Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Sugar S2E5, “Unknowns” (written by Michael Bhim and directed by Adam Bernstein)
Last week, Sugar (Colin Farrell) killed Ji Moon (Raymond Lee) and brought him back to life in order to trick Ray Vega (Tony Dalton). As Sugar S2E5 begins, he proceeds to take Ji to rehab and fake a death certificate for him. He seems to have told Tyler (Rek Lee) that Ji is dead, too, and while I’m not sure about the logistics there, I guess we have to accept it.
Danny (Jin Ha), on the other hand, gets the truth, and things are looking up for him otherwise as well, with his Las Vegas fight against Nestor Rodrigues (Evan Bittencourt) still on despite the fact that he beat up Nestor’s friend. Of course, we’ve yet to see any consequences for Danny stemming from his involvement in a robbery, so I wouldn’t bank on him getting a happy ending just yet.
Sugar returns to the house where Ji overdosed to retrieve the Narcan inhaler he left under a vent for some reason. As he stomps the vent back into place, a mounted cat head falls from the wall, and when John puts it back up, he leaves it crooked. Details, Sugar! You were just talking about them in the voiceover!
Ray Vega will notice this detail when he returns to the scene later in the episode.
Sugar goes to Tom (Shea Whigham) and asks about the possibility of getting Ji into witness protection. Tom thinks there’s only a slim chance of it, particularly if the potential case is a matter of Ji’s word against Vega’s. This leads Val (Sasha Calle) to wonder if Chuy (Edgar de Santiago) was in the same boat, and if he had evidence on his phone.
Sugar finds that phone when he finally manages to track down Sandra (Vanessa Martinez) again. Unfortunately, she’s dead now, and we don’t learn anything about what’s on the phone in this episode. Maybe it’s locked.
In other news, John is continuing his investigation of Pavich (John D’Aquino). This leads him to break into the house of a professor (Bernard White) he saw talking to Pavich, and later chat up the same professor about the tenacity of succulents. This doesn’t go much further in S2E5, but it is worth noting that Sugar finds a diagram in the professor’s house that resembles something from an alien notebook.
Back at the hotel, John’s feeling lonely, so he calls Melanie (Amy Ryan), but since we don’t even hear her voice and she’s apparently in Paris, I doubt she’ll factor into things significantly this season.
Charlotte (Laura Donnelly), on the other hand, is another story. Sugar sees her at the bar again and is, in my opinion at least, overly apologetic about how he confronted her after she broke into his room. Regardless, the two share dinner and talk until dawn.
When he finally gets to bed, Sugar has another vision of Peg (Laura San Giacomo), who tells him he’s going to hell for doing things like eating cheeseburgers. The broader point seems to be that John is violating the rules of his species. Resurrecting Ji isn’t necessarily an excuse for killing him, and we have to wonder whether John is going down the same path Henry (Jason Butler Harner) traveled offscreen in between seasons. I don’t know if Peg is a figment of John’s imagination or somehow projecting herself into his consciousness, but what she represents is clear enough in this scene. It’s his conscience.
Unknowns
Sugar S2E5 begins with an anonymous man being cremated and ends with his ashes being filed alongside numerous other boxes of the remains of the unknown dead. This would seem to give the episode its title—with a point being put on it, even, by the workers in the morgue when John visits them—but I’m not entirely sure of the significance of these scenes at this point.
In the opening scene, Sugar is talking in voiceover about how Ji is dead (or, that’s the story, at least), but the man we see is not Ji and isn’t even a corpse being falsely labeled as Ji. The death certificate does the trick there, for one thing, and if the closing scene involves the remains of the same man (as I’ve surmised), then he’s a John Doe and there’s no one to inform of his death.
Perhaps it’s all for aesthetic effect, which is fair enough. It remains the case that there are a number of unknowns I’m curious about when it comes to the plot of Sugar. Why did Henry kill himself? What happened to Djen? What does Pavich know about the aliens? Who was Ray Vega talking to on the phone, who seems to be his superior? And how does the fire sale in Downer Town even make sense? Why did Vega kill Chuy? Is Charlotte really just a horny philanthropist, or is something more sinister at play? Why does the professor’s parrot keep saying, “What the heck?” And so on.
We’re more than halfway through Sugar Season 2, so I hope things come together in the homestretch. I’m sure I’ll continue to enjoy the vibes no matter what happens, but sometimes it feels like this show can’t decide whether it wants to be a sci-fi mystery or a network procedural.
Mostly, it works.
See you next week.
