‘Sugar’ Episode 6 Recap: Kind of Blue

Well, that settles that question!

A round of applause for anyone who called it ahead of time (ahem): John Sugar is an alien. His pals in the Société Polyglotte Cosmopolitaine are aliens. Sugar is a show about aliens! 

By the time you get to that big blue reveal at the end of the episode, though, it’s become pretty obvious. Sure, maybe his immunity to alcohol is a genetic fluke, his ability to catch flies with chopsticks a well-honed martial arts technique, his strength and fighting technique a result of years of training. But by the time you’re staring down killer dogs, swatting bullets across the room with your bare hand, surviving getting stabbed with a knife the size of a one-liter bottle of Diet Coke, having your friend pretend to operate on you just so he can inject and infuse you with mystery substances in bags with indecipherable lettering…yeah, it’s pretty clear, we’re in Mulder and Scully territory. 

Not that the show was doing all that much to hide it. Well before this episode (“Go Home”) began, it was clear John Sugar was something other than human — a robot, a cyborg, a time traveller, some kind of actually intelligent AI inhabiting a human body, something. Every episode had one or two little lines about “these people” or “we’re here to observe.” Sugar’s obsession with films, which he credits for teaching him about people even though he still has much left to learn, is classic alien stuff. (Indeed, “Alien with tragic family back story travels to Earth, learns about humanity from movies and TV, and becomes a private investigator” is the backstory of the DC Comics character Martian Manhunter, via creators Joseph Samachson and Joe Certa and later updates by Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, and Darwyn Cooke.) The reference to the exam in The Thing during his own medical exam? Come on.

Still, it’s one thing to hint, even hint heavily, and another thing to have Colin Farrell jab a crystal syringe into his neck and turn into Karen Gillen’s character from Guardians of the Galaxy. That’s a big thing to drop on the audience six episodes into your eight-episode season no matter how much you set it up. Kudos to Sugar for having the stones.

It’s an especially impressive bit of sleight-of-hand to conduct at this particular juncture. In the show’s most violent episode to date, Sugar is betrayed by his assistant Ruby, who rats him out to Stallings. Her hope is for Stallings to simply flee, but instead the vicious human trafficker has Sugar’s associate Charlie killed, then tries to do the same to Sugar. But John snaps. He kills Stallings’s girlfriend and goon in self defense, then executes Stallings just when the man is in the middle of saying he has no idea where Olivia Siegel is after all. Turns out the locked basement is just where he keeps some dogs. 

So now Sugar is no closer to Olivia than he was before. He can’t trust his own people, except for his close friend Henry, who saves his life behind closed doors after sending Melanie on a needless mission for human medicine. He can’t return to his hotel home, crashing in Melanie’s motel hideaway instead. Perhaps worst of all, though, he’s given in to the path of the left hand, the ways of violence described so memorably by Robert Mitchum in the classic horror film The Night of the Hunter, which Sugar repeatedly pictures during the episode. He’s used violence to kill, and at least one of those times to kill a wounded, unarmed man. I’d want to look at myself in the mirror, too.

Written by Donald Joh and Sam Catlin, this episode doesn’t skimp on the violent delights of a good fight scene/shootout, much as Sugar might like them to. (Or would he? He’s the big film fan, after all.) Writers Donald Joh and Sam Catlin deftly have Sugar hint at his power repeatedly before he finally hauls off and shows it; with each such line our anticipation and excitement grows, which of course makes us in some way complicit when it goes too far.

There’s one other thing they do beautifully here, thanks in large part to the acting of Dennis Boutsikaris as Bernie Siegel and the wordless response of James Cromwell as his ailing father Jonathan. Bernie goes to see his dad to tell him the horrible news: David’s suicide attempt has left him braindead, and Bernie and Margit have decided not to use extraordinary measures to keep him alive. 

It’s a tough conversation, if you can call it that given Jonathan’s inability to respond verbally at the time. Bernie describes his failures, how he prioritized David’s immediate happiness over his long-term health as a person — an understandable mistake for a doting father to make, but a terrible one in the end. He sneaks in a dig at his dad for not having cared about his own happiness that way, but that’s not why he’s there. Bernie apologizes for bothering Jonathan, but you see, “I just—” Then he breaks down and sobs into his father’s arms. He doesn’t need to say what he was obviously going to say: “I just needed my Dad.” 

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.