Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Sugar S2E4, “Off 15” (written by Jonny Gomez and directed by Amat Escalante)
In Sugar S2E4, we see what happened the night Ji (Raymond Lee) stole drugs from the hospital. He noticed approaching security guards as he raced down the stairs, and that’s what led him to the room of Jesus Jaquez (Edgar de Santiago). Unfortunately, when he gets there Ray Vega (Tony Dalton) is in the bathroom, and when he exits, Ji hides in the closet. He watches Ray kill Jesus. Ray then finds Ji in the closet, snaps a photo, and tells Ji to run.
Cutting to the present day, Sugar (Colin Farrell) is being questioned by Ray and another cop named Pete (DeLaRosa Rivera) about the events of last week’s episode. Then Ray asks Pete to leave the room so that he can talk to Sugar privately, but this is apparently just to create an appearance for John’s sake, as Pete and other cops listen to the ensuing conversation from the other side of a one-way mirror.
Sugar knows who Ray is, and Ray knows that Sugar knows, but he asks how John figured it out. The answer is simple: Ray’s voice on the phone, the CCTV footage from the hospital where he looked at his watch… But it doesn’t really matter. Someone has called Ray to tell him to leave Sugar alone, and he’s going to follow that instruction even if he doesn’t know exactly who it came from (I suspect someone associated with Pavich, but we don’t get any more information in this episode).
Ji, however, won’t be as lucky. Ray still intends to kill him and says that, while he doesn’t know where Ji is, he knows where he’ll be. Ray proceeds to pay a visit to Hannah (Nona Parker Johnson) and tells her that he’s looking to protect Ji from the bad people who are after him. She arranges to meet Ji at a shopping mall to do a drug deal, during which the cops put a tracker on Ji’s car. Sugar and Val (Sasha Calle) are on top of all of this, but they’re too late.
Thankfully, Sugar figures out that Ji plans to go to the spot in the desert featured in a photograph on the fridge in the apartment he shares with Danny (Jin Ha). John gets Danny to give him the coordinates.
By the time Sugar gets there, however, he’s again too late, or, at least, too late to get Ji out of there before Vega et al. arrive. So he tells Ji’s buddy, Tyler (Rek Lee), to lie down quietly in the desert and wait for his signal. Then, he injects the already unconscious Ji with more drugs in order to induce an overdose, so that when Ray and the others enter the house, they’ll think their job has already been done for them.
That works, and it’s here that Sugar folds in the previous bits of voiceover about having three minutes to be revived after an overdose. Once the cops leave, John springs into action to give Ji some naloxone, and begins to perform CPR. This also works, and the episode ends with Ji jolting to consciousness, surely wondering what is going on.
So, I guess John didn’t break the first rule of his species (to not kill), though he sort of did. Maybe it doesn’t count if you bring the dead person back…
Charlotte (Laura Donnelly) appears briefly in Sugar S2E4, as she has in the previous episodes. This time, Sugar sees her on the footage from the cameras he has set up to surveil his hotel room, and he proceeds to confront her about it in the bar. She says the housekeeper let her in so she could leave a flirty note, which seems to check out, but I still don’t trust her. I don’t think John does, either.
Maybe Charlotte is the one who called Ray Vega about Sugar. Maybe she’s in league with Pavich in some way. Or maybe this is all a red herring.
See you next week.
