Remember that tease of a return during the Fast Five credits?
What about the romance from 2 Fast 2 Furious? And will Hector ever return?
These are the F&F storylines that have unceremoniously disappeared.
After being introduced in Fast Five as Luke Hobbs' aide, Elsa Pataky struggles to find a consistent
role to occupy as Elena Neves in the franchise. An attempt to make her Dom's love interest gets
cut short by the sudden return of Letty. She appears to have some renewed purpose in Furious 7,
as a potential job opens up for her when Hobbs gives her a little of recommendation.
And the closeness between the two of them also suggests a potential new love interest for her.
"What's this?"
"It's the letter of recommendation you asked for. Just know I meant every word of that."
But those plot threads are abruptly abandoned by the time that The Fate
of the Furious rolls around. Elena is puzzlingly absent from this installment
until she suddenly shows up as a captive of the main villain,
Cipher. It's then revealed that she's the mother of Dom's kid before Cipher has her killed,
and everything that was set up for her in Furious 7 is suddenly and fully abandoned.
Though she appears to die in Fast & Furious, Letty is alive and well a couple of outings
later in Fast & Furious 6. Not only that, she's now working for the villainous Owen Shaw. As it
turns out, she's suffering from amnesia, and she can't remember anything about Dom or her
former friends. By the end of the movie, though, she's back on the side of the good guys. Furious
7 further explores the psychological fallout of resuming a romance with a man she can't remember.
But this aspect of Letty's storyline is largely jettisoned by the end of Furious
7. The abruptness with which it's dropped is peculiar enough on its own. But it's
extra puzzling in light of the fact that it leaves her without her own unique character
arc in subsequent adventures. Much like Letty forgets her memories of Dom
at the start of Fast & Furious 6, the entire franchise totally forgets about her amnesia.
When Sean first arrives in Japan in Tokyo Drift,
he's an outsider struggling to connect with his new home. Eventually, though,
he makes some genuine friends and even strikes up a romance with Neela. Their budding relationship
signifies Sean's journey from being a stranger in a foreign land to finding a true home. While this
may not be an all-time classic silver screen romance, it does serve an important purpose in
the narrative. So it would be understandable to think that an important character like
Neela would be a fixture of any further adventures in the series that feature Sean.
But that hasn't exactly turned out to be the case, as Neela in fact hasn't appeared in
the series at all since Tokyo Drift. Sean, meanwhile, has returned a couple of times,
while two of his best friends also manage to show up for supporting roles in F9.
Surprisingly enough, the Tokyo Drift team has ultimately proven quite consequential
to the franchise as a whole. But that importance hasn't extended to Neela.
And it's not like Sean even bothers to mention her once when we see him in Furious 7 or F9.
"When you find the guy that killed Han, what are you gonna do?”
If you stick around for the credits of Fast Five, you get a big surprise. Not only does Hobbs show
up for one last scene, but Eva Mendes' Monica Fuentes also returns to the franchise for the
first time since 2 Fast 2 Furious. In her initial appearance, Monica is an important ally in law
enforcement for Brian, and there are also sparks of a romance sizzling between the two. While Brian
returns to the series in a leading role multiple times, Monica more or less completely vanishes.
But that all changes in the Fast Five post-credits scene, which seems to suggest
that she'll be making an exciting, full-fledged return to the franchise. But since then,
she's remained M.I.A. The reasons for this are unclear. The most likely explanation is that Eva
Mendes embarked upon a sabbatical from acting shortly after the release of Fast Five. There's
also the fact that the franchise has shifted towards stories involving espionage, rather
than specific law enforcement groups. Whatever the reason, this is one of the most awkwardly
dropped storylines in the history of all action cinema, let alone this particular franchise.
After serving as the main foe of Fast & Furious, Arturo Braga returns a couple movies later in
Fast & Furious 6. Considering how many close connections he has with the main characters,
it's no surprise that he shows up again. But this movie isn't about Braga's vengeance. Instead, he's
there for only one scene when Brian visits him in prison to secure pivotal information about Letty.
One conversation and a brief skirmish later, and Arturo vanishes from the rest of the franchise.
The increasing scale of the Fast and Furious movies probably has a lot to do with that. When
Fast & Furious came out in 2009, these movies were still just car-centric action flicks. Since then,
they've expanded into international heist films and over-the-top spy adventures. As
this series keeps getting bigger and bigger, it paradoxically has
less and less room to feature the return of one of its most significant villains.
Considering how important cars are to the Fast and Furious world,
you'd think that someone who can control automobiles would have everything at their
fingertips. In The Fate of the Furious, that appears to be the case when Cipher gets her
hands on technology that allows her to hack into any car within a nearby radius. Suddenly,
the central tool used by Dom and his allies to save the planet is taken out of their hands,
as everyone's cars are in the clutches of a dangerous criminal mastermind.
"Ouch."
It's easy to assume that this tool would become a central fixture of the entire
series going forward. But Cipher's ability to manipulate all automobiles never resurfaces
again after this moment. The climax of The Fate of the Furious instead revolves around
a submarine. This ability also fails to return when Cipher shows up in F9. There
are so many ways that turning cars against Dom could twist the status quo, but for now,
it appears that the franchise has forgotten all about this.
The opening of F9 is entirely concerned with the fact that a plane containing Mr. Nobody,
played by Kurt Russell, has gone down. Dom and his family proceed to pull off a rescue mission,
with a valuable device stored inside the plane as their target. Though a brief mention is made
about the likelihood of Mr. Nobody surviving the disaster, he's ultimately never seen again. It's
never even made clear whether or not he manages to emerge from the crash intact.
Considering that we never see a dead body and that Mr. Nobody is known for getting out of
sticky situations unscathed, it seems quite likely that he's survived. And the fact that Han later
returns and mentions that Mr. Nobody helped him fake his death only draws more attention to the
fact that F9 never actually ties up the fate of this notable character. Perhaps upcoming movies
will resolve Mr. Nobody's fate, but for now, his status remains perplexingly unresolved.
All of the main characters in Fast Five have their own reasons for attempting to steal untold
amounts of cash from a formidable gangster in Rio de Janeiro. For Tej, his motivation
is his ambition to open a garage that improves on all the shortcomings he's found in other, similar
operations. This is a somewhat peculiar ambition, considering that he was previously seen operating
a garage in 2 Fast 2 Furious. But that fact is immaterial as far as Fast Five is concerned. After
the impossible heist is pulled off, a closing montage shows that all that money does in fact
make Tej's dream come true. He gets his own shop, and he gets to run it exactly as he wants to.
"So your dream is to st- start a day job? Man, that's, that's stupid. Why would-"
"Nah, it's not stupid at all, man. I love what I do."
It's clear that this location holds an enormous amount of personal importance for
Tej. This makes the fact that we never see it again in later entries rather peculiar.
Fast & Furious 6 sees Tej overseas, spreading his wealth around to people
who could really use a cash infusion. His Robin Hood-style antics are charming,
but also completely unrelated to his prized garage. Despite serving as his
entire motivation in Fast Five, it's proven to be inconsequential to the larger F&F narrative.
If you asked a million Fast and Furious fans who their favorite character is, chances are that
exactly zero of them would cite Scott Eastwood's Little Nobody. An assistant to Mr. Nobody,
Little Nobody is mostly around to serve as a straight-laced foil to the rule-breaking lead
characters of the franchise, such as Hobbs and Roman. While this makes for a solidly entertaining
comedic contrast, it also means that Little Nobody has no personality of his own to speak of.
Considering this lack of a distinct story or a memorable screen presence, it's easy to forget
that Little Nobody is even in The Fate of the Furious. Perhaps it's no surprise then that F9
opts to kick its story into high gear without any trace of this particular character in sight. There
isn't even a joke to explain away his absence; he's just flat-out gone. Considering that Mr.
Nobody is also MIA for the majority of F9, it's hardly shocking that his assistant decides to skip
town. But for the one or two fans out there dying for a comeback, the truth is still brutal. Either
way, Little Nobody currently amounts to little more than a footnote in the larger F&F mythos.
"Rule #1: know your audience."
There haven't always been sizable roles for women in the Fast and Furious franchise. But Suki,
who's introduced in 2 Fast 2 Furious, is a solid character uniquely interested in championing
the ladies of this fictional universe. She's a racer with an all-female team,
offering the women of the street racing world the chance to play a role beyond arm candy.
And when she isn't driving fast on tricky roads, she's engaging in a potential romance
with Tej and helping out Brian's climactic plan to foil the gangster Carter Verone.
While Roman and Tej get to come back as lead characters in Fast Five and its subsequent
sequels, Devon Aoki has yet to return to the franchise as Suki. This is a strange
choice when you consider her connection with such a major character. Ludacris has
managed to become a central part of the series as Tej, but Suki never comes back,
or even gets referenced. It's part of a questionable trend evident in all of the
Fast and Furious movies in which the female characters tend to take a backseat. While
Suki briefly provides an oasis to counteract that in 2 Fast 2 Furious,
the fact that she's never heard from again more or less throws her accomplishments out the window.
In the first Fast and the Furious, released all the way back in 2001,
Dom is surrounded by a whole different surrogate family. Rather than rubbing
shoulders with Han or Roman, he's best buds with folks like Hector. A fellow street racer,
Hector is a notable part of the movie's early scenes, particularly those involving Brian,
whom Hector dubs a "snowman." Though his outsized personality and the emphasis placed on his comical
lines make Hector really pop on screen, he isn't a major part of the entire movie. Eventually,
he pretty much vanishes so that the budding friendship between Dom and Brian can blossom.
This gradually decreasing presence in the first movie turns out to be a bit of foreshadowing for
Hector's role in the franchise as a whole. While other members of Dom's initial social
circle manage to return and enjoy prominent roles in later entries, Hector remains curiously absent.
His only appearance since The Fast and the Furious is a cameo in Furious 7 that's pretty
much over before it even begins. Having him show up for such a brief moment in which he
gets socked in the face only highlights how odd it is that a franchise so devoted to utilizing
every element of its canon has never really made time to bring back one of Dom's earliest allies.