Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Sunny S1E9, “Who’s in the Box?” (written by Nancy Won & Yugo Nakamura and directed by Makoto Nagahisa)
Sunny S1E9 opens with Sunny (Joanna Sotomura) alone in the woods. She’s confused about what is going on, but after she goes through a door that leads to a game show set, it becomes clear that the end of last week’s episode represented Sunny falling into herself. Here, Yuki Tanaka (Anam Sekiguchi) and Noriko (Judy Ongg) host a game show called “Should Sunny Wipe Herself?” and everyone in the audience is Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima). Sunny went outside of her programming by killing Tetsu (Shin Shimizu), so the question now is whether she can be redeemed.
It’s a compelling conceit and I enjoyed the style of S1E9, which takes place entirely inside of Sunny’s mind. Round 1 of the game is called “Who’s in the Box?” (which also serves as this episode’s title) and forces Sunny to revisit recent events. The first box contains the corpse of Joey the bird. In the second, we find the disfigured head of the dildo store owner our friends went to for Dark Manual code. And in the third is Mixxy (Annie the Clumsy), because of how Sunny punched Mixxy in the stomach. It turns out that Sunny thought Mixxy had pulled a knife on Suzie (Rashida Jones) in that moment, but she learns from revisiting the scene that this was not the case.
But it’s Rounds 2 and 3 of the fake game show that provide the information that warrants this whole episode. We learn that Masa set out to create robots that could help people with their loneliness, and Sunny is but one of many similar models that were made for testing. They paired these bots up so that they would form emotional connections with one another, and then started testing with human subjects.
The experiment is successful with a man named Asahi, who bonds with his homebot and begins to come out of his shell. Unfortunately, that bot’s partner becomes jealous and attacks her with a stool. Asahi tries to intervene, only to be bashed to death by the stool himself. Finally, Masa rushes into the room and it becomes clear that this scene is a fuller version of the one that opened S1E1.
Sunny was not the bot who did the murder in this scene, as I’d previously thought. Rather, she’s the one bot from the program that Masa decides to save. He reprograms her for Suzie in case something happens to him, as he is living in fear of the yakuza.
Unfortunately, Sunny S1E9 doesn’t give us much new information with regard to Masa’s relationship to the yakuza. In a previous episode, we saw him meeting with Hime (You) on what seemed to be friendly terms, but the story now is that the yakuza were threatening him trying to get code. That makes sense, I’m just not sure how to put things together.
Accessing her memories, Sunny learns that Yuki had rigged an outlet in the ImaTech lab, which suggests that he was working with the yakuza. But when Sunny confronts Hime (as a head in a box), Hime insists that she didn’t do anything to Sunny’s code; she just pushed Sunny towards the boundaries of her programming as if she were boiling a frog.
It’s worth noting that all of this occurs within Sunny’s mind, and we have to accept the implication that, although she is a robot, Sunny possesses not only emotional sophistication but true free will. Her code includes moral limits, but she was able to supersede these in killing Tetsu, and this stemmed from her love of Suzie.
Ultimately, it is Sunny’s decision as to whether she will wipe herself or not. She reminisces about her time with Suzie and then heads through the door labeled Wipe. Thus ends the penultimate episode of Sunny Season 1.
It would be somewhat surprising if this is a result that holds through the season finale—if Sunny rejoins Suzie in S1E10 as a blank slate. Either way, I’ll be curious to see how much closure the season finale offers.
See you next week.
