When It's Not Adding Up - Big Reveals in Sugar

 Film Noir is typically a subgenre of mystery. It's one that grew out of the trauma of World War II, a generation that had witnessed the utter, shocking evil that humanity was capable of inflicting upon itself. It's a cynical and bitter genre of storytelling that would later be echoed in the cyberpunk genre and has formed a kind of riff upon which other genres can build themselves.

It is kind of funny, though, that the genre became so prominent around the same time that post-War prosperity in America led to the sanitized suburban "Father Knows Best" and "Leave it to Beaver" optimism.

Noir is all about twists and turns, and betrayal is one of the key tropes that pops up within it. Sherlock never has to question whether Watson will be loyal to him and the mission of solving the crime, but in a Noir story, nothing is promised. We might have our heroic detective to trust, but everyone else is fair game.

And thus, it's a little funny that John Sugar has built his life around these tropes. He's so in love with the golden age of Hollywood (though he's not limited to it, at one point describing John Carpenter's The Thing to his doctor).

Following the case of missing woman Olivia Siegel, there are elements that don't really add up, moving parts here and questions that remain unanswered. That's fine, though. That's the genre.

Let's go into spoiler territory. Oh, and just to warn you, there will be spoilers for The Prestige as well.

The Enticingly Weird Neo-Noir of Sugar

 Having heard it was good, and now being done with both season two and Andor and season one of Widow's Bay, I decided to check out Sugar, the Colin Farrel-starring neo-noir series.

I live in Los Angeles, and while I didn't grow up here, both my parents did, and so it was our default destination for family vacations, visiting with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. My dad, while born in Hungary, grew up in Hollywood, and until his parents were too old for us to come and stay with them, we'd often camp out in their apartment, which was just a block away from Paramount Studios.

I was a big cinephile as a kid (sadly kind of less so in adulthood,) and Hollywood not just as an industry but as a place has always loomed large in my world.

Going in, I wasn't sure if Sugar was set during the peak Hollywood days of the 40s and 50s, but it's actually set in modern day. The reason you might be fooled, though, is that its title character, John Sugar, is straight out of a classic Hollywood noir. A private detective who specializes in retrieving missing persons, we first see him in Japan tracking down the illegitimate son of a Yakuza boss.

Sugar dresses in fine suits and comports himself with movie-star poise (it doesn't hurt that Colin Farrel has decades as a successful Hollywood leading man under his belt). What's fascinating about him is that, as we see him go about his work, he seems to be profoundly, genuinely good as a person. Again, it's that old Hollywood leading man archetype, the principled, professional, and cool in the sense of never seeming to falter under pressure.

Sugar himself is a cinephile. When he meets a powerful film producer (James Cromwell, always welcome) whose granddaughter has gone missing, he says he's seen every one of his films at least 5 or 6 times.

What really draws me into the show is its unconventional editing. Among other flourishes, Sugar's investigation is interspersed with clips from classic movies, like Bogart as Sam Spade doing detective work just like Sugar is.

We get the sense that this is a person who has built his entire identity out of being that old Hollywood archetype, even if his methods involve high-tech gadgets in an era with smartphones. Upon returning to LA after his trip to Japan, he checks in with his manager/agent/coordinator, Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste,) who does not play into any of the genre tropes that Sugar seems committed to embodying.

Two episodes in, the plot he's trying to solve doesn't, at least so far, seem to be all that unusual (though my current working theory is that the missing woman has been engaging in vigilante justice against killers of women) but the appeal of the show feels very much about our detective himself.

Now, I will say, I'm aware of a twist coming in the show that was spoiled by an AV Club review that was a little bit loosey-goosey with a pretty major spoiler. I'm trying to put it out of my mind and just take the show on its own merits, but it's a little hard to un-know what I know. I feel a little hesitant to even mention a spoiler here, but I'd say if you want to watch it fresh, be careful.

Also, watching the opening titles I was concerned that it may have been AI-generated, but a little cursory research has indicated that this was not the case, and the kind of irregular water-color-like animation was evidently done by humans, so... phew.

I don't know if I've made my position on AI stuff clear on this blog, but basically, the way I see it is that yes, there could potentially be some use for LLMs if it ever actually proves helpful in, like, developing new medicines or all the other things that AI boosters have promised us, but the primary way I see it being used is to further concentrate profits into the hands of the the capital class at the expense of labor, and to flood our attention with misinformation. Especially in the realm of art, I think that generating stuff via LLMs serves to do nothing other than deny real human artists the chance to share their labor and passion with the world. And for that reason, you shouldn't have any of that shit in your work.

Trolley Problems in Widow's Bay as the First Season Comes to a Close

 Once again, one of the greatest assets of Widow's Bay is its production design. In a storm shelter under town hall, there are posters on the wall of the infirmary that give guidance on treating various kinds of bites - snake bits, dog bites, and human bites. There's also a poster for "How to... subdue someone," and yes, the ellipsis is part of it.

Widow's Bay is a horror-comedy, but it does not skimp on the first part of that, with a plot that you could actually use for a more straightforward horror series. It's just these touches, and the character notes, which lend it a bit of silliness and fun.

In particular, the degree to which the culture of the island has normalized the weird is reminiscent of Welcome to Night Vale, a podcast that I was a fanatical listener to in the mid 2010s.

As we come into the finale, a terrible storm has struck the island, threatening to wipe away everything. All the townsfolk and tourists are crowded into this cramped shelter, and things are looking bad: much of the rations set aside are moldy, and the power is going in and out. And our main trio has one option to end the horror, but at a terrible cost.

Which we'll talk about behind a spoiler cut.

The True Threat Revealed as Andor Ends

 When Star Wars came out in 1977, it was an homage to the gee-whiz serial adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon from about 40 years prior. It's interesting that we're now just short of 50 years past that original film. But Star Wars eclipsed its influences to become one of the most influential movies of all time, creating an aesthetic and language.

The idea of a "Death Star" is, if you hadn't grown up with the idea, kind of ludicrously over the top. It's such an arch name for a superweapon, and the fact that it requires a massive moon-sized space station to support the planet-destroying superlaser lifts the concept into the absurd heights of not-very-hard science fiction.

The denouement of Andor, in its final episode, after all the high-stakes blaster fights and explosions have run their course, is simply convincing the rational people in charge of the Rebellion that this is, in fact, a real thing that the Empire is building. That this cartoonishly evil plan is taking place in a world that Andor has redefined as existing within the rational and realistic.

Andor lovingly makes use of Star Wars' retrofuturistic aesthetic, its extremely analogue technology that is nonetheless so much more powerful than what we have (I find this particularly interesting as an evolution of the series given that the high-tech stuff in the movies looked pretty convincing to a 1970s audience, before digital technologies became commonplace and now ubiquitous). Luthen and Kleya's radio is operated by putting a bunch of giant plugs on cables into various sockets depending on the intended recipient. But at the same time, we have hovercars and seemingly sentient (at the very least sapient) droids.

After the horrors of Ghorman, we find ourselves in the final year of the story, BBY 1 (a dating system that does feel a bit contrived - sure it makes sense that dating things in comparison to the first movie makes sense, but surely in-universe they'd date it instead to something like the rise or fall of the Empire? The Battle of Yavin is certainly an important event, but I don't see us using the Battle of Stalingrad or D-Day as the basis for our calendar.)

And there's really just one last thing to cover. It all comes down to Lonni Jung.

Spoilers ahead:

The Tragedies of Ghorman

 I remember as a teenager, when I first saw Macbeth, I was puzzled as to why it was considered a "tragedy," because the title character is a villain protagonist, guilty of murder and tyranny. It's a tragedy with a happy ending, sort of.

Of course, my sense of what it means for things to be tragic grew more nuanced with my processing of that play - that the genre is more about the doom that is set in a character's fate, through flaws in their character that are not remedied in time. If a hero must overcome their flaws to emerge victorious in a happy ending, a tragic figure is one who fails to evolve.

I've been a bit cavalier about spoilers with Andor's second season - a season that was spoiled for me a year ago by endless flagrant spoilers posted on social media. So, these events didn't come as a surprise to me, but I'm going to try to exercise better propriety here.

Spoilers ahead.

Counting Down to Rebellion in Andor Season Two

 Despite being a Star Wars fanatic as a kid, I really never got that into the expanded universe, which in the Disney era has been relabeled "Legends," as its own separate continuity (sorry Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin Solo. You've been replaced by Ben - ok, yes, I did read like one of the Jedi Academy books).

So, the "Ghorman Massacre" is something I'm only aware of thanks to the broad pulp culture discourse around this show. And evidently, Andor makes a bit of a tweak to it - the operatic and over-the-top version of said massacre, in which Grand Moff Tarkin landed his ship on a giant crowd of peaceful protestors, is referred to in Andor, but it's evident that as atrocious as that is, the real horror is what we're building up to.

I've managed to take a break in the middle of a story arc, but Ghorman remains relevant for multiple arcs this season.

One of the fun things the show did was create a language for Ghorman. If you weren't listening closely, or didn't know any French, you might assume that the Ghor are just speaking français, but it's actually a constructed language, one that the actors deliver with such natural confidence that it feels real.

Obviously, the French Resistance is one of the most storied movements during World War II, an underground resistance to the brutal Nazi occupiers, romanticized as a youthful and obviously righteous group fighting against really staggering odds. It's also something that needed outside help, with the D-Day Invasions really beginning the liberation of France in earnest. It was the Free French who liberated Paris, but they had the Allied Forces at their backs when they did so.

Andor is about, among other things, building a resistance from the ground up. There are many time-jumps throughout the series that help us get there, but it's sort of a remarkable thing that any revolution ever really gathers enough steam to overthrow the existing system. One of the biggest problems is when the vast majority of people are simply trying to get by, living their lives, avoiding the notice of the regime. In season one, we see these discrete missions that benefit scattered resistance cells, but the idea of actually opposing the Empire seems beyond anyone's capabilities.

And there's impatience with that. When Andor arrives on Ghorman under the identity of Varian Skye, fashion designer, he meets with the Ghorman Resistance and tells them, basically, that their timing is wrong and that they're going to all get themselves killed if they try moving. Now, I've been quite thoroughly spoiled on a lot of what happens in season two, but I also think that we all know where this is going: Andor is right, but at the same time, something has to happen.

Indeed, we know, given that the Death Star does get built, that the mineral the Empire wants to strip-mine Ghorman for is going to be extracted, which means that the planet is going to collapse (even in its construction, the Death Star is responsible for the ruin of another planet) and those who cannot evacuate (and the Empire is not making any effort to evacuate the populace even by force) are just going to freaking die. Bye bye, friendly silk-producing spiders.

The Rebel Alliance is pretty scrappy even in the original trilogy: they're frequently on the run, moving from remote bases like Yavin to Hoth and eventually just existing as a fleet out in deep space. It's a bit glossed over how the transition from the Empire to the New Republic goes down: with the decapitation of the Empire and the loss of its most fearsome warrior, perhaps there's such disarray that the Rebels are able to simply move their shadow-government into place and re-establish some pre-Imperial institutions like the Senate (Mon Mothma's status as a former senator gives her some credibility to become the first leader of the New Republic. Man, makes me really wonder what a sequel trilogy that didn't immediately destroy the New Republic would have been like.)

The incredibly dark detail about Ghorman is that both sides are hoping for a massacre. The Empire wants to cultivate a violent resistance in order to justify a violent crackdown, while Luthen wants to provoke the Empire into excessive use of force in order to shock the conscience of the Galaxy.

I was at the very beginning of my sophomore year of high school when 9/11 happened, and I remember at the time thinking that the attack surely had failed in its goals, especially ten years later when US forces killed Bin Laden. While there was a lot of rhetoric coming from the terrorists at the time about shocking the American public into converting to Al Qaeda's radically fundamentalist version of Islam - something that was never going to happen - I now think that the resultant two decades of quagmire wars we got stuck in sort of proved the strategy effective. I mean, when I was a kid in the 90s, American military and geopolitical mastery was kind of unquestioned after the end of the Cold War, but we burned a ton of our credibility both as a force for global peace and as an actual military threat by getting sucked into two incredibly long conflicts. (Though these look like strategic master strokes compared to what we're doing with Iran these days).

But there is this real question: all of this posturing, all of this preparation has to lead to something. At some point, the trigger needs to be pulled and a resistance needs to turn into a rebellion, and that rebellion needs to at some point become a viable replacement for the regime that is.

That's not something that the original movies really concern themselves with, of course: it's far more about Luke's personal hero's journey and how he becomes the opposite equivalent of his father: if Vader is the Empire's most powerful warrior, a one-man army, then Luke becomes the Alliance's version of that, able to blow up their Death Star. Also, someone pointed out at some point that Luke's the only witness to what happened in the Emperor's throne room on the Second Death Star, so you see Luke walk in there in handcuffs and then emerges as the only survivor, you must think he's the most incredibly badass warrior the Galaxy has ever seen. (Funnily enough, the three people there kind of rock-paper-scissors, with Luke besting Vader, the Emperor incapacitating Luke, and Vader/Anakin killing the Emperor).

We know Andor's fate, of course - it lends a certain level of plot armor to him throughout the series but also a tinge of tragedy on top of all of the victories he accrues. He never gets to see the Death Star blown up, much less the fall of the Empire. It a tragic sense, he's not built to be one of the people who carries that victory into a new and reformed age.

The one character we know for certain will make it into that era is Mon Mothma, who becomes the Chancellor or Prime Minister or President or whatever the title is of the New Republic. But while Andor ultimately sacrifices his life to help defeat the Empire, Mothma seems to be sacrificing her family.

It's kind of fascinating, actually: the Empire has injected itself into the structures of the Old Republic, and while the original film has a throwaway line of the Emperor having the Senate dissolved, he uses it for a couple decades to enforce a sense of legitimacy to his regime. That dissolution could potentially give the New Republic an avenue to gain legitimacy by reinstituting it, but one wonders to what degree the New Republic needed to really clean house and rip out the roots of the Empire.

Anyway, eager to see more, but sad to realize that I think I only have four episodes left.

Finally Getting to See Andor Season 2

 Well, I've finally got access to Disney Plus again, and the first thing I rushed to do was start the second season of Andor.

As I'm sure I've written here before, I fell in love with Star Wars when I was in elementary school, watching the original trilogy on laser disc in a loop for a good chunk of 4th grade. My feelings toward the franchise were... altered by the prequel trilogy, and while I still have a great affection for that world, it wasn't the unadulterated fixation that it had been in my childhood.

Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm in the early 2010s more or less guaranteed a sequel trilogy, and while I thought the Force Awakens had a lot of promise and the Last Jedi did some very clever complication of the formula the sequels were hinting toward, the awkward U-turn that was the Rise of Skywalker felt like such a garbled mess that it left a really sour taste in my mouth. While I roll my eyes at my contemporaries who have tried to gaslight us all into thinking that the prequel trilogy was good, actually, I will say that while I fault the prequels for their poor execution of a truly different story that Lucas was trying to tell, the sequels wound up being a halfway-competent execution of an utterly unambitious story (again, which veered away from the ambitions of The Last Jedi).

Disney has tried to take the Marvel approach to Star Wars, with mixed results.

Look, I get that Star Wars has always been meant to appeal to a young audience. I got into it when I was 9. But as someone who is now 40, the idea of Star Wars has always held the potential, in my opinion, for more mature stories. And it's Andor, building off of the artistic success (and chutzpah) of Rogue One, that came out of left field to deliver that adult take on the Star Wars saga that I had been craving.

And let's be clear: this hits a lot harder when we're watching the United States descend into authoritarianism. The subversive thing about Star Wars, which seemed to fly over the heads of the Reagan-era people who embraced it as part of their own jingoistic, anti-communist politics, is that while the Empire is very Nazi Germany-coded, there are parts, like the fight against the Imperial forces on Endor, in which the Empire is standing in for US imperialism, with Lucas confirming in interviews that the Ewoks were basically like the Viet Cong fighting against America.

We've spent the last decade watching the stable order of how America is supposed to work collapse, with government agencies like ICE being unleashed upon the country to terrorize us into compliance. In the first arc of Andor's second season, Andor's friends (practically his family) are hiding out on an agrarian planet, working without documentation. While the planet seems idyllic (if probably a little boring - it's basically grain fields as far as the eye can see,) the safety it represents is torn apart when the Empire begins an inspection looking for undocumented workers.

We follow basically three threads in this first 3-episode arc. One with Bix, Brasso, Wilmon, and B2EMO on the farming world, one with Andor getting stuck on a jungle planet with the most dysfunctional rebel faction we've encountered, and one with Mon Mothma overseeing her daughter's wedding and realizing to what degree her personal life is falling apart as she secretly works for the rebellion.

Andor's plot, I think, was controversial because the people he's with are just such fuckwits. By the time of the original trilogy, the Rebellion is an organized, professional, and competent force. While we do see them getting massacred by Imperial troops frequently, the cause is not any real fault in the Rebels' methods - just a matter of being outgunned and outnumbered.

But one of the key ideas of Andor is that before the Rebel Alliance is an entity, the many, many factions that will form that alliance vary greatly in terms of how competent they are. And the Maya Pei brigade does not seem like it's going to be very helpful to the Rebellion.

We first see Andor when he's snuck into some sort of skunkworks-like place where new TIE fighters are being designed and tested. With the help of an asset inside, who is absolutely terrified at the fact that she's risking her life to help him steal the new prototype, Andor manages to break out (after fumbling through the controls of a ship that works differently than expected and having to fight his way out) but when he gets where he's supposed to hand the experimental fighter off, he finds that his contact isn't there, and instead, a ragtag group of rebels who did not get the message about his mission are waiting for him there.

This Maya Pei brigade, led, one learns, by the now-late Maya Pei, who evidently didn't declare a successor should something happen to her, has been stuck on this jungle planet for a couple days without food, their old ship (I model I vaguely think might have been in the prequels, so it's presumably an old ship) is wrecked on the surface. They see Andor in an Imperial flight jacket and assume he must be an Imperial, and so take him prisoner. But in-fighting leads to the brigade splitting into factions and killing a bunch of one another. Eventually, Andor takes advantage when the two sides try to reconcile to escape with the ship and leave them to the wild beasts of the planet. (A planet that I think is actually meant to be Yavin IV, where the rebel base is in the original movie.)

Sidelining the main character in this plot is... ok, it's a little tedious, but we're meant to feel it's tedious as much as Andor does. It demonstrates how resistance to an evil empire doesn't automatically make you competent or even particularly good people. There's ego and mistrust even when you're just a group of maybe 20 people on the outside. The level of management and organization required to corral an entire galaxy's worth of resistance cells is truly a monumental task, which at this point is basically being done entirely by Luthen and Kleya.

On Chandrila, Mon Mothma gets to briefly escape the politics of Coruscant to watch as her weirdly regressive trad-wife daughter (presumably an embrace of conservative traditions born out of rebellion against her busy senator mother) gets married into the sketchy Sculdun family. But as distressing as it is to see her relationship with her daughter disintegrate in front of her, her beloved childhood friend Tay, who has been helping to shield the money she has been moving around to help fund the rebellion, decides that he wants a bigger cut, blackmailing her.

Unfortunately for Tay, also at the wedding is antiquities dealer Luthen Rael, and when he finds out the position that Tay has put Mon and the rebellion as a whole in, the answer is clear: Tay leaves the wedding party early, and his driver is not his usual, but actually Cinta, whose mission is clearly to help Tay Kolma find his way to a lethal accident.

She has to stand by as one of her oldest friends is sent off to his doom, watch as her daughter embraces this life she always wished she could have avoided, and all while she needs to keep a bright smile on her face as the proud mother of the blushing bride.

Actually, the fourth storyline here has us keeping up with Syril and Dedra. Syril's weird obsession with Dedra has, actually, led the two of them into a romantic relationship. Syril has been doing well in his bureaucratic job on Coruscant. In a scene that truly flips our sympathies, when they have Eedy, Syril's mother, over for dinner, Dedra gives her a warning: that she has to stop being so terrible to her son or she'll never get to talk to him again.

It's honestly one of the rare times that we can kind of cheer for Dedra, because Syril's mother is the worst.

But lest we forget just what kind of person Dedra is, we actually open the season with her being invited to a super top-secret meeting in a mountain fortress somewhere remote. There, Director Krennec (the main villain of Rogue One, and head, as we'll discover in that movie, of the Death Star project) explains that the Empire needs a rare mineral for its "Energy Project," which can only be obtained in sufficient quantities from the planet Ghorman. Ghorman, a vaguely-French world, is not some backwater, but a culture famed for its luxurious textiles. The problem is that the mineral would have to be extracted in such quantities and with such haste that the planet itself could collapse.

And so, the meeting is there, essentially, to plan out a way to either get the Ghormans off their own planet, or more likely, to find a way to turn Galactic opinion against them enough that the Empire can justify massacring the planet's 800 thousand citizens.

While a pair of representatives from the "Ministry of Enlightenment," a sufficiently Orwellian name for the Empire's propaganda agency, suggest painting the Ghormans as snobs that are out of touch with the rest of the Empire, Dedra is the one who suggests empowering a militant resistance there to work as unwitting agents provacateurs and give the Empire an excuse to crack down.

So, yeah, as great as it is to see her telling off Eedy, let's not forget that Dedra Meero is fucking evil.

But if Dedra is the kind of person who just doesn't think morality has any basis in truth, Syril remains, I think, someone who is deeply misguided about what is "good." He gives a speech to an incoming employee at the Bureau of Standards about how it might all seem boring, but he did a lot of bureaucracy that caught some people... stealing. I mean, that... could be exciting, I guess? But for Syril, who believes that following the rules is so central to whether you're a good person or not, he must think that this was an act of epic heroism.

I did start episode four, which jumps a year ahead, but I haven't finished it yet, so I won't comment on it just yet.

Once again structured in these three-episode arcs, we're given a glimpse of what we can assume is a long and dense struggle against the Empire. Andor's time dealing with the Maya Pei Brigade is only notable in what happens when he finally returns to his family, and the terror and loss they suffer. (I doubt that they'll still be there by the time the Rebels establish their base on Yavin).

Star Wars was built, of course, to be a high-adventure throw-back to old serials like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, but I think the cultural impact Lucas achieved has inspired a lot of examination of the world that he created. While it should absolutely be the place for mythical heroes and spiritual forces, I'm so happy to see someone take the complex politics implied by the premise and really drill down into them with a series like this.

By reputation, I've heard that season two is an improvement on the excellent first season. It's a bit early for me to see if I agree, but I'm very happy to finally get to see it.