Spoilers follow for all eight episodes of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which premiered on Prime Video on February 2.Â
In the finale of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, strangers-turned-married-spies-turned-lovers John (Donald Glover) and Jane (Maya Erskine) Smith blaze a path of destruction on a chase through the luxurious interior of their supersize brownstone. Each suspects the other of trying to assassinate them, before they come to realize they’ve actually been let go by their boss — corporate downsizing given a fatal spin. They end the season hiding in a panic room from the colleagues sent to kill them, where they find solace in some final moments of honest connection before they die.
Or do they? “A Breakup†ends in ambiguity, but the open question of John and Jane’s survival following the finale’s concluding gunshots amounts to little more than anticlimax thanks to the fundamental emptiness of this series’s central relationship. Mr. & Mrs. Smith is so committed to its unconvincing love story that it ends with the pair injected with truth serum — Jane against her will by John — and spilling out their secret adoration for each other. Yet even in this moment of supposed frankness, neither John and Jane nor Mr. & Mrs. Smith itself can be candid about the acquisitive insatiability that first brought these two together and then left them facing (un)certain death amid the ruins of their millennial-dream mansion.
The miscalculation of “A Breakup’s†non-ending lies in the assumption that we’ll care about what happens to John and Jane, either in an imaginary future or a potential second season, when the series has done so little to define the contours of their characters or relationship. Glover goes all-in on wisecracking flirtation (and is often allergic to a shirt) and Erskine nails the awkwardness of Jane unexpectedly falling for John; a moment where she, wounded that his emergency contact is his mother, tearily admits that he’s hers actually has some impact thanks to her vulnerability. What’s missing, though, from moments like John telling Jane “I want to put a baby in you,†or Jane attacking a woman with whom John’s been having an emotional affair (an underused Michaela Coel), is a genuine sense of whether these two can legitimately love each other without really knowing anything about who they were in their past lives.
John and Jane are banned from talking about their history, so they don’t know each other’s real names, they don’t know much about their relationships with their parents or prior partners, they don’t know about each other’s childhoods or adolescence or formative experiences therein. Eventually, he learns she failed a CIA test for her “sociopathic tendencies†and she learns he was discharged from the Marines for anxiety and asthma. (That imbalance is customary for the show, which recurrently presents Jane as a robotic monster and John as the nice guy just trying to love her.) For the most part, their differences are based in the present moment, not in a sense that the two are getting to know each other in a more foundational way, and so the series’s writing and dialogue becomes increasingly repetitive as a result: Here’s another fight about John staying in touch with his mother against the Company’s rules, another fight about Jane flirting with the next-door neighbor, another fight about how the two differ in their approaches to assignments.
It’s reiteration without additional depth, a hollowness that is only exacerbated by how John and Jane’s work seemingly doesn’t have any impact on the outside world. Dozens of people witness them abducting a billionaire real-estate mogul out of a high-end art auction; he eventually dies in their home and is turned into compost for their rooftop garden, but his disappearance never makes the news. They fight child soldiers in El Salvador and are involved in an international incident in Italy — a shootout that spans three villages, interrupts a wedding, and ends with the disappearance of another billionaire wanted by various governments — but there’s no public awareness of those events, either.
Because the characters are both closed off from their pasts and unaffected by their current professional actions, John and Jane’s personalities, and by extension their relationship, become most defined by their material desires. They delight in the vastness of their home, at their wardrobes full of clothes and their bar stocked with high-end liquor. Their first pact is an agreement that they’ll make enough money and then quit, although “enough†is never defined; they consider moving up from “high-risk†to “super-high-risk†assignments because they pay significantly more. They talk about whether they should buy more wine, despite having a cellar full; they have the highest-end tech gadgets and drive a Maserati. They came into this job with sparse checking accounts and no job prospects (a generation-defining millennial problem) and now, look at all their shit.
During that chase in “A Breakup,†every element of the house is damaged in some way: bullets tear up the seats of their basement movie theater and explode countless bottles in their wine cellar, chef knives are thrown across the kitchen and embedded in their oversized refrigerator, planters smashed in their indoor succulent garden and books dislodged from floor-to-ceiling bookcases. “You’re gonna ruin all this expensive art you bought, babe,†John tells Jane while evading her gunfire; she chastises him for scratching their rare Italian floor tile by sliding guns across its surface. John and Jane using all these beautiful things that convinced them to be assassins as weapons against each other is Mr. & Mrs. Smith’s smartest commentary on these characters’ yawning materialism, on how their need for more and more and more inspired the moral compartmentalization that enabled their relationship.
The closest John and Jane get to criticizing each other on this front is in “Do You Want Kids?â€, when John shares that he bought them a vacation house in Italy and she complains about him spending that amount of money without consulting her. But this argument retreads the same characterizations of John as spontaneous but well-intentioned, and Jane as uptight and unwilling to praise his decision making, rather than actually digging into any kind of unease about why John and Jane suddenly have enough funds to even be having this argument. This swift pivot from financial discomfort to a discussion about whether the two should have a baby foreshadows the way “A Breakup†forcibly shifts these characters away from concern about the destruction of all their nice things to their truth-serum-induced admissions of love.
John and Jane’s rapaciousness is their greatest, and perhaps only, harmonious quality, but it’s the one Mr. & Mrs. Smith shies away from over and over again. This portrait of millennials as so hungry for stuff that they’ll agree to do deplorable things for an employer they know nothing about is a tantalizingly barbed idea, if Mr. & Mrs. Smith were willing to dig into it. If the series gave Jane and John interiority and reflexivity past Jane not wanting to eat their produce because it was fertilized by a corpse, or John asking Jane to protect his Gucci jacket before they set out on a job; if it interrogated how they buy things they don’t know how to use (John’s ski gear) or don’t seem to derive pleasure from (Jane’s growing art collection) just because they have the means to do so; if it were more focused in depicting how all this avarice affects Jane and John’s relationship with each other.
This isn’t to say that Jane and John should be rewritten as good people, but the opposite. What’s most interesting about them is how their initial economic despondency justifies their ensuing amorality, and how materialism becomes a guiding principle since the Company has given them nothing else to believe in. Jane and John are, in the words of Tyler Durden, owned by their things, and they’ll kill whomever — even each other — to keep them. Truth serum and some bullet wounds may cause John and Jane to literally and figuratively spill their guts, but Mr. & Mrs. Smith’s concluding vagueness is a direct result of the series misrepresenting what its central characters actually love.