Liz Merriweather and her writers are a little bit thinking about what they do in a writer's room. Speaker 2 (3:59) That's a really good point. They're Speaker 3 (4:00) manipulating us and they're using our empathy and our interest and our dopamine to get us to feel certain ways about characters and scenarios that might otherwise appal or surprise us. Yeah. And I love it. Use me. Speaker 2 (4:13) There's a level of sophistication to this show that I just think is really, really, really worth pointing out. I'm sure people could point to dozens of other shows and be like, well, they do this and this, but I'm just saying like there are visual motifs. There are lines and sort of images that the dialogue evokes that don't necessarily correspond to characters knowing that the other is talking about that, but is... they're bringing up these ideas throughout the episode or throughout the season. I was struck by, um, you know, when Emma, the Hope Davis character, and now we know why Hope Davis took this role. I was going to text you the same thing. Um, because often in prestige television these days, you'll be like, Oh, okay. Like that seems like a, uh, like a kind of tiny part for such an accomplished actor. But I guess everybody, everybody in New York's got to work. Everybody wants to work. And then you, You find out why. When her character and the totality of her character's complicity and her father's perversion and violence is made clear that she is in fact procuring these girls for him at this point. She goes out into her garden when her father is doing whatever he's doing with a very young woman. And she starts like putting her hands in the soil of her garden and like squeezing the dirt and hands and hands as a kind of, um, first responder or sensor to trauma and to, um, the brain not being able to totally process what's going on has been something that Emma has done. Something Catherine has done. I can't, you know, these aren't even my hands when she's in the shower with. Alice and Alice's trauma response to what Marshall did to her often manifests itself in her shaking hands. You know, when she's trying to get her, her anxiety under control, it's a little thing, you know what I mean? It's nine out of 10 shows. Don't bother with a detail like that because yes, maybe one character can exhibit that, but like, you don't need to do it. It's just something that I was like, I can't wait. to hear Liz Merriweather talk about this. I can't wait to hear about like what it was, how, and how the different actions of the hands between the characters kind of like connect to the character themselves. And Speaker 3 (6:40) the needle drop in that moment is, I don't know if that's Loretta Lynn or it's someone similar, but it's a version of In the Pines, the traditional song that Nirvana sang in Unplugged that is deeply unsettling. And I'm... I'm running out of superlatives to talk about the way that everything is in concert with the show, why it's not just I'm like loving the scene, loving this performance, loving this episode. Everything is serving the same type of storytelling. Ariel Marks, who we shouted out the first week, is the composer of the music, and the music has continually signaled to us. to be disarmed, to be surprised. There are moments when the score seems to settle into something more appropriate to like a tense moment or a family moment. And then it kind of mutates in a jazzy or surprising way and twists itself. This episode, and I believe next week's finale, are directed by Corey Finley, who directed a movie called Thoroughbreds. And as far as I can tell, like, I don't know if this is someone that Liz knows or has worked with before, but to step in to the penultimate Speaker 2 (7:39) episode. Speaker 3 (7:39) If I remember Speaker 2 (7:39) correctly, Thoroughbreds, has a very Speaker 2 (7:43) lose Meriwether sensibility when it comes to like mixing comedy into these things. So, Speaker 3 (7:47) so, so aesthetically a good hire and clearly simpatico and said the right things. But still, when you bring in episodic directors for hire for something as crucial as the final block, you don't know what you're going to get. This episode begins with an absolutely elite framing of ambulances and cop cars swarming at the shelter through the streets of Manhattan. And I was like, God damn, this is an action show too. It's doing all of it. You know, the, It feels like kind of, I can't tell if it's a sign of like how excellent I think this is to focus on the blocking, but when both Alice and Marshall are brought to the hospital in the opening moments, and then Danny and Marshall's mother, who's played with outrageous ferocity and also specificity, this is not a character we know or have seen by the veteran stage actress, Constance Shulman. Like that collision is explosive and it's framed, you know, they blocked it so that both. It's like people, each boxer has their cornerman who's in a hospital bed right now. Speaker 2 (8:45) And they're shooting the show, I think, with anamorphic lenses or like it's widescreen. It's taking advantage of like a probably modern standard that most people are going to have these very wide televisions and then you can play a lot with the frame where TV used to be a much more like kind of vertically framed aspect ratio. Speaker 3 (9:02) Speaking of taking advantage of New York theater royalty. Constance Shulman married to Reed Burney, great stage actor who pops up in these shows time to time. And they are the parents of Gus Burney, who was one of the stars of Something Very Bad Is Gonna Happen. I Speaker 2 (9:15) did not know that. How about that? I'd like to Speaker 3 (9:18) make the connections for you. You Speaker 2 (9:19) know, that little moment you mentioned at the beginning of this episode, I think is something that a lot of TV shows can learn from. You know, we'll sometimes find myself being taken out of shows when I feel like it's obvious, like... oh, there's supposed to be a riot going on as Homelander walks off out of this courthouse, but there's 50 people there. Or maybe they've spent too much money trying to recreate what a car chase is going to look like. If you were making a future film of this episode, you could have... Speaker 2 (9:56) So many different locations within New York City, but all they do to communicate the chaos that is started from this shooting, from Catherine shooting Marshall, is the sirens going by. And in New York City, that is a real feeling of like, you'll be like walking down the street or you'll be about to cross the street and all of a sudden, five cop cars and an ambulance fly by and you're like, oh shit, I wonder where that is, you know? And Speaker 3 (10:19) then you go get your $10 latte. Speaker 2 (10:21) Right, exactly. Or in our day, a $2 Rheingold. Speaker 3 (10:25) Who can say whether we've degraded and fallen as a society? Speaker 2 (10:29) Let's talk a little bit more about the Easton side of this. One of the things that this show has done, and it took me a while to maybe get my footing with it, is it has been very plain about the mystery. The cards are turned up. To Speaker 3 (10:45) a point. We still don't know who killed her friend. Speaker 2 (10:49) No, I know, but I meant... Who the bad guys are? We always knew... who Catherine was and we always knew more or less who did it to her. Yes. And it's been a matter of not who done it, but will the people who had it done to them get their revenge? And this was a twist, you know, I mean, obviously, like we said, with the Hope Davis character, you, you see her casting and you're like, she's going to do three scenes. Um, and you know, this is why you hire her. is because they're seen in his safe room, basically, where he is still holding on to child pornography, even after she has tried to rid the entire house of it as the cops are on their way. And unbeknownst to them, Catherine is on her way. Speaker 2 (11:39) is just extraordinary. And I mean, I don't think I've, I don't know if I've ever seen anything like that, like that specific Speaker 3 (11:46) confrontation. Well, also, again, it's a level of confidence to know the totality of the story you're telling and how you want it to land to, like you said, you cast Hope Davis because you know the part has more room to run. You cast Peter McRobbie, who plays Jay Easton. Who's been in Speaker 2 (12:01) everything. He's been in Brokeback Mountain. Speaker 3 (12:03) Daredevil. He's a working, talented actor. But he's also perfect in the sense that if you cast James Cromwell or something, the audience is going to be like, I know him and I know he can be nefarious. So I know he's coming back. The show played a really interesting bait and switch with audience expectations where we are told that this guy is hiding things. But because we're focused elsewhere, the level of malevolence isn't fully present because we haven't spent time with him. So you have to trust that you can make the investment to pay off later. Speaker 3 (12:36) The scene between the two of them and I believe this is the first episode where we've seen the two of them share the screen with no one else. Yeah, Speaker 2 (12:43) in the past, the only other scene that... Like Kendall Scott had been there or Speaker 3 (12:47) Alice was interrogating them or Danny was interrogating them and questioning them. So you get a scene with two actors who have never been alone on screen before and he tells her that the code to his child porn safe is his daughter's birthday. It's her birthday, yeah. And the entirety of the series... lands on you in the audience like a fucking emotional anvil, that is not easy to accomplish with our not our normal avatars. And it's doing something that feels almost obvious in the sense that all of the women in this show carry water, carry trauma, carry sin for the monsters in their proximity. But to do it with a degree of artfulness and subtlety so that it can sneak up on us and then... wallop us the way that scene did was masterful. I thought it was incredible. Another Speaker 2 (13:37) scene I wanted to highlight from this episode was Alice's confrontation with Catherine in the bathroom of the hotel room, motel room. Speaker 3 (13:46) Also the phone ringing in the other room. Awesome. Yes. That's been done before. I don't care. I loved it. Speaker 2 (13:52) That's to me was like, that's Emmy Rossum's like Emmy highlight reel right there. Was like that, like her just being like, what if I... I let you go. You know what I mean? Where would you go? Would you go to his house? That was extraordinary. I thought, and like, she has now like fully become like, I think she has synthesized all the lessons of like humanity from Danny and, and manipulation from, from Nora and seeing how the game is played and does something that like, you know, she's like, I'm already persona non grata in the PD and in the FBI. I'm going to get this case solved, you know, and Speaker 3 (14:32) it's personal again. I don't mind that, that we talked about what is the, what is going on with Danny and the video file and all of that. It works for what the show is communicating to us. You know, the, it is a, I think it is, it is a sign of a failed fiction. If it pushes the audience out enough to start nitpicking and questioning why things are connected. It's like. When Tolstoy wrote a novel, he wasn't like, well, Levin and Anna will never meet and have nothing to do with each other. I'm just going to tell you two stories at once because that's more accurate to my experience in 19th century Russia. Anna Speaker 2 (15:02) and Levin. Two stories that don't really interact. Speaker 3 (15:05) It sounds better when it's written in Cyrillic. I also, by the way, shout out to, obviously we're wearing the same clothes as last Thursday, but shout out to that podcast. Alice, this episode also fully becomes me watching the Sterling Point pilot. And she's like, get these fucking pears out of here. So she's a good TV critic as well. Yeah. I thought... We this this episode introduced the concept of Nora Oki in which Nora goes and sings a meatloaf song wearing a Hawaiian shirt and Quincy Tyler Bernstein continues just like an absolute terror. This is like catnip for I would imagine for both of us. But in that bar, when drunk Nora explains, really explains what it is that we do. It is this is their FBI agents, but it is pure CIA. We love. and talk constantly about spy shows and spy books and thrillers in which inevitably emits the action and the global intrigue and chaos. One character says some super sick shit to the other one. Like, you know, we are, I wrote it down. We use people. That's what we do. We are inhuman in defense of humanity. We become evil to fight evil. Speaker 2 (16:17) Reminded me a lot of the Edward Norton speech in Born Legacy. Speaker 3 (16:20) Yes. Yes. And again, that, is