Sugar Recap: More Human Than Human
It’s a shame we didn’t see more of the “real” John Sugar. I put “real” in quotes because in its final hours, Sugar the show is reaching for something about the fluid state of “self” and its unavoidable integration with humanity’s darkest impulses. So what I’m really saying is it’s a shame we didn’t get more time with the fully revealed John Sugar from outer space, awash in the silver-screen dreams and real-world violence of sunny California’s beautiful, decaying human race. You can’t ever just observe. You will inevitably receive love. Receive hate. Then transmit.
But hey, now that we’ve got the alien reveal out of the way (and presuming we’ve all decided to stick around for the last two episodes), we’re free to enjoy the remaining threads of the mystery at hand. Where is Olivia? Who has her? And why is this extraterrestrial special-op “Polyglot Society” trying to stop one of their own from finding her?
Sugar wakes up in the motel room, human face back on. Melanie’s already awake and demanding explanations. I’d like to tell her everything, Sugar thinks. But I can’t. Not ever. He sort of holds to that. But an abrupt, rather rough visit from Miller at the motel gets Melanie even more rattled, so by the time they get away in the Corvette and post up at the top of a nondescript parking structure for a little golden-hour powwow, Sugar lets her think he’s a (presumably earthbound) foreign spy. “We’re just here to observe,” he tells her. “That’s our only mission.”
By the time they reach Henry Thorpe’s classroom, he’s nowhere to be seen. Miller got to him first. Someone’s covering their tracks, Sugar thinks, rolling up everyone connected to Stallings. Got to get to Stallings’s last surviving lackey before anyone else does. En route in the ’vette, Sugar puts some more pieces together in his head and lets it slip to Melanie that his bosses are trying to stop him from finding Olivia. “We don’t hurt people,” he says, trying to reassure Melanie that the Polyglots had nothing to do with Olivia’s abduction. “That’s not who we are. I promise.” Sounds like one of those “promises” of denial you make to yourself in the heat of unexpected, incriminatory revelations.
By the time they get to Moss’s house, the guy is dead on the ground, blood splattered on the wall behind him. Time to get to the bottom of all this down-and-dirty gangster shit his people seem to be involved in. Sugar goes home, suits up (kind of too bad, I was digging the monochrome Ethan Hunt–bomber-jacket look), then heads back out in the ’vette solo to track down Miller. He finds his mark at work, a Miller development site, and follows him to a nondescript L.A. suburban home. Wouldn’t you know it? The whole L.A. Polyglot group is staring back at Sugar like an awkward group of acquaintances facing their intervention subject.
The mission is over. They’re all being “called back.” They got word from home this morning on Ruby’s space typewriter (not so casually revealed as such at the top of the episode). Exit plans are underway. In a day or so, everyone in the room will be off planet.
“Nice try,” says Sugar. He’s not going back until he finds Olivia. “A woman who some people in this room mysteriously and unmistakably don’t want me to find!” Henry breaks the tension just as Sugar demands they tell him where Olivia is. “We’re leaving, so what does it matter,” he tells the others. That seems to be enough to hold them off as he takes Sugar into another room.
“After all this, it’s an address,” Sugar says. Ain’t that just the way in a hard-boiled detective joint — the path seems anticlimactic once it’s all laid out behind you, especially those final steps. But there’s one last killer to face before Sugar finds Olivia trapped under the basement stairs.
The humans have found out about them. “Powerful people,” as Henry put it. It turns out our abductor is the son of a politician (and an ex-client of Stallings). I get it now, Sugar thinks as he drives to the address Henry gave him. We were being blackmailed with the threat of exposure. Tell Sugar to back off his case, or we spill your secrets to the world; aliens walk among us. Sugar doesn’t like it, but Henry’s right. They’ve stayed too long. It’s time to go home.
Sugar’s final confrontation with the psycho-killer son of Senator Pavich is a nice little suspense sequence, offering up a moment for Sugar to face his darker impulses head-on and choose the light. “I kept running through these thoughts,” Sugar had told Henry earlier that night. “I’m in danger; he’s a bad man; maybe it’s justice. Or at least, justified.” But then, just before he’d pulled the trigger, those thoughts went away and Sugar killed because he felt like it. Having tasted the raw desire to take life in full, Sugar decides he’s had enough. With the gun under the chin of the man he’d be most justified in taking out of the picture, he offers life. Our killer takes himself out instead, and Sugar finds Olivia under the basement stairs.
The woman is found, but the case remains unresolved, if not unsolved. John Sugar has mere hours to tie up loose ends. Some questions will be answered, and some micro-mysteries will inevitably go unanswered. Every time you close the book on one case (or mission), something else shakes loose on another Sunset Boulevard street corner. Or some humming patch of occupied sky above L.A.