Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Sugar S2E2, “Downer Town” (written by Gary Tieche and directed by Michael Morris)
Whatever Ji Moon (Raymond Lee) got himself into, it must be pretty serious. Sugar S2E2 begins with a couple of guys from the Ez4 gang rolling up on a man on the streets of LA and killing him, because they think he’s Ji.
Sugar (Colin Farrell) puts this together when he visits an old client/friend named Tom (Shea Whigham), who appears to be a medical examiner, or coroner—whatever the term is for what he does. Not-Ji doesn’t have any identification—just a phone card that might be able to lead them to his parents—but his killer is dead, too (taken out by the LAPD), and Sugar finds a picture of Ji on his phone.
John goes back to the hospital, where he’s delighted to learn that Blaine (Catfish Jean) has taken the time to watch Casablanca since they met in S2E1. Sugar’s looking for a favor from Blaine now, which he gets: access to the hospital’s CCTV footage.
They watch Ji enter the stairwell on the fourth floor. It takes him some ten minutes to emerge from the door to the street, so Sugar infers he must have gone to another floor in the interim. Sure enough, they find him on the fifth floor, and Blaine notes he must have gone somewhere in the hallway near the door, since he doesn’t show up on other cameras.
Sugar figures out that Ji went to the room of one Jesus Jaquez, who was in the hospital for gunshot wounds. He didn’t make it.
John opens the closet and sees a torn sticker on the wall, indicating that the photo of Ji on the Ez4 member’s phone was taken in that closet. But why was Ji hiding in there (if he was hiding), and who took the photo?
Sugar and Blaine find footage of a man on the surveillance tape who is clearly hiding his face from the cameras on purpose. So I’m sure that’s the guy (and I’d guess this will be Tony Dalton’s character, who we still haven’t met through the first two episodes of the season).
Sugar visits the Jaquez residence and doesn’t learn much beyond the fact that Jesus’s mom, Sandra, is on the streets somewhere. He does note that his visit has been noticed by a guy outside on a bike, who he thinks called it in to his boss. Sugar gives him a business card and asks the message be relayed that he wants to talk to whoever took the photo of Ji, to clear up a misunderstanding.
This will not go well.
Danny (Jin Ha) learns that Ji didn’t pay their rent before disappearing, so he takes a gig robbing a retail store with others. I infer that he’s done this before (though perhaps not for a while), and while it might butt up against whatever path Ji went down, we don’t get much more than the robbery itself in this episode.
Meanwhile, Sugar sees Charlotte (Laura Donnelly) in the hotel bar again. She says he’s a nice man, and Sugar seems to be considering romance, but that doesn’t go any further in this episode, either.
Neither does Sugar’s surveillance of Tyson Pavich (John D’Aquino), though we do learn that Pavich is no longer a senator. He’s become CEO of a tech company that promises to solve age-old problems, whatever that means.
Sugar hires Val (Sasha Calle), who kind of stole his car last week, to be his partner/assistant, and it’s again striking the extent to which John just doesn’t care about petty crime. Don’t get me wrong, he cares about big stuff like murder and kidnapping, but you stole some robes? Who cares. You stole my car and extorted me to return it? No big deal.
Of course, Val says she’s done worse, but even here Sugar doesn’t ask about what. John is cool. He’s always been cool. And he sees something in Val that I hope the series will explore more moving forward.
I’m presuming that Sugar doesn’t die at the end of “Downer Town,” but he’s not in good shape. After receiving a call about his inquiry into who took the photo of Ji, he receives an address and takes off into the night to go there. He’s tailed, but then, at a red light, the car behind him speeds past, calling his attention (and ours).
Seemingly out of nowhere, a motorcycle emerges carrying two people. One of them shoots John through the window of his car. Then they circle back and toss his business card onto his bleeding chest. The car rolls into the intersection in front of it, and the credits roll on screen over it to end the episode.
Narratively, Sugar can’t be dead two episodes into the season. I have no idea what this show would be without him at the center of it. It looks like his would-be assassin was aiming for the heart, so maybe the fact that John isn’t human will save him. However, the fact that he isn’t human is also a major complication in terms of him receiving medical care for his injury.
The other aliens are gone. No one has been responding to the message Sugar sent out on their special comms. John burned Henry’s body so that human beings wouldn’t discover an alien corpse, so what is he going to do if he’s able to get it together enough to do anything at all about his gunshot wound? Could Melanie (Amy Ryan) help him? Will he reveal his secret to Val? Or, will human doctors just be able to treat him well enough even though he isn’t human?
I get the feeling there’s going to be some connection between Pavich’s tech company and Ji Moon that we’ll discover as the season progresses, but the first two episodes of Sugar Season 2 have been more about opening questions than answering them. Which I’m fine with, to be clear. The vibes of this series remain impeccable.
See you next week.
