The new TV adaptation of the 2005 blockbuster movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith is out on Amazon Prime, starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine in the lead roles of the Smiths. The show did not impress, to say the least, but read our full review if you’d like to know more. The show begins with a spy couple that gets attacked by some people just as they’re making plans to quit the business and escape into obscurity. A little while later, a woman and a man get interviewed by a computer. It’s like an AI screen that asks questions, and the human being answers them. So it seems there’s a company that has multiple openings for jobs based on the level of risk. These people are all ex-CIA or FBI, basically law enforcement officers who were abandoned, expelled, failed for some reason, and are now working for a private company because of the lack of other options. I suppose once you’re a fan of the action, you can’t let go of the rush you expect from it. The two new characters we meet are John and Jane (as are they all), who get assigned as partners and have to pretend to be a married couple as their cover. Will they manage to be good partners? Or will they crumble under the weight of each other’s identities? Let’s find out.
Spoilers Ahead
Who Are John And Jane?
To begin with, in this new Mr. and Mrs. Smith, John and Jane are complete opposites of each other. John’s a kind and extroverted guy who gives the impression of being the life of a party. On the other hand, Jane seems almost anti-social. She keeps her distance from John and even befriends the house cat before she does him. On their first mission, they’re meant to deliver a package. In the middle of the process of obtaining said package and delivering it to the desired location, the two get to know each other a little bit. A first date, if you will. Considering they’re both spies, they’re both deeply cautious about not just their identities but their personalities as well (not for long kids). They’ve both signed up for high-risk jobs, which is how they got paired up, but the first delivery has them shocked when it’s just a cake. Two seconds later, the cake explodes, and they flee the scene, realizing what their high risk really entails. On their second mission, which we can imagine is sometime later, they’re meant to capture a real estate mogul and extract some information from him using truth serum. There are a few rules: first, they can’t inject him with more than one syringe, or it’ll be too much serum and no truth, only death; and second, there should be no casualties or witnesses.
If the Smiths end up failing a mission two times, they’re out. Unfortunately, their plan for the second mission doesn’t go so well, so while they’re caught up in some weird kinky game with the target, both of them end up injecting him with the serum. The mission is a failure because the man ends up dying, and that’s strike number one. The trauma of accidentally killing a person (and possibly that of the game he made them play) gets them bonding, and you can imagine one thing leads to another and their distance is thrown out of the window.
Who Are The Other Smiths?
On their day off, a little while after they get together, John meets another John Smith in the market. Said other Smith is overjoyed to meet our John and invites himself and his Jane to the house. I’m going to refer to these two as John 2 and Jane 2. So the new Smiths visit our original ones, and they’re having a blast at first. It’s almost as if the two couples are ordinary people and not spies in this absurd universe of spies all named Smiths and bossed around by a company referred to as “Hihi.” I suppose at this point the show is trying to establish that the Smiths are all real couples. John 2 and Jane 2 are determined to appear like they’re having a wonderful life together. They make silly jokes like a real couple and invite John and Jane to join them on their “super high-risk” mission (I honestly couldn’t have thought of a better hierarchy myself). At this point, everyone’s had a lot to drink, so John and Jane agree to join them in drunken excitement. On reaching the helicopter that’s meant to take them to the location, the new Smiths back out and send John and Jane on the mission alone. They’re attacked by kids at the new location and somehow manage to escape after attacking the “captain” with a machete, who they find out soon after was also a Smith. The super-high-risk job is basically to take out other Smiths. At least the two escape and get paid a lot for the job they did.
On their next mission, they’re like two lovebirds on their honeymoon while keeping an eye on a woman and her husband fighting because she’s got no time for him. This obviously causes problems between John and Jane, who start to identify with the couple and take sides. Eventually, though, they get separated, and after they’ve done their tasks, the woman gets kidnapped, and the husband refuses to pay the ransom. John can’t leave the woman to die (especially since she’s a mother), so he interferes and saves her. But he also ends up severely injured, and at the end of the day, it’s Jane who has to come save him.
What Happens With Toby?
What we can assume is many months later (at least), John and Jane are tasked with keeping a man named Toby safe. When they’re keeping Toby safe, it seems like the couple is closer than ever. However, John doesn’t like the old man Toby at all, and the guy who’d usually be kind to a wall ends up being really harsh with the old man for no reason. The safe house that they’re meant to stay in gets compromised, adding to Jane’s tension; however, John ends up taking them to a remote location somewhere in the middle of Italy. You see, they’ve been discussing wanting to buy property in all the cool countries they’ve been to, and John’s actually bought one in Italy. Unfortunately, Jane blows up the house in order to save them when the place gets compromised too. This is after they spend a night there, and John tells Jane that he wants to have kids. Jane’s the one who has been conversing with “hihi” at this time, and she wonders if she needs to have children right now. It goes so far that “hihi” even asks her if they should change her John. She obviously declines their offer, but it definitely looks like she’s been thinking about it for a bit. John even thinks Jane is pregnant (I have no idea what this was about, but okay) and asks her, and she tells him it’s ludicrous (in many words) to think of bringing a baby into the picture in their line of work.
Why Do They Need Couples Therapy?
At this point, I’m left asking why we need this show at all, but that’s beside the point. John and Jane start to fight a lot because Jane likes to take charge and doesn’t allow John to “shine” like he wants to. Jane thinks John is incapable of doing a lot of their tasks and feels pressured to look after most things herself. With their therapist, they try to talk it out, and somehow things get even worse. It’s funny because you see them drift further apart on the couch as sessions pass because, despite listening to the therapist’s advice, things aren’t working out for the two of them because they work together. Eventually, the solution that reveals itself is for them to get different partners at work (she thinks they’re software engineers). At the end of the month, she also gives them recordings of their sessions, and they’re a little taken aback, wondering where the hidden cameras and recording instruments are. She tells them that people don’t reveal their true selves in front of the cameras, so she keeps them secret. This seems like a foreshadowing of what “Hihi” does to know exactly what the Smiths are planning and doing with each other (eww).
Who Is Bev?
They do end up getting separate missions for a little bit until Jane decides to help John with one of them. She meets a woman named Bev, who is supposed to be John’s new girlfriend. She’s actually someone that John’s meant to kill, but John hasn’t been able to do it for a month. At first, it almost seems like Jane is having a therapy session with Bev, asking her to tell Jane everything John’s told her about her (what?) with a gun pointed at her. After Jane is convinced that John still loves her and cries a little bit, John comes home. This is when Bev breaks character and reveals her killer side. You know, nobody can look like that and not be a martial artist, at least. Ultimately, Bev leaves Jane and John with a failed mission. At this point, Jane’s really ill, and John makes her soup, specifically asking his mom for help. He’s really close to his mother, something Jane doesn’t approve of considering the line they work in. On the other hand, Jane doesn’t speak to her father, so that’s awkward. Now that they have two failures, though, John decides to leave, so they wait for the next steps separately.
Do John And Jane Die In The End?
In episode 8 of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, John leaves, and Jane is immediately hunted down by somebody. Her beloved cat Max gets killed in the firing. Jane immediately thinks it’s John who’s attacked her and calls him to meet her in a museum. John, on the other hand, notices that his house, which he shares with his mother, has now been tampered with too. He tells his mom to wait until he says it’s safe. John and Jane meet up in front of a painting of a lonely woman. Although it seemed like Jane might’ve been happy alone, she was actually really happy with John. Now, they both believe the other has set out to kill them, and so instead of confessing their love, they decide to start a cat-and-mouse chase to kill each other. Jane ends up going to their shared home and finds John’s mother there. She tells him John’s real name, which is Michael, and has a word with her before leaving the house. On the other hand, John tries to enter the house by going in through the neighbor’s backyard. This “hot” neighbor has been showing a deep interest in Jane, which makes John jealous, but when John goes into the house, he finds the man’s taken pictures of them. It turns out it’s because he wants to sell the house they live in, and he’s a real estate agent. The guy claims that the Smiths live in a magnificent home. Eventually, John makes it out of there.
After an extended shootout between the two and completely ruining the architectural marvel that is their home, John finally gets a hold of Jane and injects her with the truth serum. He does the same for himself, and they both basically admit that they can’t live without each other, and they didn’t try to kill each other. Jane admits that she didn’t become a CIA agent because they found that she had sociopathic tendencies. John tells her that he would still be with her if she was actually a sociopath, and he just assumed it was because she was half-Japanese (a terrible joke, to be honest). Eventually, the other Smiths show up to finish the job. John 2 gets shot in the eye by Jane, but John gets shot in the gut too. Jane takes John to the panic room, while Jane 2 waits outside for them to open up eventually. As John bleeds out, Jane seems to realize there’s no way they’re going to survive this.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith ends ambiguously, with three shots fired in the house before it’s the next day and the hot neighbor tries to come into the house. He notices the house completely tattered up and calls up his colleague, immediately telling him that they’ll be able to sell the house now. At night, Jane, who had only one bullet left in her gun, eventually opened the door. If you want to be positive, you can imagine Jane managing to shoot Jane 2, steal her gun, and then shoot her again, twice more to be sure. On the other hand, I would think Jane 2 did manage to kill the two, while the third shot must’ve been the one fired by Jane. If the show ends up having a second season, we can go with theory 1, but if it doesn’t, we’ll know that at least Jane and John are together, wherever they are, at each other’s throats.
