WTF is Happening in Sugar?!
Seriously, it can’t really be …
We were due to write a review of Sugar, the new Apple TV+ detective series with Colin Farrell after watching the first two episodes but got delayed and ended up watching the third episode and …. WTF is going on?!! Major SPOILERS follow, like BIG SPOILERS so leave now if you don’t want to know anything!
We say spoilers, but it’s more speculation as we haven’t seen the full series yet, only the three episodes released so far. So … beware our SPECULATION!
Where do we start? Maybe with our now obsolete review of the first two episodes. Sugar is a private detective show, with Colin Farrell as John Sugar, who specialises at finding missing people. We see his skills in play in Japan where he finds a kidnapped boy, then we’re off to Holywood where he’s hired by a movie mogul type, Mr. Siegel, to find his missing 25 year old granddaughter, Olivia. All perfectly normal so far — it’s an Apple show so it’s made well, looks great and is full of good actors. Farrell is a movie star, and looks amazing as the good hearted private eye who loves old movies and who clearly fancies himself as a bit of noir hero himself. He’s smart, speaks multiple languages, drives a cool car, wears Saville Row suits, and can look after himself physically as we see in a couple of skirmishes. The series is good, a little bit ‘arty’ as you’d expect from a prestige TV series with a big star, but it moves quickly and doesn’t get too fancy with itself.
Ok so far? We were too, then we watched Episode 3 … after which we said, and we quote: “What the f***?”, then grabbed our phone and googled — we’re having difficult even saying this, we googled — “Is John Sugar an alien?”. An ALIEN! Yes, please keep reading, we haven’t lost our minds. We did some more googling and it appears from folks who’ve seen and reviewed the entire series that there’s a big twist in the show (we still haven’t gotten around to requesting preview access to Apple TV+ shows but will be after this!).
Why do we think aliens? We meet in earlier episodes Sugar’s boss / handler (the always amazing Kirby Howell-Baptiste) who seems to be the one who sets him up with jobs, and she’s not happy that he’s taken on a new missing person’s case so soon after the last one. In Episode 3 however, Sugar goes to a party at her house where there are many other folks who he knows, who all take turns talking to her in private. When it’s his turn, it’s for her to chastise him on his bad reporting of … humans, we think? There’s a big black case on the table which he glances at, while asking about ‘Them’. Later, she’s seen opening the case and typing into what looks like an old typewriter — perchance communicating with her alien overlords?! All sound a bit, circumstantial? We started thinking back over what we’d seen so far — like when Sugar lifts a big guy off his feet in one scene, and then remembered all the scenes where he … looks up at the moon! Are ‘They’ up there?! He also injects himself in the neck with some drug that we presumed before was heroin or something, but now we’re wondering is it something to help his alien body function on our planet!
Maybe we’re getting it all wrong, and these are clues placed to confuse us. Maybe there’s another crazy explanation — like he’s a clone, or a robot, or … maybe, just once, the answer is ALIENS! If that is the case, I think we may need to sit down somewhere and a have a quiet drink, a bit like Sugar enjoys doing (for the “romance of it”) and wonder what the writers were drinking when they turned a pretty cool looking private eye show into … what, revenge of the body snatchers? In fact, we’re off now to have that drink. Come back soon when hopefully we’ll have more answers!
This review was originally posted on my site NOadsHERE:
