Summary
Smoke goes way off the rails in Episode 4, making a mockery of its central character, and as a consequence, everything else suffers too.
Smoke has been a risky show since the beginning, especially since it waited until the final scene of its second episode to become interesting. Then, it delayed gratification in respect of focusing on Michelle primarily, even though by far the most compelling element was the revelation that arson investigator and protagonist Dave Gudsen was, in fact, the D&C arsonist that he and his new partner Michelle Calderone are hunting. Episode 4, “Strawberry”, is intended to be the payoff for the wait, the outing that explains a little about why Dave is the way he is. Instead, it turns him into a ridiculous cartoon villain, and the whole show suffers for it.
It’s honestly impressive for a show to splurge all of its goodwill in quite this way, and similarly striking just how negative of a knock-on effect it has, even on the elements that were working quite well. While watching “Strawberry”, which mercifully only runs a lean 41 minutes, I found myself being annoyed at almost everything, even the stuff that has nothing to do with Dave. The entire production suddenly rang false; every character becoming unconvincing, every plot point ridiculous.
It all starts with an unconventional presentation that Dave is giving to some firefighters, and which Michelle is knowingly observing from the back. The tension here is supposed to come from the fact that Michelle suspects Dave as the D&C arsonist, but I’m not sure she does. She definitely knows he’s up to something, though, and uncovers a few clues that help to shed some light on what it might be.
Let me just briefly outline her idea to catch the Milk Jug arsonist first, since I’m sure it’ll come to matter. When she goes to reconcile with her brother Benji after the argument they had about their mother in the previous episode, she meets him at an underground cockfight dungeon where he’s running a scam on desperate gamblers. Michelle doesn’t seem to care about the illegality of this operation — side note, but the constant reiteration of her “woman in a man’s world” bona fides is always expressed by her being super macho and accepted in aggressively masculine spaces, which is fine but comes across a little clunky — but it does give her the brainwave of attaching tags to the black plastic bags that Freddy uses to hide his incendiary devices. This means that they’ll eventually be able to isolate the purchase of the bag to a specific time and store when it’s inevitably used to burn something down, but as we’ll see later, there’s a bit of a potluck element to this.
Anyway, after working on this for a while with Dave, they both eventually break off to get drunk and flirt a bit. It’s here that you get some glimmers of Dave as a psycho, especially in how he recounts his mother abandoning him. That’s clearly the root of his issues, which have probably been worsened by trauma in the line of duty, but given how he carries on throughout the rest of the episode, he might have been bonkers from the very beginning. Time will tell. Either way, you get the sense that Michelle is picking up on this, or at least I hope so — their playful banter is noticeably inauthentic otherwise.
I’m not buying Taron Egerton here. I usually like him a lot, but the accent is very distracting, and he doesn’t seem anywhere near old enough for someone who is apparently on his third marriage. And for what it’s worth, it seems like he’ll be on his fourth sooner rather than later. His relationship with Emmett remains very strained, which is causing problems for him and Ashley, especially since Dave seems to have checked out of playing step-dad completely. Despite agreeing to pick Emmett up from cross-country training, Dave leaves him there — I think deliberately — to work on his novel. When Ashley gets home, she’s so furious about Dave’s cavalier attitude to the issue that she — rightly — tears his book to pieces for the derivative, conceptually fraudulent, and overwrought garbage that it clearly is. She also calls out the fact that Dave wears fake glasses when he’s writing as a scholarly affectation. What a loser.
Taron Egerton and Jurnee Smollett in Smoke | Image via Apple TV+
The problem here in Smoke Episode 4 is that Dave is acting like such an overtly creepy villain that it doesn’t jive with the versions of the character we’ve met in the first three episodes. It also creates plausibility issues elsewhere, like the fact that somebody would have noticed how weird he was before now, especially since his previous partner, Ezra Esposito, ended his career in reputational ruin and repeatedly accused Dave of being an arsonist. This is a classic case of “too much too soon”. It would have been much more effective to see the darker elements of Dave’s personality emerge gradually as things continued not to go his way.
Instead, “Strawberry” triples down on his villainous bona fides by making him weird sexually as well. When he’s in the latest grocery store he intends to set alight, he runs into an attractive woman whom he later takes to a kind of S&M dungeon, where he gyrates in a posing pouch and silk gown like a Temu Buffalo Bill before setting the lady’s abdomen on fire and force-feeding her strawberries. She likes it, which I guess is an upside of looking like Taron Egerton, but it’s a completely ridiculous sequence. It’s also, again, completely at odds with the smooth womanizer persona Dave adopts when he’s trying to convince Michelle to stay in a suite with him at a conference. She clearly considers it, too. Again, this is an obvious upside of looking like Taron Egerton, but none of it works in context.
Freddy is a much more intriguing villain, but he’s barely in this episode. We only see him get a professional knockback that tips him over the edge. He returns to Brenda’s salon with instructions for her to fix his hair so that he can go back to being totally invisible to everyone else, but she tells him to come back later, which is clearly a mistake. Instead, he shaves his head himself, creates a new incendiary device, and places it alongside several he made earlier. Freddy is now packing enough ordnance to melt a city block, which I’m not sure bodes well for Michelle’s chicken tag idea — he might never need a black plastic bag ever again.
I’m just not buying it. The relatively sympathetic — but still oddly frightening — portrayal of Freddy is totally undermined by the arch psycho stuff that Dave’s up to, and it just isn’t clear what Smoke wants to be. I get the narration in the premiere being a deliberate gag about the state of Dave’s novel, but we’re now reaching a point where the entire show is that silly, which I don’t think is intentional. There’s still a chance for it to turn things around, but personally, I’m not holding my breath.
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