Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Sugar S2E3, “Watch Face” (written by Christopher C. Rogers and directed by Amat Escalante)
As expected, Sugar (Colin Farrell) survives the drive-by shooting that closed last week’s episode. I’d wondered if he might need medical treatment in a way that would complicate the plot of the series, but it turns out that his alien biology is resilient enough that he’s able to drive to safety, remove the shotgun pellets from his flesh, and give himself a blood transfusion. Then, he’s right as rain (though he does make sure to tell us in voiceover that the experience was all quite painful).
This case has turned out to be more dangerous than John had anticipated, so he gives Val (Sasha Calle) a chance to back out of their planned partnership. But, she notes there are a lot of dangerous things in the world, and most don’t pay as well. Sugar tasks her with keeping an eye on Hannah’s (Nona Parker Johnson) house, in case Ji (Raymond Lee) shows up there.
Meanwhile, he visits Sandra Jaquez (Vanessa Martinez) down under the bridge to talk to her about her deceased son, Chuy (Edgar de Santiago). Sandra says she knows why her son was killed—the Fire Sale, which seems to relate to the distribution of fentanyl in Downer Town. Chuy didn’t like that and made it known, so the Ez4 gang killed him. Maybe so.
Danny (Jin Ha) is presented with the opportunity to fight a boxer named Nestor Rodrigues in Las Vegas, which seems like a big deal. I hope it works out for him. But then he receives a call from Ji, who wants to meet up at a club. Danny is worried about some guys following him, and he calls Sugar, who tells those guys to relay a message to their boss that he still wants to talk, before speeding into traffic with Danny to get away from them.
At the club, Ji, who’s dyed his hair blond, tells Danny that someone is after him, but he has a plan. It isn’t clear what that is, and the two mostly argue about how Ji stole drugs from a hospital until Ji eyes Sugar and runs away yelling, “I said no cops!”
John isn’t a cop, of course; he’s a PI, but that doesn’t help. Ji’s friend hits him on the back of the head in the alley outside of the club, and Ji is once again in the wind. Oh, and Sugar thinks he saw a woman named Peg (Laura San Giacomo) in the club for a moment, but then she was gone. That will probably be relevant later.
This would seem like a good point for Sugar to drop the Moon case, given that Ji is alive but doesn’t want to be helped. But, being who he is, John perseveres. He knows how things can get between siblings, reflecting on his relationship with Djen, but he’d do anything to have her back. That’s why he does this, he tells us.
Taking a swim at the hotel, Sugar runs into Charlotte (Laura Donnelly) again. She says she’s facing an ethical dilemma related to her charitable work and would like his input, but she doesn’t say more than to ask whether the ends justify the means. She’s satisfied with John saying that sounds like a slippery slope, and she tries to seduce him. This makes me wonder whether she has a real ethical dilemma troubling her at all, but more deeply I wonder if this character is going to actually matter at some future point in this story. She’s been in all three episodes of Sugar Season 2 so far, so I think she will, but she hasn’t really yet.
As for her seduction, Sugar declines, apparently holding to rules from a species that he may well never see again.
Sugar receives a call from Tom (Shea Whigham), who he meets in a dog park even though he no longer has a dog. Tom informs John that the leader of the Ez4 gang is known as Jose Guapo, so Sugar returns to the young man (Rene Moran) he spoke to in S2E2 with this information, again asking to speak to his boss. He also mentions the fire sale in Downer Town, at which point the young man leads him into a dingy room in the adjacent projects, where he reveals that he is Guapo.
It seems pretty clear that Guapo is about to kill Sugar when the cops raid the place, guns a-blazing. Guapo dies. So do some others. John is led out of the building in restraints, then freed from them to show his credentials.
It’s not clear who tipped off the Sheriff’s department. I don’t think John did. Maybe it was Tom. Maybe they’d been planning it for a long time. Or maybe it was Tony Dalton’s character (listed as Ray Vega), who knew that Sugar was getting close to something and mustered his forces to stop it.
Vega wears a vest that reads Sheriff, but so do the other cops at the scene. My understanding is that all of the deputies in Los Angeles would be wearing them for a raid like this, but I don’t think that rules out the possibility that Vega is the man in charge.
Regardless, Vega looks at his watch in the same way as the man on the hospital CCTV footage Sugar has been studying from the night of Ji’s theft. He wears his watch with the face on the inside of his wrist, which is distinctive. John puts two and two together, and as he locks eyes with Vega, Vega puts together that Sugar has put it together. Does that make eight?
See you next week.
