The story of Sugar's first season, in which our strangely anti-Noirish Noir Detective John Sugar investigates the missing scion of a powerful Hollywood family, feels very classically Film Noir. Sugar is a man out of time, seemingly having based his entire persona on old-fashioned Hollywood leading men (a persona that fits quite nicely with Colin Farrel's classic leading-man looks).
Shows of this sort, where the main thrust of an entire season is about one big mystery, have a weird challenge in their second seasons: how different does the mystery get, and how much does it feel like the same show.
We're going to get into spoiler territories pretty quickly here, so I'll do a cut.
Lest you've forgotten, John Sugar is an alien - a literal extraterrestrial whose species looks pretty similar to humans overall, but for their blue, patterned skin, hairlessness, and glowing eyes, which Sugar and the others who have come to Earth disguise with some sort of injected human disguise (or at least the injection suppresses the surprise).
It's a bonkers twist that comes two thirds of the way through the first season, and a genre shift that I don't entirely know if the show really knows what to do with.
Really, this has been the question I've been asking: would the same basic show work if Sugar were just a regular human, there were no aliens, and his Hollywood personality was simply born out being an idiosyncratic person with severe trauma over losing his beloved sibling?
The show plays the sci-fi cards very close to the vest in season one, with only occasional hints you can pretty easily dismiss (I was right that he swats a bullet out of the air, but the shot is quick enough that you might have fooled yourself into thinking that he slapped the gun away from himself before it went off).
But in season two, the cat is fully out of the bag, and we're coming in knowing what John Sugar is.
Still, the show doesn't seem terribly interested in investigating what being an alien means for him. As far as we can tell, the aliens are more or less humans except more technologically advanced, faster, stronger, and more resilient. He talks about his sister a lot, but we don't see what she was like.
The first season ends with a revelation that his fellow "Polyglot" Henry was responsible for kidnapping his sister, and has seemed to take his mission to study humans as an opportunity to learn about serial killers. Henry stays behind on Earth while the rest of the aliens leave, which is part of what prompts Sugar to do so as well, but rather than making this a series-wide arc, we instead pick up with Sugar finding Henry in I believe India, mortally wounded and dying and giving no real answers.
It's a rug pull on what seemed like it would be the driving question for the rest of the show.
Instead, at least so far, we find Sugar settling back into his glamorous PI lifestyle (presumably the Polyglot society had a freaking enormous reserve of money, and maybe as the only alien still on Earth, John's got the whole thing to himself).
This plot, at least at this point, is a little more modern, dealing with violent street gangs and, as the third episode ends suggesting, some sort of conspiracy involving the police (of course, it's no secret that the two are not always as distinct as one might assume).
While the plight of the Moon brothers has plenty of twists and turns, I do feel like the show has set off a giant firework in the background, and I feel like it has to put some of its energy toward exploring it. Yes, it's cool that our hero can take a shotgun blast to the chest and walk it off after an alien blood transfusion over night (hope he's got a lot of that in reserve!) but I'm going to be wondering how much the show is going to want us to periodically forget the whole "he's an alien" thing to focus on the Neo-Noir mystery unfolding.
Another dangling plot thread: Miller, evidently the leader of the alien expedition (with Ruby I guess working as a lieutenant or other kind of managerial role) got shot (and I assume killed, though given Sugar's resilience to said aforementioned shotgun blast, that's not guaranteed,) but there was no mention of his missing the departure at the end of last season. You'd think that would be a big deal.
Like... here's the thing:
Is this show going to actually go in deep on the aliens-among us and government conspiracy to control/potentially wipe out said aliens? Should I just be patient?
While he's got a swanky new house up in the hills, Sugar is still staying at his fancy resort hotel as his primary residence. There, he's been seeing and flirting with a woman (I can't recall if she's actually been named yet,) who surely must be something more important. My current theory is that she knows what he is, or suspects it at least, and is part of that government conspiracy.
Again, so far the aliens seem to be basically "human unless otherwise specified," so I guess we can assume that John is male in the same sense we would understand it, and has sexual desires as we'd understand it? Or maybe that's an assumption too far. Indeed, when he's flirting, we see the films he's thinking of (I always interpret those flashes to classic cinema as thoughts popping into his head,) so maybe he's just having fun playing the part of being a flirty human man because he's seen it in the movies, when it might be something that his species doesn't remotely do.
I'm torn: on one hand, the show is having a lot of fun recreating classic Hollywood detective stories, and the show really does feel like it's shot in LA (though watch it turn out that most of it is being shot in Atlanta except for occasional location shots,) with such a classic old-school feel. I would be frustrated if the show really just wanted us to forget the whole alien thing. But at the same time, if the show gets too focused on the sci-fi of it all, does that then make the actual human mystery feel like window dressing?
What a truly strange show.
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