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

Finding Redemption at Shawshank

Spoilers ahead; the plot has secrets in it that you may not wish to know if you haven't seen it yet.

I recently watched The Shawshank Redemption (1994) again; I haven't seen it since the mid 90s when it released. It has held up well, and I liked it better than the last time I saw it. The pacing is superb, the ambience has just the right amount of gray, and the story is suitably affecting. This time around, I discovered that it's a much more nuanced film than I once thought it was. I'll just talk about two related points to illustrate this.

First, the happy ending with Red finding Andy on the beach always bothered me. It didn't seem in keeping with the rest of the film's dingy esthetics. But this time through, I noticed that just before the shot of Andy driving his convertible down the coast of Mexico, Red says, "When I picture him heading south in his own car with the top down, it makes me laugh all over again." This isn't really Andy driving... it's Red imagining Andy driving. I infer then that the final scene of them on the beach is also Red's imagination. Hold this thought while I discuss a second point.

There's a pair of scenes that indicate how Red will meet any attempt to change him with quiet resistance. They're out in the yard playing checkers, and Andy comments that Chess is a better game. After Red suggests that it's a mystery, Andy offers to teach him how to play. The subject of them playing games is dropped for quite some time, then in a subsequent scene, after an interval of 10-20 years, they are again playing checkers. There's no fanfare about this; it's a subtlety not often seen in Hollywood film. But it is very important.

If you didn't know, the "redemption" referred to in the title is that of Red (Morgan Freeman), not Andy (Tim Robbins). Andy never loses hope, and pushes patiently until he escapes. When Andy talks of Red's eventual release, Red just says, "I'm an institutional man now." This refers to Brooks, the old guy who was the librarian and spent 50 years in the prison. They talked of Brooks as an "institutional man"; someone who had been there so long, the walls had come to be necessary in his life. He had no idea how to live once he got out, and killed himself. Red even explicitly warns Andy about hope and how it's just a hurtful thing.

After Andy's escape, Red is finally paroled and goes through the same motions as Brooks did, working the same job and even living in the same apartment. The second checkers scene prepares us for him to take the same way out. But instead, he decides to go looking for Andy. That is the redemption.

The final scene being imagined and pristine is the best possible depiction of the redemption: it shows Red's newfound ability to imagine a better possible life for himself. Whether or not it really happens is completely irrelevant. He has regained hope, and that's what matters.

The Establishment Clause

Remember that we are always in the process of determining what America is. If you believe that the Constitution was meant to protect *everyone* and not just whoever happens to be the majority at the time, then you have to fight with those who don't understand that fundamental fact.

Notably this part of the First Amendment, known as the Establishment Clause:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..."

The Establishment Clause is a limitation placed upon the United States Congress preventing it from passing legislation respecting an establishment of religion. The second half of the Establishment Clause inherently prohibits the government from preferring any one religion over another.

That we undermined this with the "In God We Trust" business in 1956 because of the Red Scare is proving detrimental to peoples' understanding of what the EC means. We should go back to "E Pluribus Unum", which is something we can all get behind, regardless of religious affiliation (or unaffiliation, as the case may be).

"Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it." This is not just some random collection of words, it explains what happens in human communities over and over again.

Do your part to understand what the Constitution means, and how it has granted us the freedoms we have. And then, armed with that knowledge, help your fellow Americans understand it so that we can all move forward together. Dark forces are all around, hoping to deprive us of our freedoms. Don't let them win.