Okay, so I’m guessing it’s going to be hard going forward without spoiling one particular reveal from the first episode of The Smoke, so we’re gonna lay that out on the table today. We’ll see what the plot looks like in future episodes and how much the storylines build on each other – hopefully, I can talk about the miniseries as a whole without getting into too many spoilers, but either way, I’ll avoid talking about anything major that goes down in whatever particular episode I’m reviewing.
Kev’s injury has been hard, not just on his well-being at work, but on his relationship with Trish. In the first episode, it’s dramatically (and graphically) revealed that the extent of his burns were much worse than he let onto to his friends and coworkers, and he’s suffered significant, traumatic damage to his genitals. While Trish is trying to explore new ways for them to be intimate together, Kev is pushing her away, feeling like he can no longer satisfy her. At the same time, he feels jealous toward his best friend Mal, an inexhaustible player who it seems like is hooking up with a different woman every night. Unable to deal with either Trish or Mal, Kev instead starts spending time with Dennis, a young rookie with a big secret.
One thing that I’ve been enjoying about this miniseries is the wide breadth of firefighter experiences it depicts, some integral to the plot, others incidental. Each episode so far has included a pretty dramatic rescue – here, Kev and Dennis have to find a path through a precarious salvage yard to get an injured civilian away from a building that presents a danger of explosion – but we also see more mundane aspects of the job too. For instance, we see a few of the supporting characters retrieve a young, Harry Potter-obsessed girl who climbed a tree and then discovered her “magic” couldn’t get her down. From the harrowing to the ridiculous, the firefighters are consistently professional and reassuring to the people they help.
After the reveal in the first episode about the nature of Kev’s injuries, I wasn’t surprised at the plot we get today. It’s easy to assume that he’d be feeling emasculated, and it’s understandable that he’s reacting just as badly to people whose approaches are sensitive (Trish) as those who are tone-deaf (Mal.) It’s still unpleasant to watch, though, and for Kev’s sake, I hope that part of his journey throughout the show will be him coming to understand that he’s just as much of a man as he ever was. And for the most part, when he’s responding to a call, I think he’s able to tap into that. In his big rescue today, he’s the man (minus one bad judgment call,) and I can’t tell if it’s because he’s genuinely at peace with himself when he’s helping people or if it’s in part because he knows these strangers don’t know about his injuries. If it’s the latter, I hope he eventually learns he can be just as confident with people who know him and know what happened.
After a very brief showing in the first episode, we see a lot more of Trish today. Not all of it for the best, in my opinion, but today’s plot is suggestive that this will be a meatier character for Jodie Whittaker to play. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I’ll talk more about how Trish responds to things rather than what she specifically does. As I said earlier, she’s trying to figure out how her intimate relationship with Kev can evolve in light of what’s happened, and I really appreciate that. She’s not looking for an out so she can be with a “real man” like Kev fears, but she’s also not selflessly devoting herself to a lifetime of abstinence. She knows that their lives are different now, and she wants to find ways that that can work for the both of them.
We also pick up on the thread I mentioned last week, about how Trish is choosing to stay in this as someone with her own agency. She pushes back against Kev’s assumption that she’s been holding out until he’s recovered enough that she can leave him, resenting both the idea that she’s going anywhere and the notion that it’s some innate “goodness” that’s kept her hanging around this long. It hasn’t been easy, and Trish doesn’t pretend she doesn’t need support too, talking with Mal about what he can do, not just for Kev’s sake but for hers as well.
Not everything comes together fully for me in the script – for the moment, I’m waiting to see where they go with it – but Whittaker plays it all wonderfully well, making Trish feel consistent even when not all the plot beats gel. I want to highlight a scene where she gets in an argument with Mal, culminating in the excellent line, “Except, you know, I’m a natural live woman, not a blow-up bloody angel! I don’t just exist to pick up little boys when they fall over.” And that, I think, is going to be key going forward. For this character to work she needs to be a person and not just the figure of Kev’s love interest. So far, Whittaker holding up her end; I just hope the show doesn’t let her down.
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