Mr. & Mrs. Smith S1E8: A Breakup
One of TV’s sweetest romances culminates in Ben Wyatt proposing to Leslie Knope by declaring, “I like you, and I love you.” But real relationships are rarely so sweet or so simple. John and Jane Smith tell each other “I hate you” and “I like you” over the course of the same fight, in between being more emotionally honest and vulnerable than they’ve ever been, and also trying to murder each other. Marriage is complicated.
The complications hit a new level at the end of last week, when they failed another mission. Their third strike. All their mysterious boss says is, “await further instructions.” So we open on Jane lying awake in bed, palpable dread hanging over her. She checks messages from her boss, and gets one line: “TERMINATE! Take out your Smith.”
Part of the tension between Jane and John is that he feels like she sees him as the weak link. She’s definitely more committed to the job, but when we’ve seen them fail (or nearly fail), it’s generally because they get in each other’s way. As they established in therapy, they have very different styles. But this episode doesn’t waste time overanalyzing. Jane’s in the kitchen feeding the cat, and bullets sail through the window. They miss, but it’s clear someone’s trying to terminate her.
Is it John? He’s out for a casual stroll with his mother, who he’s staying with while on the outs with Jane. We know even his frequent phone calls to her are verboten by their spy agency, so this seems to be a big step over the line. And if the agency wants John terminated, Mom’s in quite a bit of danger.
Sure enough, he comes home to find a tripwire just inside her front door. (He might feel like he’s the weak end of the partnership, but he’s smart enough to know something’s amiss and checks out the entryway before he or his mom go inside).
He texts Jane. They meet in public, at the Whitney museum, for safety’s sake, and have a terse conversation. Both are furious with the other, but stop short of acknowledging the murder attempts that each assumes the other was behind.
Once they’re outside, things explode, literally and figuratively. (And we get a nice callback when she mocks him for getting winded after running after her). After a chase all over Greenwich Village, Jane ends up at home, where John’s mom — sorry, Michael’s mom, his real name — is waiting for her, to give some warm counsel about marriage. She knows they’re having trouble, she just doesn’t know how much or what kind. But Jane opens enough to admit that she can be cold, and can push people away. Even while trying to murder John, she still thinks of their relationship as a relationship.
John, not knowing his Mom came over, only knowing Jane is lurking inside, asks nosy next-door neighbor Paul Dano to let him cut through his house so he can come in through the back door. He takes the opportunity to snoop, and finds out Dano isn’t just a harmless busybody. He’s been photographing John and Jane, and has blueprints to their house.
John goes from being worried he’s interested in Jane romantically to being worried he’s working for a rival spy agency, or even theirs. But the answer is a surprise third thing, that ends up being a terrific reveal we won’t spoil here. It’s also another tense moment that turns into marriage counseling, as Dano talks about divorce and his philosophy on relationships. Even at this late stage, with everything coming to a head, the show is still more concerned with the marriage than the spy stuff, which, as we keep saying, is what makes the show so good.
But come to a head things must. John’s mom conveniently vanishes so the Smiths can have an all-out war all across the brownstone. Which leads back to them hashing out their marriage. Which leads back to spy stuff. Around and around it goes. We won’t spoil anything beyond that, except to say there are a few callbacks that make it clear that their earlier misadventures were all pieces of a carefully plotted whole, building up to an ending as emotional and tense as anything we’ve seen on television in ages.
So we’ll end with this. Donald Glover and Maya Erskine have each proven themselves to be remarkable talents; he as a writer/comic/actor/rapper who makes it all look easy; her as a writer/actor who pulled off the remarkable high-wire act of playing her 12-year-old self at age 30 in PEN15 and mining brutal emotional honesty from her own childhood. So perhaps it’s no surprise that they’re both very, very good in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. It’s a joy to watch two talented people at the absolute peak of their powers, and whatever either of them chooses to do next, we’re already on board.
Stray thoughts:
• This episode has some of the best visuals in the series. Jane in the Whitney, standing in the same position as a figure in the painting behind them and John facing them both; Jane all in black and John all in white, framed by a background that divides down the middle between them. Glover directed this episode himself, and he’s got a terrific visual sense.
• A lot of New York- or LA-based TV shows seem to be based there by default. It’s easy to film in the cities where the TV studios are. But the few episodes of Mr. & Mrs. Smith set in NYC make terrific use of the city’s geography. There are always people around, there are always multiple ways to get from place to place, and you can always be hit by a taxi if you’re not careful.
• Movie spies routinely get into knock-down, drag-out fights, straighten their tie, and keep going like nothing happened. But John and Jane look beat to hell and exhausted, and it’s great.
• This is Beverly Glover’s first and only acting credit (Donald Glover’s real-life mom, playing his mom here), and she’s terrific.
