It was a question we pondered as Mr. and Mrs. Smith premiered just before the weekend: why was Alexander Skarsgård in the Donald Glover and Maya Erskine-fronted series for just 187 seconds? And how did his seemingly standalone scene with Eiza Gonźalez connect with the rest of the series, if at all?
In the final, eighth episode of the series we got our answers. And as the series swiftly flew up the Amazon Prime Video most-watched charts, it seems like many other viewers stayed hooked on the fun re-up of the 2005 movie right to the very end, where we were landed with an almighty cliffhanger.
So what happened? Are Jane and John dead or alive? And what does Skarsgård’s 46-word scene tell us about their real fate? Let’s go deep undercover and find out (spoilers obviously ahead).
The ending, explained
In the episode titled The Breakup, that’s exactly what our John (Glover) and Jane (Erskine) are going through. Except, being super-undercover agents and trained killers, their split was a little more intense than arguing over who gets to keep the Le Creuset set. They’re out to kill each other; with Jane’s cat Max (RIP) and John’s mum (Glover’s real-life mum; very thankfully still alive both in the series and IRL) being the first attempted collateral hits.
But as the once-honeymooning couple turned on each other – as masterminded by their enigmatic boss, HiHi – things get bloody ugly. From brawling in the street to setting a tiny but powerful bomb in the Whitney museum revolving doors, these guys won’t stop until the other is dead, eventually taking their would-be mortal combat back to their amazing Brownstone house (that destruction would make Kevin McCloud weep hot tears).
There’s a little interlude in their fighting where we’re given a few more crumbs of intel – John’s real name is Michael! The Hot Neighbour isn’t a rival spy, but a deranged estate agent with designs on their house! – but then it’s back to their duel, spraying handgun and machine gun fire all over their home.
Eventually, John injects Jane and himself with truth serum, and we finally get more heart-to-heart honesty than the therapist (Sarah Paulson) managed earlier on in the series. The bombshells dropped include that Jane is an actual sociopath and got kicked out of the CIA because of that (those marbles she collected in a jar were for each time she did something sociopathic), while John was kicked out of the military because of his asthma, which made him feel weak and ashamed. There’s more! Jane’s mum died in a car crash, and it was Jane’s dad who never wanted to speak to Jane again, not the other way around like she had insinuated. John wants children, more than anything, even if it’s with Jane the sociopath. Plus, they both admit they could have killed the other person earlier but let them escape. The couple then have an awkward upside kiss and decide not to kill each other now.
However: they learn that it wasn’t them that set the bomb up to kill John and his mum or Max the cat. By the process of elimination, that means someone else is out to get them…enter stage right: the other John and Jane Smith (Wagner Moura and Parker Posey). Hands up if you saw this twist coming? 10 points to you then, because their mega-high risk job actually means they’re “finalisers”, which entails bumping off the other John and Jane Smiths who don’t comply with orders or go rogue. That guy our John and Jane had to bump off in that mad mission to El Salvador? He was another John Smith on the run, and their “chance” meeting at the farmer’s market was all orchestrated by the other couple’s boss, known as Supe.
Thankfully the older John Smith starts his triple-sneezing fit – a nice callback to his sneezing in an earlier episode that the younger couple had noticed and found annoying – giving John and Jane a chance to escape, with Jane managing to shoot him in the eye. The OG Jane and John manage to get to their panic room, but John has been shot and looks like he’s bleeding out.
As the pair talk about having a kid – or five – Jane tells him her real name, Alana, and John asks her to look after her mum. But will they get out alive? Jane/Alana has just one bullet left in her gun and seems determined to take the other Jane – currently the other side of the door – out. “I’ll go out on the count of three, shoot her and then we’ll go out,” she says unconvincingly, like a fairytale ending to tell a dying man.
There’s three shots and then that’s it, save for the Hot Neighbour (Paul Dano) coming back in to tell his estate agent buds that his “Moby D”, the house, is finally potentially his. As for the couple, we hate to say it, but it looks like they’re dead.
How does it relate back to the opening scene?
Think back to the Skarsgård opening scene: Skarsgård and Gonźalez were simply another John and Jane Smith, who were eventually taken out, presumably by the same finalisers hunting down our couple.
As Glover-as-John pointed out, even if they did manage to escape the panic room (which was highly unlikely as he looked seconds away from death) they know they can’t run. They themselves killed another Smith bolter in El Salvador, and the opening scene shows us what happens to couples who go on the run (“Why don’t we stop running?”, a clearly tired Gonźalez-as-Jane asks her husband): they are always ultimately found and executed at some point.
They’re in a hopeless position, but mirroring Skarsgård and Gonźalez’s characters, they wanted to go out all guns blazing, though sadly with the same tragic yet predictable end.
Co-showrunner Francesca Sloane told The Hollywood Reporter about the ambiguous ending: “We wanted to make sure that it felt like a complete story, even with the ending being what it is. We watched a lot of films from the ’70s. I love the way that a lot of films then ended. The Graduate has one of those endings that still feels satisfying without giving you everything”, adding there are “definitely” talks for series two. Skarsgård and Gonźalez’s backstory, anyone?
