In the second episode of Furious, Hulu’s 2026 series about a survivor of childhood sex trafficking seeking revenge on the men who abused her, Catherine Grace (Lola Pettigrew) is standing in a kitchen, preparing raw chicken breasts, when a man at the edge of the frame begins commando crawling across the floor toward her.
He seizes her aggressively by the ankle, a move that in most stories would signal she was in imminent danger. But in Furious, Catherine overpowers him easily, forcing his head back to the floor. In the next scene, he is lying helpless in bed while she stands over him with a syringe.
It is a startling reversal of the way the show presented the pair only an episode earlier: him, tall, middle-aged, powerful, and physically imposing; her, young, working-class, and small enough to be almost engulfed by him. Now, his size is irrelevant. She has rendered him powerless and is deciding what will happen to his body. It is in this transformation—from apparent prey to the most dangerous person in the room—that much of the satisfaction of Furious lies.
In real life, women are overwhelmingly the victims of violence rather than the perpetrators of it. An average of 24 people per minute in the United States are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, with women experiencing such violence at three times the rate of men. Meanwhile, the Epstein files and associated legal battles have shown both the scale of sexual abuse against girls and young women and its penetration into the national and international elite, alongside the paucity of consequences for powerful men.
In the face of such impunity, many women are incandescent with rage—a rage intensified by how little power we have to correct the injustices that provoke it. As such, Furious offers a potent fantasy: a woman who does not wait for justice she knows won’t arrive, but appoints herself as its arbiter.
Of course, stories trading in that fantasy are neither new nor particularly rare. In Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is (2026), adapted from her play of the same name, twin sisters set out to avenge the cruelties of their estranged father. In last year’s The Housemaid, Sydney Sweeney plays Millie, a formerly incarcerated young woman hired to work in the home of Nina (Amanda Seyfried) and her abusive husband, Andrew, and the two women ultimately join forces against him. Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, released in the aftermath of #MeToo, followed a woman seeking revenge on the men who enabled the assault of her best friend. Naomi Alderman’s 2016 novel The Power imagined a world where women suddenly became the physically dominant sex. And in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the tiny teenager who would be destined to die in a dark alley in most horror movies was instead the person powerful enough to kill the monster.
Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Photo: ©20thCentFox/Courtesy Everett Collection
