F9: The Fast Saga adds a lot of new backstory details for the Toretto family, but it still doesn’t answer the biggest question about Dom, Mia and Jakob’s childhood – who was their mother? Through nine core movies and a spinoff, the franchise has never even mentioned the Toretto matriarch, and it’s starting to cause some continuity problems. If Fast and Furious wants to truly be a story about family, it needs to bring in Dom and Mia’s mom in Fast and Furious 10.
Prior to F9, not a whole lot was known about the origins of the Torettos. Dom reveals in the original movie that his father died in a racing accident, that he served a couple years in prison for assaulting the driver responsible, and that prior to that tragedy, his father was a strong family man and a pillar of the community. At some point, Dom stepped into that same role in the neighborhood, eventually rising up to become the king of the local street races. F9 adds new wrinkles to that backstory by introducing Dom and Mia’s estranged brother Jakob, and by revealing that there was more to their father’s accident than Dom originally thought.
That’s all well and good, and the additions F9 makes to the series’ canon are fun, but it feels particularly strange that the film still makes no allusion to Dom, Mia and Jakob’s mother. Their father, Jack Toretto, gets a decent bit of screen time in flashbacks, but his partner is nowhere to be seen. Here’s why that’s a huge problem for Fast and Furious going forward, and how it could be fixed.
Who Is Dom, Mia And Jakob’s Mother?
Almost nothing has been revealed about Dom and Mia’s mother in canon. The character is never mentioned, which means that what few details exist are derived from the negative space in the story. There are at least a few years between Dom and Mia, and there’s never been any mention of them being half-siblings, which means that Jack and their mother were together for at least some extended amount of time. And since she doesn’t appear in any of the movies in the present-day timeline, it’s reasonable to assume that she’s been out of the picture for a while – either dead, presumed dead, or gone off the radar from the rest of her family.
Because Jack was such a family and man, and since he raised Dom Toretto to be one as well, it would almost make more sense for his and Mia’s mom to be dead than alive. If she’s been dead for years, it could explain why she’s never mentioned. And if she were still alive, it would be especially strange for Dom to never bring her up or make any attempt to reconnect with her. Unfortunately, F9 makes an even bigger plot hole by refusing to assert either of these possibilities as the truth.
Dom’s Mom Is A Big F9 Plothole
The flashback scenes in F9 show the events surrounding Jack Toretto’s death. Strapped for money and buried in debt, Dom and Jakob’s father decided to throw a big race to help pay off some of what he owes. That decision goes horribly wrong when the tampering he did to his own engine ends up costing him his life, leaving his family struggling in his wake. In a fit of rage and grief, Dom beats the driver responsible for the accident to within an inch of his life, causing him to serve time in prison. When he gets out, having discovered only half of the truth, he blames Jakob for their father’s death and runs him out of town.
These retcons all fit pretty well with what’s been established in the previous films, but there’s one big plot hole that makes the flashbacks more than a little confusing – where is Dom’s mom? When he challenges Jakob to the drag race, he says that his brother had better not come home ever again if he loses. However, that home life he references is never really shown. Was there a mother in the Toretto house when Dom was in prison, or did Jakob and Mia have to fend for themselves? If their mother was still around, why would she allow Dom to chase Jakob away? If she wasn’t around, how were Mia and Jakob able to remain in their family home for years? Did other family come to help? And how did Dom never find out about his father’s debts if he was the head of the household? These questions could have all been answered by simply acknowledging Dom’s mother, but unfortunately, F9 chooses not to do so.
Fast & Furious Is About Family
In the wake of F9’s release, the meme of the franchise’s family theme has grown exponentially, to the point where Twitter was taken over briefly by edited images of Vin Diesel popping into other movies to promote his family values. It’s a joke, but it’s also, still, the emotional core of the franchise. F9 leans into the family storylines even harder with the introduction of Jakob and return of Mia, and the film is stronger for it.
So how, in a franchise with family at its center, where flashbacks are charted territory, has the main character’s mother never even been mentioned? Dom talks a lot about his father being a role model, but what about his mom? The family barbecues, the race days, and everything else about Dom, Mia and Jakob’s childhoods feel incomplete without some mention of their mother. At the very least, the series needs to confirm if she’s alive or dead, and what exactly happened to her.
Theory: Fast & Furious 10 Will Bring In Dom’s Mom
With two more core films left in the saga, Fast and Furious will have to pull some big rabbits out of hats to make the franchise’s conclusion even bigger than what fans have already seen. And given the films’ penchant for bringing in secret family members and resurrecting characters from the dead, one way Fast and Furious 10 could do that is by bringing back Dom’s mother. After all the work Michelle Rodriguez and the rest of the female stars of the franchise did to improve gender equity for F9, it feels particularly egregious that Dom’s mom still isn’t mentioned. That could be justified, however, if Justin Lin is already planning to bring her in for the next movie.
Jakob is on the run from the authorities at the end of F9, the family is bigger than ever, and Cipher is still at large. Bringing in Dom, Mia and Jakob’s mom could play into all of those plotlines in really fun ways. Maybe she too is an international superspy. Maybe she has amnesia and was living another life this whole time. Maybe she left her family for villainous purposes. There are countless possibilities, and most of them are just the right kind of absurd for Fast and Furious. There’s a good chance Fast and Furious 10 will finally introduce Dom’s mother, and for a number of reasons, it really should.