‘Sugar’ Episode 3 Recap: Who Goes There?

Uhhh…is John Sugar an alien? 

Is Ruby an alien? Is everyone in the Société Polyglotte Cosmpolitaine an alien? 

Is Sugar a show about aliens???????????

Forgive me if I’m jumping off the deep end here. I suppose there could be any number of explanations for John Sugar’s physical inability to get drunk, or his ability to catch flies with chopsticks, or his immunity to anger and violence. Maybe the Société Polyglotte Cosmpolitaine is just a run of the mill organization of ex-spies who come together to save the world, like Davey Siegel suggests — and which Bernie Siegel rejects as the preposterous premise of one of his own shitty movies. Maybe when Ruby tells Sugar “We’re here to observe these people, not participate in their lives,” she’s not echoing Star Trek’s Prime Directive, nor Jor-El’s words to Kal-El in Superman: “Even though you’ve been raised as a human being, you are not one of them.”

But anything’s possible, right? And a private-eye series willing to bend the genre far enough to incorporate a hero who’s a pure white hat is probably willing to bend it even farther and place that white hat atop a large, domelike grey head, right?

Look, I feel that through context clues, this is a perfectly reasonable assumption. And it goes beyond the stuff listed above. Look at the entire SPC, waiting dutifully to hand over their identical private journals to Ruby for evaluation in a weird green interrogation room, after which she types her conclusions into some kind of Naked Lunch typewriter. He asks her “Have you heard from Them?” She tells him “They say that They’re counting on us.” Capitalization implied.

Listen to his conversation with his fellow agent Henry (Ozark standout Jason Butler Harner), who refers to himself as “an anthropologist” and who’s suffering the same medical symptoms as Sugar, and has to go see the same mysterious Doctor Wickham as a result. Hell, consider even Sugar’s out of character interest in the work of the band UFO — UFO!!! — relative to his otherwise exclusive obsession with midcentury Hollywood cinema. At the very least, we’re being head-faked in an extraterrestrial direction.

Everyone’s pulling one over on everyone else in this short but sweet episode. (I love shows that are just whatever length an episode feels like being.) The big bombshell is Melanie, who seems to still be an item with Bernie, her ex-husband. Bernie, of course, is actively covering up his son Davey’s history of sexual assault, which would get in the way of the Best Actor Oscar that he and Davey’s mother, egotistical actor Margit (Anna freaking Gunn), want so badly for him to get. How any of this squares with the work that Melanie was doing with her missing stepdaughter Olivia in helping battered women like Carmen Vasquez find safety is beyond me, but of course that’s the point of the contradiction, to make it confusing.

For his part, Sugar pretends to be a parole officer in order to rescue Teresa Vasquez, Carmen’s surviving sister, from Stallings, the associate of her murderer. (Both Sugar and Stallings have a past as government agents, or at least that’s what the records show.) The ruse is on the verge of failing until his civilian associate Charlie (Paula Andrea Placido) creates a diversion, allowing Sugar to knock out the goon left behind to guard him and escape with Teresa and her family. Stallings was on the verge of putting her hand in a blender to get intel out of Melanie, whom he’d forced Teresa to lure to the apartment, until Sugar and Charlie sprang into action. He’s a tough customer.

There are other interesting wrinkles to the case. While Davey seems to be a WYSIWYG moron, his right-hand man Kenny is both intelligent and seductive. He uses his masculine wiles on an NSA agent, Everett Roberts (Jonathan Slavin), to get the skinny on Sugar’s (alleged) background. In addition to making Kenny a more formidable opponent, this also makes him a more interesting character, one who can hold down scenes of his own. 

There’s something more to the killing that appears to have caused Olivia to flee than meets the eye as well. The way Melanie explains it, Olivia killed Clifford Carter after finding that he’d killed Carmen, hid his body with Melanie’s help, then skipped town. Even before we know for a fact that Melanie is still on good terms with her shady ex, Bernie, Sugar wonders why they didn’t just call the cops over a clear case of self-defense, and why Olivia hasn’t called her wealthy, well-connected, well-respected grandfather for help or money since she ran if that was the only reason she was missing. 

Finally, it’s worth remembering that despite his first-person narration, we viewers are privvy to much that he isn’t. It’s not just Bernie and Davey’s scheming, or Melanie’s double dealing — it’s a betrayal by Ruby herself. On the phone with the much-ballyhooed Dr. Vickers, she says that Sugar knows about Stallings. “It’s only a matter of time before he discovers the rest,” she says. “It’s time to stop him,” the voice on the other end replies. Can this insanely overpowered man, or creature in the semblance of a man, be stopped at all?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.