Summary
Smoke focuses primarily on Michelle in Episode 3, and Jurnee Smollett rises to the challenge, but it leaves the premiere’s key twist a little neglected.
Jurnee Smollett is very good in Episode 3 of Smoke, which I think is important to point out, since I spent most of it being disappointed that more attention wasn’t being paid to Dave after the key reveal at the end of the two-part premiere. In case you needed reminding, that reveal was that Dave himself was the D&C arsonist. You’d think that would open up a lot of space for digging into Dave’s psyche and motives, and I suspect down the line it will. But not in “Weird Milk”, which focuses instead on Michelle’s background and current psychological makeup while building what is unmistakably sympathy for Freddy Fasano, the Milk Jug arsonist.
Needless to say, it’s unusual that we already know the identity of both criminals. But this clearly isn’t a typical procedural. It’s much more about the interiority of the characters than the forensic details of the case, which perhaps makes it more irksome that Dave is almost completely sidelined here. But Michelle does have an interesting background either way, and since she’s beginning to strongly suspect Dave as one of the culprits she’s clearly being positioned as his adversary, giving the show what will hopefully develop into a pleasing cat-and-mouse quality as both try to outsmart each other.
Until then, though, it’s therapy time. After shooting Arch, Michelle has to be psychologically cleared before she can return to duty, a process she finds inconvenient. It’s obvious to us that she isn’t even keel at the best of times – she’s served overseas and is nursing some deeply-held childhood trauma that we’ll delve into a bit later – and her therapist isn’t buying it either, but there isn’t enough justification for suspending her so she’s allowed to return to work. And her work at the moment is rigorously investigating every clue yielded from the D&C fires.
I think this dynamic of Michelle getting closer and closer to the truth of Dave’s guilt would be a lot more effective if we saw more of Dave’s side. That would also make the bureaucratic roadblocks as frustrating for us as they are for her (she finds a discarded cigarette which is obviously a clue but can’t get it analyzed because there’s nothing to officially connect it to D&C), especially since it’ll feel like Dave was only getting away with things by the skin of his teeth. The counter perspective is important here; we know Michelle is dogged and determined to the point of obsession and will find the truth eventually, and Dave knows that too. More urgency on his side would create more tension in the middle.
Dave’s breakthroughs in the Milk Jug case pull focus away from his own crimes in Smoke Episode 3 and provide the clearest link to Freddy. Since the jugs are all covered in plastic bags to disguise the accelerant they contain, there’s plastic residue in all the debris. That residue identifies the bags as black in every crime, and only two local grocery stores sell black plastic bags, radically narrowing the field. If Dave can apprehend a suspect, he can naturally divert a lot of attention and resources away from his own crimes, but this still doesn’t feel like it’s being properly focused on as his intention.
Taron Egerton and Jurnee Smollett in Smoke | Image via Apple TV+
Speaking of Freddy, I felt bad for him in “Weird Milk”. Against Lee’s envious judgment, he pursues a manager position to try and better himself, but he seems utterly unsuited to it. The interview is disastrous, with him only giving the most simplistic and sometimes silly answers to questions and parroting the company motto – helpfully written on a poster behind the interviewer – in an almost childlike way. For the most part, Freddy seems like a nice, naive guy, but even if we didn’t know he was a serial arsonist, we see flashes of his mania, such as when he loses it with Lee. This is an interesting character and I’m curious to see more of his backstory and motivations. Early assessments suggest he’s a loner who struggles socially and perhaps intellectually and uses the power of fire as a means by which to achieve some measure of control. Not that I’m a psychologist, obviously.
It wouldn’t take a psychologist, for what it’s worth, to figure out what’s up with Michelle. As it turns out, her mother, a former drug addict, is up for probation. She has found religion in prison and the rest of the family, especially Michelle’s brother Benji, think she has significantly bettered herself and would like to see her free. Michelle feels differently since it was she who, as a child, was locked in the closet while her drug-addled mother set the house on fire.
This goes some way towards explaining Michelle’s fiery unclear flashbacks and also her general temperament. But it’s an interesting dilemma. Michelle, being so personally affected by her mother’s addiction and delusions, refuses outright to accept the idea that she might have atoned, even though the prison chaplain explains that, in the state she was in, she thought she was saving her daughter, not condemning her. As an investigator, Michelle is used to being right. But in this scenario, her surety gets her nowhere, even with her own family. It’s this, after an encounter with her drunk brother at his daughter’s birthday party, that finally cracks Michelle’s facade and reduces her to tears.
As I mentioned at the top, Jurnee Smollett really rises to the challenge of this episode, even if I feel it would have been better to split its time more evenly between its leads. There’s a great deal of important internal trauma relevant to everyone in Smoke, and it isn’t like Michelle makes no progress at all, but the reveal of Dave’s involvement at the end of the premiere was such a compelling hook that it’s a shame it barely seems to influence what we see here. Still, if nothing else, there’s a real psychological foundation being built that should hopefully yield interesting stuff in future episodes.
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