Summary
Against all the odds, Smoke becomes truly riveting in Episode 6, with a couple of sensational villain turns for good measure.
Seriously, how is this happening? Smoke is a truly confounding show. It started out okay, trundled along inoffensively enough, and then took a sudden, severe turn for the worse. After it veered back in the right direction, I expected Episode 6 to, at best, continue in a similar vein. But “Manhood” is the best installment of the season by far, and one of the best individual hours of television of the year, boasting a phenomenally fun supporting turn from John Leguizamo and a terrifying rise to the forefront for Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine that, while overdue, is handled expertly.
The balance is just right here, too, splitting the difference between multiple point of view characters and, for the first time, leaving none feeling like they have been underserved. The value of that ridiculous manuscript, at once the show’s funniest joke but also silliest component, really reveals itself in “Manhood”, providing the breakthrough that’ll presumably result in Dave Gudsen’s eventual capture. But while the hunt for Dave begins in earnest here, it’s Freddy who steals the limelight.
Needless to say, Dave survived being T-boned by a drunk driver at the end of the previous episode. He actually escaped with incredibly minor injuries, all things considered — a mild concussion and a sprained ligament that gives him an exaggerated limp, as if he needed any more affectations. But Ashley is less than impressed with his survival and takes the opportunity to leave him, which would qualify as poor bedside manner in most contexts but seems deserved here. Taron Egerton impresses again, serving more whiplash in his sudden shift from pleading to bitter aggression than he suffered in the crash.
Here’s an interesting thing to note. While he’s still woozy, Dave catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, but the reflection is a fatter, balder, schlubbier version. Something occurred to me here. Is that the real version of Dave Gudsen, and handsome Taron Egerton is simply what he’s delusional enough to believe he looks like? Is this another extension of the author-insert idealized main character of his novel? It’d be a great twist if it were.
Anyway, Dave takes the opportunity to go after Milk Jug while everyone else thinks he’s resting and recuperating (he even lies to Harvey, saying the doctors wanted to keep him in for observation, but he insisted on leaving — how fragile is this guy’s ego?). To be fair to the man, he’s a very competent investigator. The authorities think that the crime, which is on a scale and in an area unusual for Milk Jug, was committed by a copycat who had an agenda against the wife who burned up in the fire. Nobody but Dave suspects that her husband, the head of HR for Coop’s, was the real target. That helps him narrow the suspects down to Freddy Fasano.
I was fascinated by Freddy in Smoke Episode 6. He’s off the deep end at this point, clearly having suffered a psychotic break of some kind, but it opens up a genuinely frightening new contour to Mwine’s performance. Freddy says more in “Manhood” than he has in all the prior episodes combined, and he paints a portrait of a truly wounded man locked in an endless cycle of disappointment and rejection. Dave confirms this by digging up information about his past, which he spent being bounced through 27 different foster homes, eventually ejected from the final one, where he had lived from the ages of 16-19, when he got too old for the state to subsidize his care. The arrested development comes through in a tour Freddy gives Lee of a funfair where he once spent the day as a child — the last time he was ever happy.
Greg Kinnear in Smoke | Image via Apple TV+
But Freddy’s a villain, there’s no question about that. When he suggests setting Dev’s house ablaze with his family inside it, Lee intuits that Freddy was also responsible for immolating the HR manager, and begins to drip with terror. Luckily for Lee, he’s just about the only person who has ever been remotely kind to Freddy, so it seems like he’s spared. Freddy takes his phone and his car keys, but directs him to a bus stop nearby. Instead, he heads to Brenda’s house, where, in his mental disarray, he mistakes her for Mrs Yolande, his final foster mother, whose house he burned down six months after he was ejected from it, killing her, another adult, two teenagers, and two children under six years old.
Dave arrives in the nick of time to “save the day”, hosing Freddy down with a fire extinguisher so as not to ignite the copious amounts of gasoline he has poured all over the place. The heroic rescue can’t help but bring a smile to Dave’s face and a touch of visible excitement to his trousers. He really is a loser. But now he’s going to be a hero loser, which is probably the worst kind.
The apprehension of the Milk Jug Arsonist will no doubt complicate the efforts the capture the D&C Arsonist, who Michelle and a returning Ezra manage to convince Harvey is Dave himself. An ad hoc task force is established with help from Burk and Special Agent Dawn Hudson with the express purpose of finding proof that Dave is guilty, which proves to be much easier said than done. There’s plenty of circumstantial evidence, but nothing that’ll hold up in court, and Harvey remains skeptical throughout, at least until a throwaway line in Dave’s novel — the audio recordings of which are playing in the background — gives the game away. Dave used a child’s mispronunciation that sinisterly echoes a real-life case, a detail he couldn’t possibly have known about unless he was there.
Will that be enough? Probably not, legally speaking, but given how brazen Dave has been lately, it’s only a matter of time until he slips up again. But Smoke Episode 6 was so good that a part of me hopes it takes him a while, just so we can enjoy more of John Leguizamo doing star jumps for no reason.
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