Sugar Recap: Who Are You, John Sugar?

Nobody likes a “You haven’t been to [blank]?! Oh, you gotta go” interaction at a dinner party. But it doesn’t seem to bother Henry Thorpe (Jason Butler Harner) when his friend and colleague John Sugar comes in with a warm, enthusiastic “You gotta go to Shibuya Crossing.”

“Henry, you would love it,” Sugar says (the twinkle in Colin Farrell’s eye and the warmth in his tempered rasp remind one, for the thousandth time in this 33-minute episode, what an absolute dynamite role this is for our reigning Teddy Bear–Irish Rogue icon). “The busiest intersection on the planet. Three thousand people cross the street every two minutes, all day and every day into the night.” Sugar’s speed of voice gets faster and faster as a mix of B-reel footage and his actual memories of the place flicker through his mind’s eye. “I watched this blur, this flow of people just walking, laughing, happy, angry, sad, back and forth, back and forth. I sat there for hours, Henry. Just watching them.”

“Or feeling them?” he adds with hesitance. When speaking in classic PI voice-over, John Sugar speaks of the human race — living and dead — with a hard-boiled honesty. His cinephile’s conscience tips him off to the violent color wheel of flaws inherent to the human race. But in conversation with those he trusts, he speaks of people — as individuals and a bustling collective — with something bordering on reverence for the human spirit and its fractal diversity. This paradoxical attitude separates Sugar from confidants and strangers alike, and connects him to the darkest corners beneath the “bloody red sun of fantastic L.A.”

Cut back to the top of the episode: It’s a groggy morning for Sugar — awakened by the nightmare-fueled twitches of his problem arm. He gives Ruby a quick call to check in if she’s heard anything about the Siegel girl. “You mean since you called me four hours ago?” she says. “No, it’s all been quiet on my end.” She reiterates that she doesn’t like this case for Sugar, and he can tell there’s something behind her concern besides, well, her actual concern for his well-being. Why does she keep saying that? he thinks. What’s she worried about?

Sugar heads out into “another beautiful day in California,” complete with your run-of-the-mill rescue of some ladies from a pack of psycho gangsters. Enter Eric Lange as Stallings (another juicy noir-TV villain role for one of the standout character actors in the biz), who’s got Melanie Matthews trapped in Teresa’s apartment with Teresa (Cher Alvarez) and her two small children, a little pack of goons hovering around the living room and a lookout in one of their two F-150s parked on the street. Sugar spots the F-150s from Charlie’s van, parked not far off. “Charlie’s an old friend I like to work with,” Sugar’s voice-over introduces his modern PI’s local helper-friend. “A civilian, but I trust her.”

Stallings is about to put Teresa’s hand in a blender to get Melanie to divulge “his buddy” Clifford Carter’s whereabouts when Sugar comes barging into the apartment with an animated story about being Teresa’s probation officer — we’ve got to get you ready for your Child Services appointment in an hour, everyone out, let’s move, that sorta thing. Stallings doesn’t buy it. A PO could work his whole life and never afford that suit. Fortunately, Charlie sneaks up on one of the red F-150s outside and renders the engine up in smoke, luring Stallings and the gang outside and leaving Sugar and the ladies with a workable getaway. Just a quick KO on the guy they left behind to stand guard and a backdoor exit to Charlie’s van and Sugar’s Corvette outside. After the group splits up, Sugar gets the straight story on Clifford Carter and how his corpse ended up in the trunk of Olivia’s car.

Here’s how it went down as Melanie tells it: Melanie volunteers at a shelter, mostly helping women out of abusive relationships. A while back, she’d helped Teresa get away from her husband. Then, about a month ago, Teresa’s sister Carmen called looking for help to get away from Clifford Carter. “Olivia was helping me then,” says Melanie. “She loved it. Got her outside herself like it does me.” The night of Clifford’s death, Melanie got a call from Olivia to come over to Carmen’s. Both Clifford and Carmen were dead by the time Melanie arrived. Olivia explained she walked in to find Carmen already dead and Clifford coming back into the room with a body bag ready. Olivia was holding the gun he’d left on the table (“He didn’t like seeing me, seeing him,” Olivia explains in flashback) and ended the standoff with a shot to Clifford’s head.

“She did nothing wrong,” Sugar says, thinking it through for himself while reassuring Melanie. Doesn’t necessarily warrant trusting the cops with your story, especially with such a messy aftermath at your feet. Besides, Olivia was loyal to her family. They’ve only been out of the tabloid spotlight for two years now, and she didn’t want her involvement in something like this to crest another wave of scandal. So she and Melanie put the body in the trunk, and that was the last they saw of one another.

Sugar can’t help but promise he will find Olivia. He’s all in on making the professional personal and vice versa. The case as vicarious vendetta, just when such a thing is tilted to clash with the prime directive of his mysterious superiors.

Meanwhile, the fledgling Siegel mind trust is hard at work trying to solve the riddle of John Sugar. David Siegel’s hunk of a right-hand fixer Kenny pokes around (quite literally, in this case) for intel on John Sugar — enlisting the help of Everett Roberts (Jonathan Slavin), one of these Michael Mann–style basement-server hacker guys from the NSA who can dig up everything there is to know about Sugar on all the big databases and such. From the data, we learn Sugar was born September 2, 1976, in Chagrin Falls, Idaho, to an electrician father (who died when John was 12) and a retired-teacher mother. One sibling (his sister, that much we know is true, in Sugar’s mind at least), top of his class in public school and at Vassar. After college, Sugar enrolled at the DLI in Monterey. The army language school, super-intensive crash course for military officers, future state-department officials …

“Future spies?” Kenny asks.

A spy. That would explain why some of this biographical intel tracks and some of it doesn’t. Some of the details feel a little too manufactured. Still, given the evidence at hand, not sure what else you call this little intelligence-gathering cabal of Ruby and Sugar’s if not a “spy ring,” however literally or figuratively.

Later on, David Siegel spices up the intel as he retells it to his father, Bernie, who’s underwhelmed and borderline annoyed by the groveling attempt on the underside of the performance. “Kenny heard these rumors about this group of spies from all over the globe who used to be enemies. Once they all quit their jobs, they got together and made a pact to do something good [or bad] for a change.” Sounds like the plot of a shit action movie Bernie produced. “The script was preposterous,” Bernie says. He wants real boots-on-the-ground information on this guy. Too much is at stake.

So David and Kenny are going to go to Flagstaff, Arizona, to see if they can find Sugar’s alleged mother. Meanwhile, from her own high-tech at-home surveillance desk, Ruby detects Everett spying on her boy, and Sugar is setting Wiley up with his dinner and a movie — Double Indemnity, a classic femme-fatale joint — before heading out the door to the Polyglot Society Dinner Party.

“I’m going to speak in the language of this country, if you don’t mind,” says Ruby as she makes the introductory toast, surrounded by her fellow … colleagues? Agents? Polygots? A rather handsome international group of mystery folks, to be sure. “We scatter and we return. We go out into the world, and we do our work … the work we cannot fail to do. But tonight, we return to one another.” The group mingles while Ruby rotates everyone in and out of her office for some sort of quarterly one-on-one. Sugar finds a seat with Henry, an anthropologist by day and another close confidant among Sugar’s peers. Sugar waxes poetic about Shibuya Crossing, and Henry talks about waking up in the middle of the night and ordering a garlic press online. “I don’t even like garlic,” he says. Don’t let the academic shtick fool you; Henry is a quiet man of appetites (“C’mon, I hear there’s cake,” he says moments before). He recognizes Sugar’s overwhelming appetite for his latest case, and warns him to be careful.

Sitting across from one another in an ominous secret-bunker-ass room, Ruby lectures Sugar on the subjective thoughts that dot his notebook meant for “an objective account of personal interactions as a result of my stated profession.” (“I love how the curtains move back and forth above the air conditioner,” a blunt-poetic Chandler-esque observation if there ever was one.) The language is mostly “I feel” when it should be “they say.” “We’re here to observe these people, not participate in their lives,” Ruby says. “You need to stay focused. Don’t forget who you are.” But he hasn’t forgotten. He’s chosen: He’s a guy doing a job. And the job is to find Olivia. Observation is the means, not the ends. Sugar has flipped the script with a good old-fashioned this time, it’s personal. 

“I’m sorry for the hour, but we have a problem.” We close out the episode on a hushed-tone conversation between Ruby and a superior named Vickers. (The same “Dr. Vickers” Ruby suggested Sugar go see in the first episode? Curious.) She tells Vickers, “Sugar is onto Stallings. It’s only a matter of time before he discovers the rest.”

“We have to stop him,” says the voice on the other end of the line. “Call in the others.” With that, Ruby all but deletes Stallings’s career history in the annals of NSA cyberdom as Melanie shows up at Bernie’s door (maybe this former blonde bombshell ain’t so trustworthy, after all), and Sugar wonders how much time he’s got left before the heat closes in. This case, these Siegels … something’s not right. Whether you’re in the L.A. of your movie-addled mind or the L.A. beneath your own two feet, you’re always a stone’s throw away from something someone else will keep out of sight at all costs.