Smoke (2025): A misunderstood show? Contains spoilers.

First, some of the bits that I found odd.

• Finding out very early that Dave was setting the fires
• A lack of actual confession from Dave ever
• Almost no followup on Michelle letting Steve die, then hiding it with a fire
• The big confrontation scene in the burning forest that just felt like it didn't land
• A surprisingly believable "Truth or Dare" scene between two characters who had been poking each other for a while

After asking GPT about how some of these things might fit together, a picture emerged of a show whose critics didn't really understand what it was getting at. I thought there was a good chance GPT was just being a sycophant as usual, so I asked Claude about the discussion itself. Claude challenged me to defend what GPT came up with as a means of testing it. After some discussion, Claude thought the framework for understanding the show made sense given several of the datapoints I had.

Ordinarily, I'd just keep all this to myself, as LLMs are notoriously unreliable for a lot of things. But I really want to know what other people think of this.

As I want to keep this short enough for people to actually, like, you know, read... I won't go into too much detail.

Here are the points about the show that I think critics missed:

• It is deliberately inviting viewers to see it as a normal procedural genre show
• It rug-pulls the viewers several times with regard to the expectation of being a "normal" show
• The big confrontation climax scene in the forest is deliberately an anti-climax, promising something big and delivering almost nothing
• We get the same anti-climax with the breakup between Dave and Ashley
• Because this is a consistent pattern across the show, I read this as deliberate rather than a result of bad writing

In this context, at the tail end of the convo with GPT where I suggested they named it Smoke rather than Fire due to this structure, there's this:

They could have called it Fire. That would suggest:

- revelation

- purification

- decisive moments

- things being brought into the open

But Smoke is about everything around fire:

- what lingers after

- what obscures

- what lets people hide

- what makes witnesses unreliable

Fire is instantaneous. Smoke is persistent.

I think this analysis works pretty well, explains my experience watching the show, and the critics' generaly negative response to it.

Here are links to the convos with the LLMs if anyone is interested:

https://chatgpt.com/share/697bea61-99f4-8002-b130-5588b92540ef

https://claude.ai/share/3d96bb30-13c7-4192-9b5f-53f599634cbb