Spoilers: Apple TV Loathed the Ending of Dennis Lehane's 'Smoke' As Much as You Did

Notwithstanding standout performances from Taron Egerton, Jurnee Smollett, and a brilliant supporting cast (John Leguizamo, Greg Kinnear, Rafe Spall, Anna Chlumsky, and Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine—yes, the same actor who plays Blessing in Dexter: Resurrection), Smoke begins to unravel around episode six and by the finale is a smoldering mess.

To Lehane’s credit, he swung for the fences. Sometimes that results in a home run. Sometimes the ball ricochets off the catcher’s foot and dribbles to the backstop. This was the latter: a twist so bizarre it barely registered.

“We hid it from Apple because we knew they’d hate it — and they did,” Lehane told Variety. I don’t often find myself siding with studio executives, but here they weren’t wrong. A good twist recontextualizes what came before. The twist in Smoke instead played like an inverted Fight Club — as if we’d followed Edward Norton for eight episodes only to discover in the finale that he thought he was Brad Pitt, who conveniently materializes for the very first time in that final scene.

The premise had promise: Egerton’s Dave Gudsen, a cocky arson investigator, partners with Detective Michelle Calderone (Smollett), who’s been demoted after ending her affair with her boss, Steven Burke (Rafe Spall). Together, they hunt a pair of arsonists. One, Freddy Fasano (Mwine), is a tragic figure — a fast-food worker ground down by poverty and invisibility whose crimes, while horrific, are tinged with pathos. The other is Gudsen himself, a self-pitying incel prick who lights fires because his wife belittles him.

By midseason, Calderone uncovers Gudsen’s guilt and conspires with his former partner, Ezra (Leguizamo), to bring him down. Gudsen knows she knows, but smugly keeps working alongside her, daring her to find proof. At the end of the penultimate episode, she manufactures it — framing him for Burke’s death after she kills Burke herself during an assault, then torches his house and plants Gudsen’s gloves as evidence.

It only gets more ridiculous. But then comes the finale, where the show veers into self-parody. A forest fire rages, Gudsen speeds through it, Calderone holds a gun to his face, and Gudsen rams the car into a tree in an attempt to kill her. She’s hurled through the windshield, stands silhouetted against the blaze, and — because why not — ties her hair back with a scrunchie before forcing Gudsen into a simulation of oral sex with a pistol. (Lehane says about 45 seconds of that scene were cut.)

Calderone spares his life, drags him back to the station, and finally corners him with irrefutable evidence. Gudsen snaps, looks into a mirror, and the mask falls away. For the first time, we see not Egerton’s handsome profile but a balding, pudgy, middle-aged man.

“Dave is not Dave. Dave does not look like Taron Egerton,” Lehane told Variety. “No, he’s projecting! That storyline is about his projection. He’s projecting who he is.”

But … why? On paper, maybe there’s a kernel of an idea about performative masculinity. In execution, it’s ludicrous. It reframes the entire show not as an arson thriller or a battle of wits between Calderone and Gudsen, but as a meditation on male self-delusion. Which is fine, except the preceding nine episodes didn’t really prepare us for it.

It also raises baffling questions. Were Gudsen’s wife and ex-wife — both out of his league — merely projections too? Was the confident, sharp-edged man we’d been watching actually the swaggering alter ego Gudsen once wrote a book about? The reveal makes the entire series feel like a nine-hour setup for a single, nonsensical twist.

I understand why Lehane hid it from Apple. Frankly, if he’d pitched that ending upfront, the series may not exist. What I wonder is whether Egerton and Smollett knew from day one that the show they were anchoring would end not in fire, but in flames.