As I mentioned in an earlier post about this unusual mystery show, I've found some parallels with my favorite Christopher Nolan film (and among my favorite films period,) The Prestige. In that movie, which non-linearly (it's Nolan, naturally) traces the deadly rivalry between two turn-of-the-century magicians (can we still call 1900 the turn of the century if we just say 2000 was the turn of the millennium? As someone born, as the young kids would say now, "in the 1900s," it's easier for me if that terminology remains the same). The movie presents a formula for a magic trick, and then structures the film in a similar way.
I will say that I don't know if this terminology (The Pledge, the Turn, and the Prestige as the three "acts" of a magic trick) has any basis in the actual craft or was just invented for the novel upon which the film is based (Nolan would similarly present a bunch of internally consistent rules about dream logic in Inception that don't necessarily actually correspond to, you know, my experience of dreaming,) but it's a handy structure, foreshadowing that the film has not one, but two big plot twists, one of which is easier to anticipate than the other, and thus might lull the audience into thinking they'd outwitted the film much as a magician wants their audience to think they've figured out the trick, only to prove their earlier theory wrong.
What kind of show is Sugar?
Let's get into spoiler territory.
The Noir mystery and crime drama of Sugar's second season is fairly straightforward, possessing the typical twists and turns of such a detective story. Ji Moon, by sheer dumb bad luck, witnessed the murder of a gang member who was in the hospital at the hands of a corrupt cop named Vega. Vega (Tony Dalton) is a really scary antagonist throughout the season, using his badge to shield himself from scrutiny.
It's a fairly elaborate conspiracy: flooding LA's homeless population with cheap fentanyl to get lots of people to die of overdoses while stealing their identities to take advantage of a federal grant that would be giving them housing assistance.
And Vega is just part of it - that's why, when he's dead in the desert, strangled to death by our heroic PI John Sugar, and the Moon brothers are reunited and free from the shadow of this murderous dirty cop, there's a lingering sense that something isn't resolved, that the danger hasn't passed.
And again, it's truly insane to me that this show lets you get so focused on the nitty-gritty of the crime drama that you can periodically forget, or at least push to the back of your mind, the fact that John Sugar is actually an alien - a literal extraterrestrial who has only been on Earth for eleven years.
Fun fact: director George Cukor's last name is pronounced in Hungarian as "Tsukor," and literally means Sugar. I wonder if cinephile John over here chose the name in tribute to the director of Gaslight, Adam's Rib, A Star is Born, and My Fair Lady.
Anyway, we do get a glimpse of John on his first mission to Earth. Evidently, the aliens used to come and go, and there's even evidence that his long lost sister Djen was there with him on that first visit (I think we also saw a picture of them together in Paris). Sugar was there to escort one of the other alien visitors back to their home planet after she broke their code - evidently some kind of financial fraud.
As far as we're told, Sugar's species has a somewhat utopian world, committed, among other things, to nonviolence. Visitors to Earth have to abide by a few rules to protect humanity and themselves, among them being to never kill and also never have sex with humans.
Well, Sugar crossed that first one off in season one, though his colleagues seemed willing to look past it when it was done in self defense, and even expressing little more than mild concern when he killed Stallings despite his having the man at his mercy.
But it seems that the broader danger is "assimilation," a process in which the aliens come to identify so much with their human personas that they start embodying some of our worst aspects. Certainly Henry seemed to fall into that trap: was his kidnapping and presumably murder of Djen learned behavior after being exposed to violence on Earth?
At the end of season one, the aliens all leave Earth, except for Sugar, who remains behind ostensibly to find Henry, a shaggy dog story that we conclude right at the start of this season with Henry's unexplained death. Now, Sugar seems to regret missing the boat, as it were, though I think he was already reluctant to leave behind the world he had come to love.
But it surely is changing him.
Again, Sugar is a weirdly inverted version of the classic Film Noir detective - the classic archetype is someone who maybe started off idealistic, but by the time we encounter them, they've become bitter and cynical and beaten down. Granted, often these stories reveal that underneath that tough facade, there's a core of principle and duty, but the stories then often end with those latent heroic values being punished with a grim and tragic ending.
Sugar espouses truly admirable values - I think one of the best character-revealing scenes is when he is visiting Chuy's (the murdered witness) grandmother and, seeking for a way to ease her burden just a little bit, wordlessly starts washing the dishes that have piled up in the sink.
Sugar is a good person, but the real threat to him in this series is that the world in which he has immersed himself - Earth, broadly, but the world of crime-solving in particular - threatens to darken his soul and slowly corrode him.
Anyway, why was I talking about the Presitge?
Well, yes, the drugs-to-apartments-to-federal-grant-money conspiracy is certainly something that probably has more powerful people than Vega working on it, I suspect that this season finale is going to go in a different direction.
Spying on former senator Pavich, the father of the serial killer who kidnapped Olivia in the first season, Sugar found out that there's some work being done on some insanely advanced technology that could, in theory, halt climate change and more or less give us control over the planet's atmosphere. Sounds great, but my guess is that the technology was stolen from Sugar's people, and its actual applications are, well, who knows what they might be?
Sugar has been dating and now sleeping with Charlotte, the woman he met at the hotel (there's another mark against him on the alien code - though if he's the only one still on the planet, who's going to enforce said code?) and I think the show has worked hard to make us forget the time that she snuck into his room. As Sugar is dissociating after killing Vega in his room, she finds the sketched diagram of the climate-control technology, and boy, narrative economy suggests to me that she has to be involved in the weird alien-controlling conspiracy. She describes her work as being "humanitarian," and I find that word an interesting choice given that not every sapient person in the conversation is, in fact, human.
I'm really liking the show (I mean, it's got me writing a blog post at almost 3 in the morning) but I do find it... tantalizing. This was a word that a professor once used on a paper I had submitted, and while the word often has positive connotations, let us remember that it's derived from the myth of Tantalus, who was tortured by the gods by always having fruit and wine just barely out of reach.
Sugar pulled a crazy trigger with its sci-fi alien reveal, but nearly a full two seasons into the show, it's very hesitant to explore all the implications of that reveal.
With the main mystery/crime drama resolved with an episode left, does that mean we get to fully commit to some real answers and development of the big alien plot? I guess you might see a blog post soon about just that.
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