Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Sugar S2E7, “What Else Can You Do?” (written by Sam Alper & Christopher C. Rogers and directed by Michael Morris)
Sugar S2E7 begins with a cold open of a vehicle overturned in the desert, while John (Colin Farrell) talks in the voiceover about violence being the only language some people understand. It’s brief, but the Breaking Bad vibes are strong (which I mean as a compliment).
After the credits, we cut to two days prior, with Sugar and Tom (Shea Whigham) talking about how to handle the threat Ray Vega (Tony Dalton) levelled at the end of last week’s episode. Tom wants to take the chance of pursuing a legal case against Vega, even though he was just telling Sugar the previous day that such a thing would be a long shot. Plus, that wouldn’t help Danny (Jin Ha), who Vega could easily have killed in jail. Thus, John asks Tom to set up a meeting with Sergey (Daniel Zacapa).
I’d speculated that Vega was working for Pavich (John D’Aquino), and that could still be true when it comes down to it, but John has surmised that Sergey is Ray’s direct boss. He agrees to finish the job he’d previously left half-finished for Sergey if Sergey gets Danny released, and they have a deal. Unfortunately, it turns out that it was really Sergey’s son, Diego (Diego Rodriguez), who was behind the fire sale in Downer Town, and he’s invested enough in the project to sabotage his father’s plane when it’s on the way to Miami for a Bad Bunny concert.
With Sergey dead, Sugar shifts to Plan B, and the show conceals the details of the plan from us until it culminates, filling things in later. John meets Vega for coffee and offers him a new life in Panama, saying that everyone is born good, even if they lose themselves along the way. Vega sees more truth in that than I do, if I’m honest, but declines Sugar’s offer. John won’t hand over Ji (Raymond Lee), so they seem to be back to a standoff.
But, Sugar has foreseen how Vega would bug him, such that, when Val (Sasha Calle) tells John that Ji has gone missing, it’s really for Ray to hear. The next step of the plan is for Ji to call Vega and offer himself up in exchange for his brother. So, Ray loads Danny into the back of his car and heads to meet Ji in the desert.
When he gets there, he can’t find Ji, and when he returns to his car, Sugar has taken Danny’s place in the backseat. He starts to strangle Vega, the two fight for a while, and John ends up choking Ray to death. This is what he was talking about in the cold open. He’s broken the first rule of his species: Thou shalt not kill.
You might argue that it’s also the first rule of our species, but if we’re talking about the Ten Commandments it’s the sixth, and most secular moral theorists tend to put some caveats on the prohibition. I found myself thinking about how Sugar, by making its protagonist an alien, manages to put more ethical weight on John’s decision than we might feel if he were human. By his own logic, the act is justified, but he also recognizes it as a corruption of himself that he’ll never be able to wash away.
Regardless, in narrative terms this seems to resolve the threat to Ji. Diego is still out there, of course, but I don’t know how much he’ll care about pursuing revenge. Vega wanted to kill Ji because Ji saw him murder Chuy (Edgar de Santiago) in the hospital. I suppose Diego might still view Sugar and Ji as a threat to his fire sale, but I think that the Season 2 finale of Sugar is going to go down different paths.
In the middle of everything unfolding vis-à-vis Vega in Sugar S2E7, John gets a call from Stanley (Bernard White), the professor he met in a previous episode. Stanley’s parrot has died, which is sad, but John can’t help but reveal that he isn’t really a tax attorney, so that he can ask Stanley about the circles he found drawn on a notepad, and what Pavich is up to.
Reluctantly, Stanley tells Sugar that they aren’t circles; they’re tropospheric nodes. Stanley is an engineer working on a Weather-Smurfing Machine to solve all of the problems with the climate. That might seem justified, given the catastrophe global warming is wreaking on the planet, but, of course Stanley has his anxieties about the playing God of it all.
We don’t learn anything further in this episode before Stanley ditches Sugar, but I can’t help but wonder if John’s species was the source of the technology involved with this plan to manipulate the atmosphere. That would probably be against their rules in some way… Maybe Djen was threatening to expose the plan and that’s why Henry killed her?
John mentions his sister to Charlotte (Laura Donnelly) during their post-coital reverie in Sugar S2E7, but we don’t learn much from their conversation. As for Charlotte, she’s piqued my suspicions of her again by pulling John’s drawing of circles out of his jacket towards the end of the episode, but maybe she’s just a curious sort.
As for Sugar, he ends the hour bruised (physically and mentally), drinking some whiskey and watching Here Comes Mr. Jordan. A disfigured Peg (Laura San Giacomo) appears to him, representing his conscience even if she’s a figment of his mind. Charlotte beckons him to bed, but he continues to sit there, watching a film about a man who finds redemption after dying due to a metaphysical mistake, as the credits roll.
See you next week.
