Sugar Recap: Everything is For the Mission

Sugar is coming. GET OUT NOW. 

No sooner does Stallings get home from his latest sex trafficking business trip at the border than the anonymous warning text comes in on his phone. But the warning doesn’t save him. Instead of taking the hint, Stallings and his crew set up a trap for John Sugar and get themselves killed. I mean, how are a vaguely mustache-twirly L.A. noir bad guy (played with gusto by modern character actor Eric Lange, but still underbaked) and his vaguely drawn cronies going to compete with the bullet-dodging agility of a movie-loving space alien super-being detective?

That’s right. In the sixth of eight relatively thin episodes, we reach the big reveal about John Sugar: Our guy is an alien (a blue one even, though by my estimation, a little more cyborg than, say, Navi). The actual reveal, where Sugar takes a big injection from his box of weird alien juice and his human form disintegrates in front of the mirror, doesn’t come until the very end of the episode. By then, it feels like a limp, forgone conclusion. There’s a clear miscalculation here, bordering on terminal for the series, in thinking the surprise of Sugar’s extra-terrestrial identity would amount to more than a cycle of articles and Reddit theorizing. Staying under the internet attention beam for six weeks is never a worthwhile reward in and of itself.

But go back and watch the show from the beginning (especially in director Fernando Meirelles’ quietly hypnotic first two episodes), and you’ll find Colin Farrel’s performance even more impressive and certainly more moving. Like Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still — an empathetic blank slate from outer space. Only not quite. He’s got a dead sister in his past. A spiritual wound that opens his raw human heart to great compassion and swift, colorful violence in equal measure. Projected in the movies he’s watched (and loved), the foundation of his image of the human race. And himself.

Any cinephile still watching this show will surely identify with this John Sugar. Especially those of us who came out to sunny L.A. from some far-off isolated community in search of the magic behind the movies we loved. We found a cruel city where the good, the bad, and the ugly all die young. Not everything’s like a movie, as John Sugar thinks to himself, driving away from the scene of his righteous (but unnerving) killing spree. Sometimes, a thing is just a thing that happened. Uniquely in itself. Incomparable. The bitter pill swallowed by every sentient being with lungs that breathe the L.A. smog. Past, present, and future. And yet we can’t help but think there’s something yet to be mined from our shared Hollywood myths. The truth between the lies. It’s all about the trail.

Back to the case at hand, such as it is. Stallings’ locked basement was a red herring. Nothing in there but caged fighting dogs. (There is one “nice” dog that Sugar sets free. Could have done the same for the others, there big guy, don’t care how much that one with the blue eyes reminded you of all the innocent pups you’re out here trying to protect). Charlie, last seen on guard outside Stallings’ place, is missing — breathing status unknown. Jonathan Siegel is awake, but barely. He is immediately confronted with his sobbing son Bernie at his side, breaking the news of David’s condition (still breathing, but essentially braindead). Meanwhile, Sugar meets up with Melanie at a nondescript motel room, side cut open, on the edge of consciousness. He manages to hand Melanie his phone with Henry Thorpe’s number on it — the only person he can trust to patch him up without sounding some type of alarm, whether to Earth’s authorities or his own presumably extra-terrestrial superiors.

Sugar wakes up hours later, still in pain. Serves me right for what I did, Sugar thinks, back at his white-hat justice baseline. Henry had already packed up and left ages ago, leaving Melanie with nothing in the way of answers, despite her pleas to tell him what was going on, why taking Sugar to a hospital would be dangerous, etc. He hobbles out of bed without waking up Melanie, asleep at his side, and sneaks off to Ruby’s house for a dramatic confrontation. It was her number in Stalling’s phone (another example of the show waiting till the cheapest possible “ah-ha” moment to reveal something to the audience). “WHY?!” Sugar asks again and again. Why would Ruby warn a man like that about him? Why are they protecting criminals like Stallings? What sort of “observation” mission are they running here on planet L.A.?

The answers (and their concealment) are clearly hurting Ruby, but she remains a locked box. “They need you to stop looking” is all Sugar can get out of her. “Everything is for the mission.” He takes the first opportunity to bounce, goes back to the motel, and sheds his earthly, hard-boiled persona. A naked moment of clarity when backed into the corner of some dank motel bathroom in Los Angeles.

Against all odds, the earnestness with which creator Mark Protosovech has led this cloyingly inoffensive genre-bending noir to its “big reveal” remains infectious, and there’s still something truthful and heartfelt to be mined from the story of John Sugar now that it’s in full frame. But the construction of the reveal itself — taking what might’ve been a killer premise and concealing it for a vague, two-thirds of a season-long guessing game of diminishing returns — feels at irreconcilable odds with the show’s cinema-loving soul.