So, in The X-Files, there was this idea that was somewhat less common in TV in the early 90s: The Myth Arc. While the show primarily followed a case-of-the-week format, sending Scully and Mulder out to various places in the US investigating paranormal cases that could afford to be wrapped up neatly by the episode's end, on occasion you'd get "Myth Arc" episodes that dealt with the grand conspiracy covering up and working with would-be alien invaders.
In the early seasons, these episodes were amazing and exciting, cranking up the tension as we, along with our heroic FBI agents, wanted to learn more answers. By the later seasons, this plot had gotten so convoluted that it became sort of tiresome, though, and the show's more episodic format, which allowed for really wild creative and formalist swings, came into focus as the show's strong suit.
Sugar is structured very differently, of course: in its two seasons, Sugar investigates a pair of missing persons cases, though while the first season is more traditional in a "just where exactly is she?" kind of search, the question of where Ji Moon is in season two is less important than the question of how do we keep this schmuck from getting murdered?
But Sugar has a running arc story, and one that the show spends far less time focusing on. In two seasons, this is the only episode we've gotten that I think is primarily focused on his individual, personal story, with really more of an epilogue for the season plot.
(As an aside, I'm always shocked that more shows don't use the Buffy the Vampire Slayer format, which has episodic and seasonal plots, the but the series-wide arcs are really only broadly about the lives of its main characters rather than overcoming some specific antagonist.)
Of course, this being a mystery show, we'll do another spoiler cut here.
I always found it a notable choice to have Sugar talk so frequently about his missing sister Djen without ever showing flashbacks, except vague ones on their home planet in their natural forms.
Oh yeah, did you click the spoiler button and not realize what you were getting into? Yeah, this is a sci-fi show and our detective protagonist is an alien. Try to keep up.
The notion that Djen was not, in fact, kidnapped and murdered, and that she actually had Henry fake her abduction to get out from under the control of the "Polyglot Society" so she could pursue her goals sort of looks inevitable in retrospect through genre conventions. You just cannot make such a crucially important character and never show her without raising suspicions that she's not so dead and gone as you might think.
And also... well, Djen's up to no good. The lost-sibling-as-villain thing is also a common trope. Indeed, I can think of another sci-fi Noir show from the last few years (though one that approaches that balance firmly on the sci-fi side first) that goes the same way. (I'll avoid naming it, though I think I wrote about it on this blog, and it's not The Expanse, which kind of dropped the Noir-ish elements after finishing the events of the first book.)
Yes, she's the one who introduced this climate-control technology, intending to undo the harm that humanity has done to our climate (and look, if I had a magic alien technology that could stop climate change, I'd be very happy about that) but while these ends seem noble (though put a pin in that,) the kinds of people she has gotten involved with to do so, like Pavich, are not exactly humanity at their best.
Not only did she sell out the other aliens, exposing them to a faction of humanity ready and willing to murder them if needs be, and while it's never confirmed, I assume it's her conspiracy that murders Henry to cover her tracks (something I really wish we had gotten some real confirmation of,) but her miraculous creation of rain, snow, and fake sunlight over a wowed crowd in the Hollywood Hills likely has more sinister purposes. After she has Charlotte (oh yeah, Charlotte was totally her agent all along, though Charlotte claims that apart from the observing and taking notes about how Sugar was doing, the whole romantic connection was genuine) incapacitate him with Chekov's Cinnamon Allergy, she confesses to him that this technology isn't for "them" (aka humanity,) but for "us," (presumably their species). While her demonstration goes off in a totally lovely manner, I feel pretty confident that her long-term solution to humanity's impact on the climate is to wipe us all out - though how this helps their species is up in the air.
I mean, why are the aliens here on Earth? I'd generally assumed them to be explorers merely curious to learn more about similar species on other planets. Surely if they needed another planet to colonize because of environmental problems at home, couldn't they just use this technology to fix their planet. (This is an argument I've been hearing more recently about why terraforming Mars to escape climate crises on Earth is silly - if we had the technology to make Mars habitable, surely we'd have the technology to repair the damage we've done to Earth?)
My feelings toward this show are so bizarrely mixed: I really love the way that it shoots Los Angeles (and really emphatically shoots recognizable locations to assure you that this is not, like, Atlanta or Vancouver doubling as the city that used to be where everything was shot, but is the real deal). I love its take on Golden Age of Hollywood aesthetics (I actually love the intercut clips from old movies). And, to be frank, I actually love the insanely big swing of also being a sci-fi show where the detecive is an alien.
But I sometimes feel like there's a little bit... missing. Like, I don't know that these two genres have been properly blended together, the mix feeling a bit lumpy. The earthbound mysteries that make up the primary arc of each season feel pretty tightly plotted, and if there are big plot holes, I don't really see any. But it sometimes feels like that grander, personal plot for Sugar is a little incomplete. Again, Sugar shows up to Henry's bungalow on the beach at the start of this season and finds him bleeding from a gut wound and dying, but we still don't know what, exactly, happened there. It looks like Sugar found him that way. If that's a question that the show is setting up for a later reveal, well... A: it needed to really linger on it and call back to it to remind the audience that this is an open question and B: wouldn't the finale have been a great time to answer it, or at least address it? It feels similar to Miller's murder at the end of the first season: sure, we know that aliens are being hunted down as they get ready to leave the planet, but there's not really any mention of the fact that the expedition's leader was killed.
I wonder if there were scenes cut for some reason?
I mean, it's funny: I clearly liked the show, given how quickly I blew through it. (I also saw my real-life friend in it - she plays the woman who greets Ji at the rehab clinic by the pool.) There's so much to recommend about it, but just these weird little oddities about the show's priorities.
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