Apple TV+‘s Smoke started as a slow-burn, but creator and writer Dennis Lehane turned the heat up to 11 and achieved a full, ferocious blaze in the Season 1 finale.
In our detailed finale recap, Decider dubbed Smoke Episode 9, “Mirror Mirror,” one of the year’s “wildest, most exhilarating, outrageous television episodes.” On top of stellar performances and compelling twists, the praise comes in large part because of a fiery finale showdown between Dave Gudsen (Taron Egerton) and Michelle Calderone (Jurnee Smollett), which features the partners speeding through a flaming forest, several intense fight scenes, and even Harry Nilsson’s banger, “Jump Into the Fire.”
Curious to learn how Smoke brought the action-packed scenes to screen? Lehane, Smollett, and Egerton broke down the intense episode for us. So buckle up (IYKYK) and get ready to relive the wild ride.
“Molly Miller, who is my right hand as a writer — she’s my chief writer on the show — she had written the eighth episode, and she killed it. She knocked it out of the park. She crushed it. And I was like, ‘Great. Wonderful. Now I’ve gotta come up with a bigger episode,'” Lehane told Decider over Zoom. “I went into the writers’ room. I blocked everybody else out. Nobody was there that day. I turned on the Oppenheimer soundtrack, and I just started going crazy. I just had it on repeat and I went crazy trying to create the craziest episode I could. At the center of it, I wanted to have this insane drive through a fire. I wanted it to be madness. I wanted all the brakes to come off.”
With control of the wheel, Gudsen believes he holds the power in the next-level face-off, but in the end, Calderone has the upper hand. She not only survives the crash intended to kill her, but she pummels Gudsen, holds him at gunpoint, and ultimately spares his life so he can receive the long-game punishment he deserves.
“Dennis said to me, ‘I’m writing the finale. Jurnee, I’m gonna make you a full-on 90s action star.’ And I was like, ‘Hell yeah, man! Please bring it!'” Smollett excitedly told Decider. “It was awesome. I trained for it pretty heavily, because I’m not naturally that way. But Michelle is a former Marine, so you gotta feel like she becomes a machine and that Marine in her comes out. It was wild. I mean, the practical effects, the special effects, it was so massive and on such a large scale. It was breathtaking to be a part of it. And I have to say, they kept us incredibly safe. So shout out to Apple and the entire production for that.”
When Egerton looks back on the episode from a personal and professional standpoint, he sees a masterful feat that played a meaningful role in the characters’ journeys — particularly at the end of the finale, when his character has a rare moment of self-reflection.
“It’s interesting, because in some respects, it feels like the culmination of [Gudsen and Calderone’s] relationship, but it also feels a bit like the start. What stands out to me is that both Jurnee and I were kind of manic. The characters, at that point, are both in existential crises. Dave is coming apart at the seams, because he knows everyone is after him. He knows he’s been found out,” Egerton explained, recalling the forest fight.
“The interesting thing about that, is not only that he’s going to get caught, but that he is — on some level — going to have to look at who he is, which is the one thing Dave can’t do. He can’t examine himself in a truthful fashion that’s aiming for objectivity, because it’s gonna mess him up. And that is what happens in the final moments of the show,” he continued. “For Jurnee’s character, she’s perpetrated something terrible and unthinkable in the episode before. So it’s very interesting for them both to be dealing with that at a hundred miles an hour in a burning forest. It was intense, but also felt really, really exciting and big in scale. It was a really expensive episode of television and really thrilling to be a part of.”
While some might assume that the flashy, large-scale forest fire would have come towards the end of the finale, Lehan knew he wanted a quiet, yet profoundly powerful close to the debut season.
“I wanted to put [Gudsen and Calderone] in a room, because I think anybody who knows my work knows there’s nothing I love more than two people sitting across from each other at a table,” Lehane explained. “I was like, ‘You can’t do a show about fire unless you have the fires at the end — on every level, not just practical, physical fire. You have to have fireworks, emotional fire, psychological fire, and then go out with a big disco song.” Duh!
While viewers get a certain sense of closure before the end credits roll, if Apple TV+ renews Smoke for a second season, Lehane assured us he has more story to tell.
“We’ve planned a whole Season 2, now we’ve just got to find out if we get it. We’re ready to go for you,” Lehane told Decider. “We always saw the show as three seasons. And just so you know, I always have to know where I’m ultimately going. I don’t know how I’m getting there, but I know where I am going. So I know where the show’s going.”
Here’s hoping we’ll find out, too!
Smoke Season 1 is now streaming on Apple TV+.