‘Smoke’ Episode 8 Recap – I Bet You Weren’t Expecting That Ending

There are very few shows that start as badly as Smoke did, only to end up being quite this good. It’s remarkable, really. You could see the quality begin to swing in the right direction around the midpoint, but nobody was expecting the riveting one-two punch of Dave capturing Freddy and Freddy looking into Dave’s soul. Episode 8, “Mercy”, switches things up again, showing a new, even more deplorable facet of Dave’s personality — and thus Taron Egerton’s exceedingly good performance — and building to a totally unexpected cliffhanger ending that nobody will have seen coming.

It starts with Dave being let off the leash. After Reba’s phone call and Burk tipping his hand at Dave’s party, Dave now knows that his colleagues are on to him. Having ditched his badly-placed tracker, he’s in the wind, and he takes the opportunity to start six fires that, when plotted on a map, make a smiley face. He’s toying with the task force, which is in danger of being shut down if they don’t scare up some actionable evidence proving that Dave Gudsen is the D&C arsonist.

And this is the point. Dave is many things, probably even a few more that we haven’t seen yet, but one thing he isn’t is stupid. He knows there’s no meaningful evidence proving what he has been up to, so he makes a point of rubbing that in everyone’s faces by going into work as though it’s any other day, and dragging Michelle around with him while he “investigates” the fires that he knows she knows he started. It’s an ego-stroking exercise of incredibly brazen magnitude, and Egerton delivers a dose of weaponized smugness so potent that I wanted to climb through the screen and smack his face in.

What this leads to is a catty game of one-upmanship between Dave and Michelle that gives Episode 8 of Smoke a really unique vibe within the context of the season overall. All that cagey investigative business is done away with here. Michelle, who’s wearing a microphone hidden in one of her buttons, courtesy of Ezra, is trying to force Dave to say something incriminating, while Dave is trying to terrorise Michelle for his own amusement. She brings up the wish-fulfillment aspect of his author-insert novel protagonist having sex with his partner; he brings up Michelle having an affair with her married boss. She brings up how his application to the police force was rejected on the grounds of his having failed his psychological exam due to a propensity for violence; he reiterates that there’s no evidence or motive to convict the D&C arsonist.

It’s brilliantly done. Jurnee Smollett holds her own, no doubt, but Egerton steals the show again. The scene where he torments the unexpected witness to one of the fires he started the previous evening plays for laughs to a certain extent, but is terrifying in its own way. Dave’s obvious joy at making people squirm retroactively adds tension to him lingering outside Ashley’s house, staring at her and Emmett through the wavering flame of his lighter. This is a guy who burns dogs alive. This is a guy who, as Ashley suggested, is capable of just about anything. We believe it. And he keeps proving it.

But his intelligence makes him a formidable adversary. We must understand this so we can gain a proper sense of how fraught the investigation is becoming. It takes a while, but he’s eventually able to push Michelle’s buttons enough for her to show her hand completely. He takes her to a diner opposite the dollar store that used to be the motel her mother burned down, with young Michelle inside, and recounts her most personal traumatic story to her, unable to mask his enjoyment at the retelling. Given Michelle’s mother is due to be released from prison any moment, the wounds are too raw for her to take it.

But this, in a very roundabout way, may prove to be Dave’s undoing. We’ll get to that in a moment. But in the meantime, let’s briefly check in on some other stuff happening in “Mercy”, since a lot of it may prove to be important.

Rafe Spall in Smoke | Image via Apple TV+

The burgeoning flirtatious relationship between Ezra and Special Agent Hudson, I’m willing to write off as largely unimportant, even if it does crack a window into how much Ezra misses his job, and thus how much Dave cost him. They spend Smoke Episode 8 fitting a new tracker on Dave’s car and then staking out Reba’s house, where Dave eventually turns up for more strange sex. At this point, it’s still a little unclear how much Reba knows and how much more she’d be comfortable knowing, but the scars on her abdomen suggest she has always been overly familiar with — and forgiving of — Dave’s proclivities.

Of more obvious concern is Harvey, who sits his daughter down to confess to having defrauded the department of $256,000. It started with pocketing $5K by lying about how much some renovations would cost, but since nobody noticed, it continued to lake house-sized proportions. A lifetime of public service and frugal living couldn’t have afforded that, which at some point Harvey realized. He bought something for himself, something grand and ostentatious he wouldn’t have had otherwise, assuming that nobody would know. But Dave knows. And if Dave is going down, there’s every chance that, out of spite, he’s going to take Harvey with him.

Is Dave going down? Until the climax of “Mercy”, it seemed unlikely. But Michelle inadvertently discovers a potential solution. After being rattled by Dave’s taunting, she predictably seeks solace in Burk. But he, again predictably, sees that as an excuse to make a move on her. When she rejects him, he loses his temper, revealing that all the nice stuff he said about her career advancement was just a way to get her into bed. She won’t be able to get anywhere without his backing. Michelle, furious, tries to leave, and Burk tries to stop her physically, so she spins around and smashes his trachea in. Despite Burk waving his pen around as an obvious request for her to perform an emergency tracheotomy, she watches him die.

Michelle does, admittedly, seem pretty torn up about this; she even has flashbacks of her and Burk telling each other they’re in love. But she gets to work cleaning up the crime scene by burning it down using one of Dave’s trademark D&C ignition devices, and then plants one of his gloves, which he had earlier stuffed into the door pocket of her car, nearby. How ironic that the downfall of Dave Gudsen may well come from the one crime he didn’t commit. But there’s a good chance he may commit a few more before we get to that point.

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