Mr. & Mrs. Smith Ends with a Super High-Risk Finale
Spoilers for Mr. & Mrs. Smith below.
From the jump, Prime Video’s episodic version of Mr. & Mrs. Smith promised to be a look at intimacy and relationships, even if the borrowed premise from the 2005 film of the same name set it against the backdrop of spies and assassins. In the finale, we finally get some answers about John and Jane Smith, played by Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, the central couple who are paired together in a faux marriage by their unseen handler Hihi (a flip of the original premise in which a husband and wife each realize their spouse is a rival assassin).
“A Breakup” (season 1, episode 8) meets them after the rocky end to the penultimate episode “Infidelity” (season 1, episode 7), when John finally throws in the towel on the marriage after months of conflict. We pick up an undisclosed amount of time later to find that he’s moved his beloved mom from Baltimore to NYC and is currently staying with her while he figures things out. But when they arrive at her home after running errands, he notices that the toilet seat has been left up—a telltale sign that there’s been an intruder. (It’s a slick callback to the only good trait of his that Jane could name in episode 6.) Upon further investigation, he sees a trip wire and immediately believes Jane is behind it.
But Jane isn’t exactly safe either. After a Russ & Daughters bagel run, she’s attacked inside her home in a shootout that kills her beloved cat Max. Instead of going full John Wick on the killers, she accepts John’s invitation to meet up to talk at the Whitney Museum, similarly believing her estranged partner is behind the attack.
Maya Erskine as Jane Smith.
Thus begins a cat-and-mouse chase throughout New York City that takes up the majority of the episode. Jane traps John in the museum’s entrance vestibule with a purse bomb and when he marginally escapes before the explosion, he chases her through the bustling streets onto the High Line and all the way back to their apartment, with hand-to-hand combat (and a minor car accident) the entire way.
Jane narrowly escapes and locks herself in their home before being greeted by none other than John’s mother in the kitchen making tea (because, of course, he’s given her an emergency key to the apartment). She’s come to shed some light on her son (whose real name is Michael), telling her that he’s always been needy, and she asks Jane to give him some grace. Jane admits that she’s cold and pushes people away, but his mom promises that he understands complicated people.
Meanwhile, unable to get into the home, John cajoles their ever-present neighbor to let him in so that John could jump the fence onto his own property. John has had suspicions about the neighbor (played by Paul Dano) for some time now—mostly that he’s romantically interested in Jane—but when he finds stealth photos of himself and Jane on a cork board in the neighbor’s office, John’s instinct is to pull a gun on him. Mr. & Mrs. Smith leans into its comedy billing here when John asks what agency he works for and the neighbor responds with, “Sotheby’s.” John has no idea what that is and presses him further, thinking it’s a rival operation. But no, the neighbor has been keeping tabs simply because of the incredible value of the home; he believes the renovations alone would have cost over $25 million, something that two software engineers likely couldn’t afford.
That’s the last we see of the neighbor because, once John realizes he’s a non-issue, he is already off to the races to attack Jane. Similar to the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie source material, the married couple have a shootout throughout their home, ruining beautiful tile work and expensive artwork in the process. While the couple in the film openly confess their love to each other at the end of their fight, the television versions of Mr. and Mrs. Smith can only speak their minds via a truth serum, which John injects into both of them during a minor truce.
Donald Glover as John Smith and Maya Erskine as Jane.
It’s a convenient device that reminded me of Harry Potter’s Veritaserum and gives way to the necessary emotional confessions that have been stirring under the surface for so long. But it’s kind of a bummer that their honesty only appears when literally forced out. Jane confesses that she failed her psych exam at the CIA for “exhibiting sociopathic tendencies” and that she wishes her father understood her, though we still don’t get an answer about what exactly caused their falling out. In general, the writers have done a much better job fleshing out John’s arc—from his close relationship with his mom to his day-to-day personality—whereas Jane continues to be an enigma until the very end.
John, meanwhile, admits that he was discharged from the Marines for his asthma and that, more than anything, he wants children as a way to honor his grandma and father. In her vulnerable state, Jane asks if he’d have kids even with her sociopathic inclinations to which he responds, “in a heartbeat.” The couple clears the air that they both never actually cheated on one another and that they both had easy opportunities to kill them in their shootout but intentionally missed. Finally, with the aid of the serum, they confess that they actually did love each other.
Their reconciliation is cute until they hear their door open—it’s the Other John and Jane Smith that they met at the farmer’s market in “Double Date” (season 1, episode 4) played by Parker Posey and Wagner Moura. The rival couple explains that their “extremely high risk” assignments are always to take out other Smiths, and these two are their current targets. It’s not exactly clear why this is, just that our John and Jane better make a move quickly.
Parker Posey as another Jane.
When Other John begins sneezing, our Jane shoots him in the eye. Our Smiths run to a safe room upstairs and lock themselves inside, only to find that John has been hit in the gut during the pursuit. Sensing the end is near, Jane promises John that they can have one kid, which he counters and asks for five. She tells him that her real name is Alana and vows to kill the Other Smiths. When she opens the door, the camera cuts to a POV outside of the apartment building where all we see are a few flashes of light in a window before cutting to black.
The ending leaves quite a few things unanswered. Did our Jane prevail? Did our John end up bleeding out? Who is Hihi and how deep do their tentacles reach? Why did they become the targets of the operation? There’s no word yet on whether Mr. & Mrs. Smith will return for a second season, so we’ll have to live with our own answers for the time being.
Watch Mr. & Mrs. Smith on Prime Video