Mr. & Mrs. Smith Season 1 Ending Was Explained In The Show

*WARNING: This post contains spoilers about Mr. & Mrs. Smith*

MR. & MRS. SMITH isn’t predictable until you’ve spent hours inside its wild spy playground stumbling over revelations and bumping into surprise guest appearances. By the end, your brain had probably already been contorted by the winding rabbit hole of Spycraft you’re taken down ta to make sense of everything Donald Glover and Maya Erskine did in the eight episodes prior that the climactic twist felt right at home. But that doesn’t mean there’s not more to explain.

Based on the 2005 film of the same name, Prime Video’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith expands that cinematic universe with rich characters whose brains you want to nestle inside to understand and spy mythology that begs for multiple seasons. Unlike the film, John (Glover) and Jane (Erskine) aren’t a married couple who are skilled spies for rival contract-killing firms and stumble upon each other’s secret identities while trying to kill the same target. Instead, the pair are CIA rejects who were strangers before being matched together by a chatbot they refer to as “HiHi” and tasked with carrying out missions that generally don’t call for any killing.

The Mr. & Mrs. Smith movie is a love story seen through a sniper scope, limited in its focus but precise in following its two leads. The TV reboot is a love story told within a world that constricts them together as it expands. Throughout eight episodes, the pair unintentionally bombs a party by delivering a package, intentionally burns down the house of their meticulous therapist, played nimbly by Sarah Paulson, after they find out she secretly recorded all of their sessions and killed kinky real estate mogul Eric Shane (John Turturro) by literally pumping him with too much truth (serum). This is happening while navigating the cultural landmines, repressed resentment, and life-or-death mistrust of any interracial killer relationship.

Of all the misanthropic nutcases they meet along the way, there’s one couple that crumbled the very foundation of their world in the season finale, just as we should’ve expected.

What happens in the end of Mr. & Mrs. Smith?

When we get to the eighth and final episode, Jane and John’s love has become lethally strained. Not only had they gone to a marriage therapist to resolve the incompatibility over power dynamics in their relationship, but they were also surreptitiously pitted against each other by the faceless HiHi. Jane was privately asked if she wanted to swap out her John for a new one, and John was inexplicably informed when Jane snuck over to confront the assassin target, Bev (Michaela Coel), he had been working (and falling for) for months. After Bev gets away and they fail their third mission, HiHi’s end game goes into motion.

Jane is given explicit instructions by HiHi to eliminate John, which she initially refuses to do until a sniper’s bullet pierces a window in their home and kills her beloved cat. That’s all her naturally distrustful self needed to go on a warpath down the Meatpacking District of New York City attempting to murder John, who she figures received the same message. John isn’t too happy with Jane either after finding the doorstep to his mother’s home was wired with a bomb. They each were so blinded by love and their unresolved issues they failed to see the real culprits had sat across from them at their dining table not too long before. That is until John stabbed both himself and Jane with truth serum to get to the bottom of it.

After they reconcile over sloppy, drugged-up kisses, they get a surprise visit from two people they should’ve never let in their home in the first place—Other John (Wagner Moura) and Other Jane (Parker Posey). In episode 4, they connected with this fellow spy couple working in the same organization for a double date involving the main John and Jane being roped into a deadly mission they barely escaped. That should’ve been red flag #1. Other John and Jane are seasoned assassins who only deal with the most challenging missions. They speak about their deadly job with the casualness of a couple who runs a pottery business together. That should’ve been red flag #2.

At one point in the date, they inform main John and Jane that they’ve had to kill another Smith couple, which should’ve been the final red flag and set off every alert in their heads. That little detail comes back to haunt them when Other John and Jane saunter into their home on a mission from HiHi to kill them. The date confession of murdering other Smiths wasn’t the only foreshadowing of this end.

The season begins with Alexander Skarsgård and Eiza González, also a John and Jane Smith killer pairing, refusing to continue running away when a swarm of militant assailants come storming towards their secluded cottage. They would eventually be gunned down in a tearful display of marital loyalty, but it was a moment that made it abundantly clear that death is the fate of Smiths; we just didn’t know it was by the same people who employed them.

Do Jane and John stay together in Mr. and Mrs. Smith?

Luckily for main John and Jane, they could momentarily escape Other John and Jane’s attempt to kill them by hiding in their panic room. Unfortunately, John sustained a ghastly bullet wound to the stomach that had him barely clinging to consciousness while Other Jane began trying different passcodes to enter the panic room. It’s in this life-or-death scenario where main Jane and John have some of their most loving moments, negotiating on having two kids after Jane was staunchly against having any and dreaming of living in the mountains with just them and John’s mom. This is also when Jane strips her last guard down by telling him that her real name is Alana, to which John replies that he prefers Jane, the woman he’s grown to love. Ultimately, the two of them are the closest they’ve ever been, but that doesn’t mean they end up together.

One of the last images of this season is three bursts of light flashing from inside the house, as seen through one of their windows, accompanied by muffled gunshot sounds. Main Jane was determined to escape to get John help for his wound. We don’t see who was shot, but we do know there was no shootout, especially since Main Jane only had one bullet left. The pause between the three gunshots could mean Other Jane took out Main Jane and then walked in to take out John. But it could also mean Main Jane put a bullet in Other Jane before taking Other Jane’s gun and putting the fatal shots to finish her off.

We’ll have to wait for the second season we better get before we know if 2024’s bloodiest couple survived.