Eleven years ago, there existed a different John Sugar. Younger, less experienced, rougher around the edges. Yet he exuded a power that today’s John Sugar cannot match. Ladies, gentlemen, friends beyond the binary, I give you…DENIM SUGAR!!!
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Sugar straps on his best Canadian tuxedo in the flashback cold open, which finally explains who that woman played by Laura San Giacomo who keeps appearing in his mind is. Her name is — or rather, was — Peg Rosenthal, and he knew her for a total of one afternoon. But it stuck in his mind for a reason: She killed herself in front of him at the end of it.
Mrs. Rosenthal was a kindergarten teacher, it seems, for whom fingerpainting lost its luster when she discovered human financial markets. She amassed a personal fortune, implicitly by committing fairly rampant white collar crime. She also ate meat and had sex, two other things that were against the aliens’ code of conduct. That’s why Sugar, who hasn’t yet selected an occupation or a personal style, has been sent by the rest of his people to collect her and send her home.
Peg knows what’s going on the instant she sees him: “See ya!” she says to her colleagues with cheerful finality, then walks away from their business lunch and out of their lives forever. The two bond quite a bit when they stop for a bite to eat on the way; Peg elicits from John that he’s thinking about being “a policeman,” the way a little kid would say it. He loves the variety of experiences cops are able to have, and their calling of helping other people — again, like a little kid. “What about the violence?” she asks. “I’ll be careful,” he insists, twice. (Apparently he later thinks better of it and went into an adjacent field where violence is less a tool of the trade.)
As they continue to drive we get a sense of why she asked him if he was (already) attracted to human violence. “It wasn’t just the sex and the food and the money,” she says. “It’s a slippery slope, one thing after another. By the end, I’d done worse things…” She’s convinced that far from a joyous homecoming, her loved ones back home will reject what she’s become.
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So when Sugar pops into a gas station mart for some kleenex to dry her first-ever tears of sorrow, she douses herself and the car with gasoline and flicks her lighter, blowing herself up.
And from this we cut directly to…Sugar in Deputy Vega’s apartment, with a gun pointed at his head? Huh?
The rest of the episode explains how Sugar comes to that point, the slippery slope he descends. For one thing, Vega has become suspicious that Ji Moon is still alive, and it’s only a matter of time before he confirms it and comes looking for real. For another, Sugar digs into “Fire Sale” — or perhaps Operation: Fire Sale is a more appropriate name, given the military nature of two of its chief architects.
The plan is simple. First, flood an area with fentanyl at below-market prices, buying off local gangs to ensure their cooperation. Second, wait for the inevitable tide of overdose deaths to roll in. Third, use an inside man from his Marine unit who works for the city to falsify death records, making victims disappear from the records. Fourth, use the names of those dead people to apply for housing grant money. Fifth, sit back and collect rent subsidy checks on apartments that sit empty, no muss no fuss.
Sugar is able to establish Vega’s gang connections beyond a shadow of a doubt when he recovers footage of a meeting on the phone belonging to Chuy, the gang member Vega murdered in the hospital before Ji’s eyes. (He’d indicated to Ji that he wanted him to take the phone just before Vega burst in.) But his cop contact Jack insists it’s not enough to make a case. The longer he waits, the more danger Ji is in, and the more bodies pile up in the underpasses and aqueducts.
Sugar very nearly takes matters into his own hands and executes Vega in his home, though he finally thinks better of it.
Apple TV
He then returns to his hotel and seemingly makes a beeline for Charlotte’s door. The two had gone on a fantastic dinner-and-a-movie date earlier, but he cut things off before they got physically intimate. Not anymore! Unfortunately, now the show cuts things off before they get intimate. To coin a phrase, they yadda-yadda’d the sex! Sugar and Charlotte hook up entirely off screen. It becomes harder to swallow the show’s oft-voiced embrace of humanity in all its beauty when it’s too squeamish for a sex scene.
Anyway, when Sugar returns to the lobby later, Vega is waiting for him. The two have a tense drink together, in which Sugar tries to make a case that yes, he knows Vega is crooked, and yes, so does Ji, but no, neither of them will ever talk. Almost regretfully, Vega says he simply can’t risk letting Ji live. (He of course doesn’t know about the footage, which I assume is still of at least some use in taking the rogue cop down.) When Sugar notes he could have killed Vega himself tonight when he had the chance, Vega’s reply is simple: “Well, man, you should have.”
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Okay, so this episode leaves in a crime-does-not-pay suicide but edits out a love scene like it’s a Hays Code Hollywood movie. Other than that, though, it’s the second in a row I’d call the strongest of the season to date. Director Adam Bernstein and cinematographer Marshall Adams really outdo themselves here, with one crisp, gorgeous shot of the Los Angeles night after another. Colin Farrell and Laura Donnelly look radiant during their date, like Golden Age movie stars. There’s a view of the sky at dusk that John and Peg catch before her death that takes your breath away.
Meanwhile, the mystery now feels much more focused. We know what Vega is up to and why, though as Sugar notes he’s just the muscle and his real backer has yet to reveal themselves. Ji’s plight makes more sense, particularly now that Vega has gotten Danny dragged off to jail where he can be killed if John fails to cough up Ji’s location. Vega and Sugar have established some hero-villain understanding like Pacino and De Niro in Heat. And Peg works much better as a real, traumatic memory than a series of cryptic hallucinations. I’ll wait until a third strong episode in a row establishes a pattern for certain, but after its initial growing pains, it seems Apple TV‘s Sugar Season 2 may have righted the ship.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
