Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Sugar S1E6, “Go Home” (written by Donald Joh & Sam Catlin and directed by Fernando Meirelles)
Sugar Episode 6 is truly a well-put-together episode of television. We open with Bernie (Dennis Boutsikaris) and Margit (Anna Gunn) being informed of Davy’s (Nate Corddry) condition, and it’s not good. He’s technically alive, but the damage to his brain is such that he’ll never be able to speak or even be properly consciously aware again.
If you’re hung up on the plot, you might wonder why this scene is here. The same goes for the later scene where Bernie relays a story to his father, Jonathan (James Cromwell), about taking a young Davy to a casino. As much as he thought he should, as a father, Bernie couldn’t bring himself to tell Davy that Davy’s luck was rare—and that gets to something about these characters. Jonathan, who can’t respond verbally because he’s still messed up from his heart attack, takes Bernie’s hand to offer condolence. The Siegel family is messed up, but they do love each other when it comes down to it.
You might think that none of this matters, as the drama within the Siegels has played its role regarding what happened to Olivia (Sydney Chandler), but by putting it upfront, Sugar S1E6 signals that it does matter. This is a story about these people as much as it is a story about John Sugar (Colin Farrell), and there’s still something about these familial relations to be paying attention to.
As for Sugar, he’s got Stallings (Eric Lange) in his sights as “Go Home” begins, with Charlie (Paula Andrea Placido) tasked to tell him when Stallings returns home. She does, and Sugar moves in, but then things get a little weird in a couple of ways.
The house seems to be empty, but it isn’t. Sugar is ambushed, and he’s at a definite disadvantage even as he threatens Stallings. But when push comes to shove, Sugar dispatches with everyone pretty easily, even if he gets stabbed in the side along the way.
Did Sugar slap a bullet out of the air? Yes, I believe he did.
Sugar dispatches with everyone, and the padlocked door in Stallings’s place is open at that point, which is odd because Sugar didn’t open it (even if he thought about it). I take that we’re to infer that it got shot open during the melee. Regardless, Sugar goes through that door after he’s killed Stallings, and what he finds is a room full of dogs in cages. He frees one of them, but only one of them, perhaps because of its calm demeanor.
I’d thought that Stallings might have young women behind that door. After all, we learned last week that he’s a sex trafficker. But S1E6 doesn’t really follow up on that. Stallings arrives home without the young women he kidnapped in Episode 5, and he refuses to tell Sugar anything about Olivia before being shot in the head.
As Sugar goes through the padlocked door, “Go Home” is shot in a way to show his disorientation, presumably due to his injuries. But I couldn’t help but wonder if there was some way what we were seeing didn’t match reality, like when John hallucinated back in the series premiere.
What Sugar does learn is that Ruby (Kirby) tipped Stallings off, and after Sugar gets some treatment for his wounds, he confronts Ruby about this. She doesn’t tell him much, though. She says she can’t, and then she says she won’t. Then she pretends she has to go upstairs to get John aspirin, and he flees when he sees that there actually is aspirin in the kitchen drawer Ruby looked in.
Did she go to call for backup?
Last week, Miller (Paul Schulze) told Ruby to do whatever she had to in order to keep Sugar from finding out what they’ve been doing. This makes me wonder if there was a plan to kill Sugar via Stallings that he’s now foiled, but Ruby herself seems conflicted. She just wants John to drop the case.
This is an important point to think about! By a lot of lights, the Olivia Siegel case would seem to be solved, even if we don’t know exactly what happened to her or if she’s OK, and so on. But John is convinced that it isn’t just a matter of Stallings taking Olivia because of what Davy told Stallings. John thinks there’s more to it, and Ruby seems to confirm that. She wants Sugar to stop looking for Olivia.
I have no idea what to do with that, if I’m honest, but I’m intrigued by it. I care about what happened to Olivia just as much as I care about anything else in this show, but I thought that the concern Miller was raising to Ruby had more to do with their relationship with Stallings in general than with the Olivia case in particular. Now I’m wondering if Miller is behind her disappearance.
Either way, Sugar S1E6 gives us significant information about the greater mystery we’ve been grappling with.
After he suffers an injury fighting Stallings et al., Sugar calls Melanie (Amy Ryan) for help and then gets her to call Henry (Jason Butler Harner). Henry has a bag of alien blood to help Sugar with, and I’m completely confident calling it that from how the episode ends.
“Go Home” plays things well, with the thought that Sugar can’t go to the hospital because he’ll be found there, but when it comes down to it, we have to think that he can’t go to the hospital because he’s not human.
This is a theory that’s been out there, so I’m not terribly surprised by the twist that the end of S1E6 gives us, but there are a couple of things to think about here. Sugar says, in voiceover, that he wants to go home just for one night, and while I guess that makes sense in terms of reverting to his true self, I’m wondering if there is something more literal about his use of this phrase.
He injects himself in the neck and slowly changes in appearance. Melanie is in the next room, and that’s going to be an issue if she sees him like this, so I guess we have to imagine a benefit for Sugar that doesn’t relate to any kind of instrumental reason. Maybe it’s just, as he says, going home—getting some kind of serenity by taking off his human costume.
But if we broaden things out, we have to imagine that Miller, Ruby, Henry, and the whole Polyglot Society are similarly not human. Whatever their plan is—the thing that Miller told Ruby to make sure Sugar didn’t find out about—has to relate to that.
Sugar asks Ruby if Charlie is OK, and she says she doesn’t know. I’d have to guess that it was their people who took Charlie out of the equation at Stallings’s place, but we don’t see who approaches Charlie’s van to knock on the window, and I didn’t recognize the car.
I’m not sure how I feel about the reveal that Sugar is some kind of alien. On the one hand, it begins to pay off the mystery that has been surrounding the character. On the other hand, it undermines the sense that he’s a good man to the extent that he’s not a man at all.
Recall how refreshing Melanie found John to be after their first meeting. She went to AA and basically told the group that this guy restored her faith in humanity by showing her care instead of taking advantage of her. Now we’ve found out that he’s not human.
Still, I appreciated the way that Sugar gave us this information. As John looks at himself in the mirror, Angel Olsen’s “Go Home” begins to play, and the vibe is one of catharsis. We still don’t know exactly what happened to Olivia, and we don’t know just how nefarious the Polyglot Society actually is, but it feels like we are beginning to live in the truth.
See you next week.
