Who is Hal in Furious? He isn't even in the main cast list
He gets two episodes, one very bad evening and a Campbell Scott performance the show's own credits treat like a footnote.
Every prestige thriller has a guy like Hal. He's not on the poster. He's not in the "starring" block on Wikipedia. He is, however, the reason half the internet spent a week yelling about Furious.
So let's do this properly, because Hulu clearly won't.
The short version
Hal Hatford is the Easton family's lawyer. He works for Emma Easton (Hope Davis) and, by extension, her extremely rich, extremely gross father Jay (Peter McRobbie), the man at the center of the trafficking ring that turned Catherine (Lola Petticrew) into a serial killer with a sparkly purse full of fentanyl.
He's played by Campbell Scott, who is doing the thing Campbell Scott always does: showing up in a supporting role and quietly out-acting the room.
Why he isn't in the main cast
Because he's a guest star, and a dead one. Hal turns up in episode four, "Flash Flood," gets kidnapped by Catherine, and by the end of episode five, "Pick a Sticker," he is no longer with us. Two episodes. The main-cast list is for people who make it to the finale.
Here's what happens to him, in order, so you can stop rewinding:
- Catherine grabs him because he knows what actually happened to her best friend Isabel the night she died.
- She drags him to the house of Alden (Steve Way), the client she's been "caring for" between murders.
- Alden, whose heart is running at about 25 percent, picks this exact moment to propose. She says yes. There's a man tied up in the next room. Romance!
- While Catherine interrogates Hal, Alden copies incriminating files off his devices.
- Hal tries the "I didn't personally do anything" defense. It goes badly.
A man who knew everything and did nothing, begging a girl he helped fail to spare him. That's the whole episode in one image.
The scene everyone is talking about
NPR played the clip on air, which tells you how far it traveled. Catherine asks Hal whether he thinks he deserves to live because he didn't film himself hurting girls at the parties, and then asks what the punishment is for people who know what's happening and do nothing.
Creator Liz Meriwether, who made New Girl and would like you to stop bringing that up, was asked whether she has an answer to Catherine's question. She said she doesn't, and that she likes it that way: "You don't have to present an answer. You present a conversation."
She also admitted she personally stuck some of the stickers on Catherine's pencil case, which is the most New Girl thing she has ever said and I will not be taking questions.
What Hal's death sets off
The murder rattles Alden, who saw the whole thing, and it's the moment Catherine realizes she has to run. Meanwhile, Alice (Emmy Rossum) gets pulled off the case by her boss Nora, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes Alice dig harder, because she is a person who has never once left well enough alone.
Hal is the hinge. Before him, Catherine is killing men who touched her. After him, she's killing men who watched.
Why a two-episode lawyer matters
Furious is loosely based on the 1987 movie Black Widow, where the killer's motive was, charmingly, "money." Meriwether's version is asking a nastier question, and Hal is where the show finally says it out loud: the men who enabled the abuse might be worse than the ones who committed it, because they had every chance to stop it and picked their retainers instead.
The show has been renewed for a second season. Hal will not be in it, on account of being dead. But the question he died answering is going to hang over every episode.
