The following recap contains spoilers for Sunny S1E4, “Sticky” (written by Kimi Howl Lee and directed by Lucy Tcherniak)
Sunny S1E4 opens with a flashback of Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) dropping Zen off to school before he sees a man outside the building whom he chases down. Masa roughs the man up, sticks a gun in his face, and maybe pulls the trigger. We hear a gunshot but don’t see exactly what happened.
Cut to a bar where Masa arrives to meet Hime (You) to tell her they got the money. It’s not entirely clear what this was all about, but Masa puts his hand on Hime’s, and it’s easy to get how the scene functions to let us know there definitely was a relationship between these two. I’ll speculate about the details of that relationship a bit later.
Back in the present, Suzie (Rashida Jones) is in shock over seeing Hime at Masa’s funeral, given their showdown the previous night at the robot fights. Suzie asks Noriko (Judy Ongg) what Hime is doing there, and Noriko deflects both the question and the suggestion that Hime is yakuza. Suzie is about to confront Hime directly, but she’s kept from doing so by a man paying his respects to Masa.
The man mentions how Masa was always talking about how his father helped him return to the world after his time as a recluse. This confuses Suzie because her understanding was that it was the death of Masa’s father, Shigeru, that led him to retreat from the world, so she confronts Noriko and demands to know the truth. Is Masa’s father actually alive? Just what is going on here?
Again, Noriko deflects. Instead of answering Suzie’s questions, she tells her a story about her cousin Yumiko, who got paranoid about her husband and started following him until she slipped and fell one night chasing his train. In the hospital, the doctors discovered a tumor, and while Yumiko’s husband spent time at her side during treatment, he fell in love with a nurse and ended up leaving Yumiko.
The point of the story is that Suzie reminds Noriko of Yumiko—they’re both “sticky.” In other words, stop asking questions.
Suzie, of course, does not stop asking questions. She leaves her husband’s funeral with Mixxy (Annie the Clumsy) and Sunny (Joanna Sotomura) in tow, and they proceed to search for answers about Masa’s father. Unfortunately, the publicly available information about the family doesn’t include Shigeru’s name, and more comprehensive information would require Noriko’s permission or access to her devices.
So, Suzie decides to go to a bathhouse that Masa used to frequent, mentioning to Mixxy how Masa would joke about the yakuza who hung out there. Sunny notes that this seems like a dangerous plan, and the robot is not wrong, but Suzie persists.
After Sunny lies to the desk clerk, Suzie and Mixxy sneak into the bathhouse. Here, they hear men talking and have to hide in a sauna to avoid being discovered. The conversation they overhear gives us some insight into what is going on with Hime and the yakuza, as one of the men, Botan, is Hime’s crony, while another is Hime’s rival, Jin.
The bad news for Botan is that Hime has sent another of her men, Tetsu, to the bathhouse, and while he’s been dispatched to look for Suzie, he quickly becomes distracted by Botan’s betrayal. After getting the other men to leave, Tetsu beats Botan bloody—indeed, I think he beats him to death.
Ultimately, this gives Suzie and Mixxy the chance to escape the bathhouse. They reunite with Sunny and return to Suzie’s home, only to find the place completely ransacked. Suzie breaks down in tears, which makes sense, but we’d also be right to ask what the yakuza were looking for.
I think we get an answer in an earlier scene, where we learn that Hime is jockeying to become the successor to her father—who’s only referred to in S1E4 as “papa”—while the old man is resistant to the idea because Jin has been his second-in-command for 20 years. However, Hime and her papa would seem to have struck a deal: he’ll give her the reins if she gets him the Dark Manual in its entirety.
Thus, I surmise that Hime sent men to search for the manual in Suzie’s house (which was, after all, Masa’s house), and Masa wrote the Dark Manual. But I’d also guess that they didn’t find anything.
There are a couple of more wrinkles that I haven’t noted yet. While Suzie and Mixxy are in the bathhouse, Sunny goes to Noriko’s house to help clean up after the funeral. The real plan, however, is to get access to Noriko’s devices, which Sunny does after getting Noriko to pass out drunk.
I think it’s worth noting that when Sunny plugs Noriko’s device in, the robot seems to flash to a memory of killing that guy, but regardless, Sunny learns that Shigeru was not Masa’s biological father.
As Sunny tells Suzie and Mixxy, Masa’s real father is named Hiromasa Matsumoto, and he’s very much alive. Further, it turns out that Masa made Mr. Matsumoto the beneficiary of his life insurance policy three days before the plane crash, though the insurance agent assures Suzie that they won’t pay out until after the investigation into Flight 405 has been completed.
Suzie and Mixxy heard the men at the bathhouse mention “four-circle-five,” so that adds to the mystery. I’m left wondering if Hiromasa Matsumoto is “papa,” or perhaps another man we’ve already met. Further, I wonder if the yakuza caused Masa’s plane to crash or if perhaps he himself did something to fake his death to escape their clutches. There are a lot of ways this could go.
One big thing I find my mind sticking on is that Hime is in search of the Dark Manual, when the cold open to “Sticky” indicates a close relationship between her and Masa. Maybe the simplest answer is the right one: Masa provided bits of illicit code to the yakuza but never gave anyone the whole manual. Now, he’s died in a plane crash, so no one has the complete manual.
If that’s right, though, I have a pretty good hunch as to where the Dark Manual is. I’ll give you a hint: it’s the name of the show we’re watching. And that makes me wonder why Hime wouldn’t snag the robot when she got the chance.
See you next week.