Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Sunny S1E8, “Trash or Not-Trash” (written by Sarah Sutherland and directed by Dearbhla Walsh)
The bulk of Sunny S1E8 is an exploration of Masa’s (Hidetoshi Nishijima) past. As I guessed, the man Suzie (Rashida Jones) and Mixxy (Annie the Clumsy) found folding laundry at the end of last week’s episode is Masa’s biological father, Hiromasa Matsumoto (Jun Kunimura), and S1E8 contains a good amount of narration to make it clear that he is telling Suzie and Mixxy Masa’s story.
At the same time, though, it’s clear that we’re seeing the actual events of Masa’s life, many of which Hiromasa was not present for. In the cold open, a young Masa puts a beetle in a box while Hiromasa’s voiceover invokes Ludwig Wittgenstein. I can’t help but point out that Hiromasa’s point is almost the opposite of the one Wittgenstein is making in his Philosophical Investigations, but this isn’t a philosophy course so we’ll let it slide. In the context of Sunny, it works—throughout his life, Masa has been lonely and struggled to feel like he was understood.
Part of his trauma involves the man he grew up with as a father, Shigeru. Masa always felt like the man hated him, and Noriko (Judy Ongg) didn’t do much to smooth things over. Apparently, she wouldn’t even let Masa visit Shigeru when he was in the hospital on his deathbed (though this may have been Shigeru’s call).
So, instead of attending the memorial service for Shigeru, Masa went into his room, shut the door, and didn’t come out for two years.
Finally, Noriko got desperate enough to reach out to Hiromasa, who comes to visit Masa and manages to convince him to move into a cabin that Hiromasa owns. It’s still a solitary life, complete with food deliveries, but Masa isn’t completely alone at the cabin. There’s a trashbot with him that doesn’t do a very good job of determining what is trash and what isn’t. So Masa becomes inspired to make it better.
Named Shō, the trashbot does have a bit of personality. It’s not clear how much of that owes to the reprogramming that Masa has done, but he does manage to teach the bot to do a much better job of recognizing trash. He even gets it to think about how an object can change its value—the can of coffee is not-trash when Masa is drinking it, but becomes trash when it’s empty.
The whole thing is rather endearing, and we start to see Masa come out of his shell as he bonds with Shō over the course of the episode. They even venture out into the world together.
Unfortunately, when they return to the cabin, it is to find Hiromasa and Noriko waiting, as they’ve come to check in on Masa. Masa says, “trash,” which causes Shō to kind of attack Hiromasa, and Hiromasa kicks the robot’s arm off. This makes Masa angry, and he takes the opportunity to lay into his biological parents about the affair they had behind Shigeru’s back. Did Shigeru know that Masa wasn’t his biological son? Is that why he hated him? It feels like Masa knows the answer.
Back in the present, Suzie is upset about all of the things her husband has kept from her. Hiromasa can’t explain why Masa didn’t tell her, and it seems that he and Masa haven’t had much of a relationship over the years, even as Masa re-engaged with the world, met Suzie, had a son, etc. But then, a few nights before the plane crash, Masa came to Hiromasa with Sunny (Joanna Sotomura) and instructed Hiromasa to give Sunny to Suzie, as he did.
This raises the prospect once again that Masa might still be alive and that everything that’s occurring is part of an elaborate plan he hatched, perhaps to get away from the yakuza.
Things are a little hard to parse, though, since Hime (You) is enacting schemes of her own. She sends a thug to retrieve Sunny from Suzie’s house, telling the thug that “it’s time” for reasons that aren’t exactly clear. But, apparently, it is time to take Sunny to where Zen (Fares Belkheir) is, which I guess is something Hime has known all along, though I fear I’m missing something. The most straightforward explanation would be that the yakuza have been holding Zen hostage this whole time, but it doesn’t quite feel like that.
Suzie, Mixxy, and Hiromasa head to the same location, following a fourth tracker they somehow just discovered. Maybe it just came online? Regardless, they do indeed find Zen at this location, with Sunny standing beside him, making a dour face. As Suzie approaches, Tetsu (Shin Shimizu) grabs her and points a gun at her head. Then Sunny snaps Tetsu’s neck.
I gather that the yakuza thought they had brought Sunny to their side through a bit of reprogramming, but that didn’t work out for them. Sunny protects Suzie. But then there’s also the fact that this homebot just killed someone and isn’t supposed to be able to do that (even though we have seen Sunny kill in a flashback).
As S1E8 ends, reality crumbles around Sunny, and she falls into what looks like outer space, so we’re left with some big questions. Taken at face value, the scene doesn’t make sense. It could be a representation of Suzie’s experience in the wake of seeing a homebot kill someone. But, instead, if this is what actually happens, we have to start wondering if this story has been playing out in some sort of simulation.
I’m guessing that what we see is just for effect, but it’s a big enough question that I hesitate to speculate about what’s to come in the final two episodes of the season until it’s resolved. I imagine it will be pretty quickly next week.
See you then.
