What Exactly Was Mad Max Doing in Furiosa?

The Mad Max cameo in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is so brief and seemingly insubstantial that it can barely be considered a cameo. It’s merely a cutaway to a wide shot of Max (played by Jacob Tomuri, Tom Hardy’s stunt double from Mad Max: Fury Road), his face not particularly visible, leaning against his V8 Interceptor, eating a can of food and casually staring out over a cliff into the emptiness below — a classic Mad Max stance, recalling the opening of Fury Road (although it’s taking place many years before that movie). Beneath him, way in the distance, we can see Furiosa slowly limping her way across the desert toward the Citadel.

It seems like a throwaway scene — a little Easter egg for fans — but there might be a bit more to it. Right now, Furiosa is at her lowest point: She’s been wounded and beaten; her partner and lover, Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), has been brutally dragged to death; she’s escaped the clutches of Dementus by basically tearing off (or possibly chewing off) her own grotesquely wounded arm, which was chained to a truck.

So Max is casually watching this helpless young woman, her arm amputated, limping across the desert. (The vehicle Furiosa used to escape has also given out by this point.) Before the film cuts away from him, he stands a bit more alertly but makes no effort to help her. This is the Wasteland, after all, where it’s every man or woman for himself; Max isn’t about to risk his life or waste his fuel helping someone who seems not long for this world.

But then the film fades out. When it fades back in, we briefly see Furiosa, unconscious, being dragged by an unseen figure. Then it fades back out again. When it fades back in, she’s in a subterranean cave in the Citadel, where her arm is covered in maggots. Severed limbs hang all over the place. We’d caught a brief glimpse of this place before, suggesting that more than a little cannibalism goes on in the Citadel.

How did she get there? Who was the unseen figure that was dragging Furiosa? The way Miller fades in and out of this scene from when Max takes particular notice of Furiosa suggests that Max might have been the one to drag her to semi-safety, at least up closer to the Citadel. (Max would presumably know that the Citadel is not a place he wants to be caught anywhere near.)

Clearly, Miller wants to leave this ambiguous. Max might just as easily have continued watching, or even turned away, content not to do anything. While he is the hero of this series, he’s generally not known for his compassion; he and Furiosa barely get along for most of Fury Road. One does wonder, however, whether the director has plans to explain this little passage. He has said that he would like to shoot another prequel, Mad Max: The Wasteland, following Max before the events of Fury Road. (Whether Miller will actually get to make that movie is, of course, up for grabs, especially given Furiosa’s less-than-stellar box office.) Though that proposed film would mostly take place some years after the events of Furiosa, perhaps it will give some more context to this scene and let us know whether Max helped Furiosa or not. Or maybe we’ll just have to decide for ourselves.