Smoke Season One Finale: The Partnership from Hell

Just circling back with a review of the Season One Finale of Smoke, which I saw a couple of weeks ago. There's no word yet about whether Apple TV+ will be going forward with further seasons, but I sure hope they do.

Here is some of what I liked best about the finale, and the season in general:

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

1. Taron Egerton's performance as Gudson is mind-blowing and Emmy-worthy.  He manages to be genuinely frightening just by talking, even when he's not setting fires or committing other violence.  In the finale, this is heightened by make-up or whatever the producers did to his face.  The less-handsome Gudson with a slightly bloated face that we see is telling us, what?  That the better-looking arson investigator/arsonist was how Gudson thought of himself, thought that he looked, and what we see at the end is the way he really looks?  Probably.  But whatever the message, it was truly unnerving.

2. Jurnee Smollett's performance as Calderone is also top-notch and memorable.  What we learn about Calderone in the finale and the episodes that led up to it is that she, in her own way, is just as violent, even more so, than Gudson, if not as chilling and terrifying.  But she's willing to break the rules when necessary, including standing by and letting her boss and ex-lover Burke die after she hits him in the neck to repel his sexual advance and he's the on the floor choking.  She's also happy to frame Gudson for the arsons he committed when he seems to have successfully evaded being brought to justice.

So, Gudson and Calderone are indeed a partnership from hell, both a mixture of good and evil in themselves, and even more so when they're operating together.  This compelling and frightening partnership. eminently deserves more screen time!

See also Shocker at the End of Smoke's Second Episode ... Smoke 1.6: A Perfect Narrative Structure

Shocker at the End of Smoke's 2nd Episode

Talk about warnings for spoilers: here's one for what follows in my review of the first two episodes of Smoke, which have been up for a few days on Apple TV+.  Indeed, the reveal at the end of the second episode of this new series is one of the biggest I ever remember seeing on any kind of TV series -- broadcast, cable, or streaming -- especially notable because it comes so early in the story.

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Here it is:  Gudsen, one of the two investigators looking into the two arsonists who are plaguing their city, is himself one of those two arsonists.  We certainly see him setting a fire in a supermarket -- one of the two arsonists' modus operandi -- and smiling afterwards (Taron Egerton, who plays Gudsen, has a uniquely recognizable smile).

But does that 100% mean Gudsen is one of those two arsonists that he and his partner Calderone (very well played by Jurnee Smollett) are investigating?  The TV series is an adaptation of the podcast, Firebug, which tells the story of a real-life firefighter who becomes an arsonist.  But that doesn't mean that Smoke has to follow every part of the true-life story.  Before that final reveal, we see Gudsen very frustrated.   The literary agent he is seeking for the novel he is writing has turned him down.  He doesn't get along well with his adopted son.  Could he have set the fire to vent his emotions, setting it in the way one of the arsonists he and Calderone are investigating sets fires?

If yes, that would mean that Trolley Town is now being set on fire by three arsonists.  But my guess it's more likely that Gudsen is indeed one of the original two arsonists, which is still a wild -- and true -- story indeed.

Lovecraft Country 1.1: Racist Police Get Horror Comeuppance

Finally had a chance to watch the debut of Lovecraft Country on HBO.   I was pulled away this past week by the Democratic National Convention, televised and virtual and truly inspiring.  And it was oddly appropriate that I did not look at Lovecraft Country until just a few nights before the upcoming Republican convention, which begins on Monday.  Creepily appropriate, because Lovecraft Country is a tableau of racism and horror, and that's pretty much what I expect to find in the Republican National Convention.  Would be nice if that meant I didn't need to watch any of those four blustering nights.

I know, it may not be good style to mix real politics and popular culture, but times have changed.  H. P. Lovecraft was a real author of horror, and a real racist.  Since I'm no fan of horror, I've never read much of Stephen King, whose progressivism is in an accord with mine.  So I certainly didn't bother with Lovecraft, and always found mentions of his Cthulhu at science fiction conventions mildly annoying.  

To make matters worse -- worse for my being anything like a knowledgeable reviewer of Lovecraft Country -- I haven't read Matt Ruff's 2016 novel by the same name, which explores the mix of horror and racism in a narrative whose hero Atticus Turner is an African-American devotee of pulp science fiction that flourished along with racism in the first half or so of the 20th century.  But I've always held that reviews of television and cinema by people who haven't read the novels are a necessary part of the critical process, because they can evaluate the movie or TV show on its own terms, rather than in comparison to the novel or short story.

So what did I think of the first episode of Lovecraft Country?  I liked it a lot.  It was fun seeing the racist murderous police get their comeuppance by another H. P. Lovecraft monster, the Shoggoth.   That was a fine metaphoric fulfillment of Atticus's appreciation of bug-eyed monster science fiction.   The genre is intrinsically a celebration of the unlikely hero, and it's a cool twist to make the genre itself a component of the heroism in this story.

I was asked a few weeks ago by Elizabeth Yuko, writing an article for Reader's Digest,  to offer an example of a science fiction novel that accurately predicted the future.  I offered Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (to see why, here's the Reader's Digest article).  If Reader's Digest ever asks me to choose a horror novel that got the future right, I might well choose Ruff's Lovecraft Country, as a strong metaphoric example of racist police getting just what they deserve.

But I'll try to watch the rest of the HBO series first, which by the way has good acting by Jonathan Majors as Atticus, and Jurnee Smollett and Courtney B. Vance in other lead roles.

See also Lovecraft Country 1.2: Malleable Dreams