Episode 1 of Smoke opens with firefighter-turned-arson-investigator Dave Gudsen having a nightmare about the time he was stuck inside an apartment on fire. He was trying to find an exit, but wherever he looked, all he saw was flames. At one point, he passed out, and he fell to the ground. When he regained consciousness, he thought he was being rescued by another firefighter. But when he approached his “savior,” he was hit with the realization that it was just his reflection that was beckoning him. When he wakes up and prepares to go to his office at the Umberland Fire Department, we learn a bit about his personal life. He is married to Ashley. She has a son from her previous marriage named Emmett, who doesn’t really like Dave, even though he is more than willing to bond with Emmett. When he reaches his chamber, he sees that Detective Michelle Calderone is already there waiting for him. Apparently, Metro PD has sent her to assist Dave in nabbing the 2 serial arsonists that are terrorizing the city, because the Umberland Fire Department has been failing to do their job for quite a while. Since Dave is used to operating on his own, he isn’t happy that he has to listen to Michelle now. However, since he doesn’t have any other options, he accepts his fate and heads out into the field with her. Do they make a breakthrough in their search for these serial arsonists? Let’s find out.
Spoiler Alert
Dave and Michelle’s First Steps
Dave and Michelle’s first assignment together is analyzing a Land Rover that has been burnt to a cinder, and they have to determine whether it was natural, accidental, undetermined, or incendiary. The car in question belongs to one Reginald Irving, who has claimed that his car was stolen. Now that it has been found, Dave asks Reginald to come over and see if there are any valuables in there that he wants, but Reginald is apparently not even remotely interested in doing so. As per Dave, Reginald was behind on payments and had racked up too many miles while having the car on a lease. So, he took the car to this remote location, set it on fire with a Duraflame log, and pretended that it was stolen so that he wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore. Which basically means that he is not one of the serial arsonists that they are looking for, or that Reginald’s car isn’t a victim of the serial arsonists’ handiwork. At this point, we get a hint at how one of these serial arsonists functions. He apparently wears a brown hoodie, has a limp, and only targets the potato chips section of supermarkets with what looks like a cigarette that has a bunch of matchsticks tied around it. While investigating one of his attacks two weeks ago, Dave made an observation that maybe the arsonists are using the “divide and conquer” strategy by setting off fires on diametrically opposite sides of the city so as to spread the fire department thin. The other arsonist’s activities are apparently limited to Trolley Town, and he uses a milk jug of gasoline to light up places, hence the nickname Milk Jug, and that too at night. The exact motivations behind their actions are unclear, but as per Dave, arsonists like the ones they are after probably feel helpless in life. Hence, they want to instill that same level of helplessness in others. And since there’s nothing like fire to make one experience true vulnerability, that becomes these villains’ weapon of choice. But enough about these antagonists. What are our protagonists made of? Well, we know a bit about Dave. As for Michelle, based on her conversation with her new partner, she was in the Marines, and she has been a cop for the past 4 years. Additionally, she doesn’t like to wear her seatbelt, which I guess is going to come into play in one way or another.
Friction Between Dave and Michelle
Michelle is familiar enough with Dave’s reports to know that he suspects that one of the arsonists they’re after is an ex-firefighter. But that apparently rubs Dave the wrong way because he is so used to working all by himself. So, he goes crying to Papa (read: his boss, Harvey Englehart), who basically tells Dave that he has to suck it up and accept the help that he is getting. Given how Michelle used to work as a detective at the Metro PD and is now in Umberland playing “catch the arsonist,” Dave thinks that she did something out of pocket over there and what she is doing now is a punishment, demotion, or both. He doesn’t make a big deal out of it though, because he knows that if Michelle wants to share more info about her past, then she’ll do it on her own. Therefore, while Michelle goes back to her decrepit home that she’s busy remodeling or renovating, Dave goes on a date with Ashley. There, he breaks the news to her that he is writing a book, which is basically a collection of all the exciting and memorable “adventures” that he has been a part of as a firefighter. It’s unclear if Ashley is being sarcastic about her excitement about Dave’s decision to immortalize his experience. But Dave thinks that her words of motivation are honest; so, maybe that’s all that matters. By the way, I think the cinematography of this whole scene is pretty interesting. The couple is sitting in front of a massive window, which is covered with raindrops, thereby causing all the light around them to reflect and refract in interesting ways. On top of that, there’s a fire, probably from a hibachi grill, that’s projected onto Dave’s back in such a way that it seems like it’s coming out of him, as if the show is trying to tell us that fire is always following Dave no matter where he is. In stark contrast to this family man, there’s the loner, Freddy Fasano. He works at a diner called Coop’s Fried Chicken. He is good at his job, but despite being much, much older than his coworkers, he is bullied by them. And instead of saying anything in protest, he just walks back home, cracks open a bottle of beer, and watches porn on his laptop. Spoiler alert: he’s one of the arsonists.
Michelle’s Past Fling
We get some more insight into Michelle’s life as it is revealed that while working as a cop at Metro P.D., she had a tumultuous affair with her superior, Steven Burke. Things between them got so serious that Steven had separated from his wife and sprung that news on Michelle, expecting that it’d impress her so much that she’d agree to marry him there and then. The exact opposite happened, though: Michelle said that she wasn’t looking for anything serious with Steven. Steven apparently interpreted her need to be physical with him as a sign to leave his old life behind and start anew with Michelle. As soon as he realized that there had been a lapse in communication, he tried to make amends by assuring Michelle that he’d get back together with his wife, and he and Michelle will continue to be “colleagues with benefits.” However, the damage had been done, and Michelle recommended that she and Steven break up, temporarily or maybe on a permanent basis. This caused Steven to flare up like a man-child and threaten Michelle with stripping her of all the benefits that she was getting by being in a physically intimate relationship with him. Michelle showed that she was unperturbed by Steven’s threats, but seeing how she is struggling in Umberland, it’s pretty apparent that her decision to not satiate his desires has taken a toll on her. Anyway, both Michelle and Dave are forced to leave their personal engagements behind—which for Dave is writing his book about fires—in order to look into another case of arson at yet another supermarket. When Dave explains the method that the arsonist in question uses—the cigarette and the matchsticks—Michelle points out that since this is such an unreliable process, there must be several cigarette butts with the arsonist’s DNA on them. I’m guessing that the fire department has that info already; the only issue is that they don’t have anybody to match that DNA to. By the way, I do want to point out 2 things here. Firstly, there’s something brewing between Dave and Michelle here, and if they start an affair, I guess I feel safe to say that she hasn’t learned anything from her past mistakes. And secondly, that shot of a burn victim’s skin sloughing off almost made me puke; props to everyone involved for eliciting that reaction out of me. That genuinely disgusted and angered me enough to want to become an arson investigator and nab the guilty party.
Dave and Michelle are reprimanded
Back at the Umberland Fire Department, Dave and Michelle are essentially cornered by Harvey. He says that he is being pressured by the global food conglomerate, ABSG Ltd., that owns the Meadow Farms supermarket chain, because their property keeps going up in flames due to the incompetence of the arson investigators. And he warns Dave, specifically, that if he is forced to take an early retirement or is straight-up fired, he is going to take Dave down with him. He even insinuates that he’ll orchestrate yet another demotion for Michelle if she fails at her new job. Usually, Harvey has a very light-hearted attitude, but this time he is not playing around, he means business. That’s why Dave and Michelle take his words very seriously and get busy analyzing all the data they have at their disposal. Firstly, Michelle says that she doesn’t buy Potato Chips’ (that’s the nickname I’ve given him) limp; she is of the opinion that he is purposefully faking the limp so that investigators and detectives looking into this issue search for people with a physical disability and end up going in the wrong direction. Secondly, Michelle wants to look into every single firefighter who was absent from active duty on the day the incidents happened, which amounts to 163,346 points of comparison. It’s a lot of work, but Michelle reiterates what Harvey said to underscore the fact that they can put all their effort into this or face unemployment. This leads to a pretty interesting montage sequence where Smoke plays around with frame rates. Also, we get to see a pretty unique POV sequence where it seems like we, the audience, are inside the laptop and looking out at the characters looking at the screen. I mean, when we had those CRT monitors, movies and shows would do something like that, and it would kind of make sense because our brain would assume that the camera was placed somewhere in the box-like monitor. But our mind doesn’t do the same when it comes to flat LCD or LED screens that we have for desktops and laptops nowadays. Anyway, Michelle zeros in on 2 firefighters, Arch Stanton, who kind of has all the telltale signs of being a villain, and Scotty Bucyk, since both of them have been absent on the days that the fires have happened. Long story short, both of them claim that it’s a clerical error; nothing more, nothing less. But since Arch is a grade-A douchebag, he laces his criticism of Michelle’s work—specifically Michelle’s work, even though Dave is her partner—with lots of racism, which is becoming more and more common when it comes to White Americans.
Freddy Targets A Couple
At the end of Smoke episode 1, Michelle and Dave drive through the places that have been hit by Milk Jug, and the running theme in all his attacks seems to be that they’re born out of some kind of personal vendetta. As per Dave, he doesn’t know his victims personally, but he does observe their daily life and probably feels jealous of them because his own life is not all that happening. Now, Dave has mentioned that Milk Jug uses gasoline, but now he adds yet another detail to it: fryer oil. Which means that he works at a fast food chain, which furthers the theory that he is dissatisfied with his life and lashing out against people whose lifestyle he envies (it’s very Se7en-esque, thematically and visually). Of course, much like her plan to comb through every firefighter anomaly, she wants to question every employee of every fast food joint in Trolley Town, but that’s just impossible. Dave says that they do have Milk Jug’s DNA in their lab, but they don’t have anybody to match it with. How are they going to bridge that gap? I don’t exactly know. And since Dave and Michelle have no clue either, they go about their lives (by that I mean Dave boinks Ashley and Michelle goes home alone), while Freddy, aka Milk Jug, picks out his next target: a young couple having a merry time at the bar that he himself happens to be in. He follows them to their home, and at the opportune moment, he sets their house on fire. While the wife and the child walk away from the incident relatively unscathed, the father is severely burnt. During the concluding moments of the show, Michelle gets a visit from Steve, whose mental status has declined as he has become a heavy drinker. Apparently, he still has his job as captain of the Metro P.D. I am not sure if he was ever able to get back with his wife. I mean, if he is breaking into Michelle’s house, I think he failed, and now he is looking to antagonize Michelle until she gives in to his alcoholic charm, I guess. Yeah, that doesn’t work, as Michelle tells him to get the hell off her porch, and he obliges. Dave arrives at the house that Milk Jug attacked and learns from one of the firefighters that the victims were at a bar before they came home. If Dave’s theory about Milk Jug being an envious fellow is right, that means he was there too. So, he talks to the bartender there, who unknowingly points out that Milk Jug was there. She even gives a surface-level description of Freddy, which can be fleshed out by a forensic artist, thereby giving the arson investigators their first rough look at Milk Jug.
