SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from the finale of Apple TV+‘s Smoke.
Jurnee Smollett was as shocked as anyone else about the twist ending of Dennis Lehane‘s Apple TV+ series Smoke.
The nine-episode series follows troubled detective Michelle Calderon (Smollett) and enigmatic arson investigator Dave Gudsen (Egerton) as they pursue the trails of two serial arsonists. As a down on her luck Marine-turned-detective, Michelle is a prickly character whose moral compass is often quite confusing. In fact, by the finale, it’s hard to argue that she has one at all.
Friday’s final episode picked up right where Episode 8 left off, after Michelle accidentally murders Police Captain Steven Burke during an argument about their ill-advised affair. Michelle burns down the house to hide any evidence of her presence at his house and, as she’s running out the door, she leaves behind a plastic glove with Dave’s DNA to frame him for the act.
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Smollett credits Lehane with “layering in [Michelle’s] contradictions” throughout the series to illustrate her extreme moral ambiguity so that by the time she starts pouring accelerant all over Burke’s body, it feels like the natural conclusion to this rollercoaster of a story.
After all, she does finally get Dave behind bars, even if she had to kill someone to do it.
“Do the ends justify the means? Oftentimes, to her, they do, and yet I still think certain circumstances contribute to her finding herself in a situation she never thought she’d be in,” Smollett says.
Smollett has previously said that she feels her job as an actor isn’t to judge her characters but to find a way to justify their behavior, however unacceptable it may seem to viewers.
To that end, she adds: “I think Michelle feels it’s justice, because he’s killed little kids. He’s killed innocent women and children and taken parents from their kids. To her, he has committed unforgivable sins. I think in her mind, she has justified what has happened with Burke as something that is an unfortunate [necessity].”
That final confrontation with Burke is far from the first time that audiences have seen the “combustible energy” that exists between Michelle and some of the people in her life, like her brother and Burke, Smollett points out.
One of the first examples we see of her volatile energy is in a flashback, when Burke tells Michelle that he’s left his wife and family to be with her. The news incenses Michelle, who warns that Burke should return to his family before gathering her things and storming out of the hotel room they’d been sharing.
“Michelle leaves Burke after he leaves his wife, because attaching to people in a real, intimate way is the most terrifying thing for her,” Smollett says, explaining that she worked with a trauma therapist to understand how Michelle’s childhood, including being locked in a burning closet by her drug-addled mother, had affected her ability to form secure attachments in her life.
Smollett said there were a few other scenes between Michelle and Burke that ended up on the chopping block but would have further illustrated “the volatility between them, particularly on Burke’s end, and that there had been a history of real emotional abuse and physical abuse between the two of them.”
Whether any of that absolves her of her own crimes is beside the point. Much like Dave, Michelle sees herself as the hero of her own story.
When they face each other in the interrogation room at the end of the finale, after Michelle has successfully coaxed Dave into incriminating himself in several other arsons, “that’s the thing that is so palpable,” Smollett adds.
“They’re so aware of how they’re staring at each other, but they’re really staring at parts of themselves,” she continued. “They’re both lying to themselves, saying that they are one thing that they are not, and they present this mask to the world that is in stark contradiction to who they actually are inside. I think that is one of the main things they recognize in each other is the lie that they are trying to desperately sell.”
All episodes of Smoke are now streaming on Apple TV+.