Sugar Finale Recap: Farewell, My Lovely John Sugar
The series doesn’t end with a bang or a whimper but a semi-wrapped-up investigation that leaves the door open for more mysteries.
Three words: “I found her.”
With three words, you can end the nightmare. John Sugar has found Olivia Siegel. He’s bringing her home, still breathing. Case closed, “all sewn up like a big bag of shit,” to borrow a phrase from Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye. We cut to Orson Welles walking through the final frames of The Lady From Shanghai — a thousand-yard stare past an empty black-and-white ocean horizon. No matter where, when, or how you find yourself in Los Angeles, getting to the bottom of something is only ever scratching the surface of something else. And the larger, more sinister forces at work remain obscured.
Sugar has returned Olivia to the Siegels (he drops her off in Melanie’s arms, the safest place on earth he knows), and the Polyglots are making a mad dash off the planet. In finding Olivia, Sugar has exposed the Pavich family, and a shrouded group of “powerful people” are after them. Miller doesn’t make it to the airport, where everyone will be beaming up through a hole in the sky or something — unceremoniously shot in the head by a traffic cop. This suggests a whole network of corporate actors and government agents who know that aliens walk among us — a “Men in Black”–type deal but with a sinister CIA vibe. An intriguing foe for a Fugitive-esque second season about an alien PI roaming the earth, doing good deeds, ever searching for the one killer that got away.
That’s right; John Sugar’s going to be sticking around on earth for a while longer. It’s always the stones left unturned that inevitably reinvigorate the scent and put you back on the trail. With Olivia safe and sound, Sugar seems poised to leave Earth by sunset with the others. He has but a few final house calls to make — first to Henry Thorpe’s to borrow a CD player, then to the Siegels to settle a few matters on that family saga. En route to Jonathan Siegel’s house, he listens to the CD recording of the Pavich kid (a distractingly rote set of serial-killer “pop-psychologisms” ending with the sounds of a hammer crashing over a victim’s skull). Sugar can’t bring himself to listen to the whole thing for now. But something is nagging at him, and there’s a clue on that CD.
Margit is looking at photos of her son in an album when Sugar arrives at the Siegel mansion. I’m not really sure why it’s her there and not Bernie. It is a thin contrivance, but it provides a great little moment for Colin Farrell to play off of Anna Gunn’s energy in a satisfying way. Once again, Sugar tows that heartbreaking line between pity and empathy within the space of a tempered breath and a twinkling eye. “You know, I saw [David] in The Boy in the Corner a while ago. He was … he was really good,” he tells her. And he means it.
“To say that I thank you would be a gross understatement,” Jonathan tells Sugar in their final meeting. Olivia hasn’t talked about what happened in the Paviches’ basement. To be expected. But right now, it’s Jonathan for whom Sugar has some burning questions.
“Clifford Carter’s body. I’m just going to assume it was you that arranged to have it go missing from the trunk of Olivia’s car,” Sugar says, setting the terms of their conversation. The jig is up, but it’s better the police aren’t involved from here on out. This is a safe space to air all the dirty laundry. Sugar hands Jonathan the polaroids of Rachel Kaye. He knows it was Jonathan who took them, having recognized the dress in his late wife Lorraine’s room and figured out the pictures were taken there. And there it is, the Chinatown-light family secret: Olivia is actually Jonathan’s daughter, the end result of a lurid affair between a powerful Hollywood producer and his son’s wife. Not exactly reinventing the wheel here (though that’s never really been the name of the game) but not wholly unintriguing as performed by James Cromwell, who’s no stranger to playing a man of experience, both hardened by and clear-eyed about the sum total of his life’s experiences and gruesome follies.
She’s loved, Sugar replies. That’s all that matters. Jonathan Siegel can consider the matter closed as far as he and Oliva are concerned. “Grace and sensitivity,” Jonathan says in casual amazement, “to the end.” But there’s an unwitting, foreboding air to those last three words — a passing notion out of the ether that grace and sensitivity can get you in hot water if you let it.
I’m sure they’re out there, but I’ve yet to see a single naysayer to Colin Farrell’s work on this show. And if there’s a single co-star we can thank for consistently bringing the raw wonder out of our guy, it’s Amy Ryan. On paper, the Melanie character was about as thinly (or intricately, depending on the day) drawn as every other member of the Siegel family, but Ryan brings her usual hypnotic well of warmth and vulnerability to all her scenes with Farrell. And together, they exuberate a galaxy of indefinable, intimate love that I’ll remember as the show’s emotional core. Sugar bids the closest connection he’s ever had to the human side of humanity — warts and ever-present, immense potential for good and all — the fondest of farewells. He shows Melanie his true face (or eyes, in this case, but the “face” as an emblem of “identity” is the point). “I’ve never shown a human being. It’s strictly against the rules,” Sugar says in voice-over. “But I’m glad I did.” The look has already said it all. Sugar has secured his humanity, not through the movies, but through a soul connection that transcends every role and every reference. Every trope you ever heard about deadly dames and tall, dark, and handsome private eyes.
“The humans we told you about are hunting us,” Ruby tells Sugar over the phone. “They want us gone so they can find out about our pact.” Another cloying case of “tell, don’t show” in the final stretch here, but the heat is closing in on our alien friends, and Sugar feels the fork in the road erupting from the time crunch. Nevertheless, he finds time to return to the Siegel mansion to check in on Olivia. She’s ready to speak about Pavich’s basement, confirming a nagging suspicion already percolating in Sugar’s head. There was a second person in the room with Pavich. Olivia could hear him writing.
Revealing Henry as Sugar’s dark antithesis might have also benefited from an earlier drop in the season, but it mostly works as a hard-boiled last-minute sickening of the plot. “The ability to hold a variety of opposing thoughts and feelings at the exact same time,” Thorpe says to his class in the previous episode. “This is why you are here, and your distant ancestors are not.” Looks like our alien professor’s gone a little “mad doctor” with this intergalactic observe-and-report mission.
Sci-fi and noir are both rich with stories of psychopaths and the antisocial mechanisms of power that house them. Sugar does a serviceable, if not rushed, job blending tugging at these threads in the final genre mix of it all. “We knew about Pavich,” Ruby tells Sugar. They all did and kept it secret for the sake of the mission. “But, Jen, I had no idea.” Sugar stopped trusting Ruby and the others a couple of episodes back, but he knows he’s getting the straight truth from her now. Jen’s dress, left behind by Henry, may be a red herring, but Sugar’s already heard the call to track his nemesis down and stop him from “observing” and fostering the work of other killers. “These people,” he says. “For better or worse, I like them.” Grace and sensitivity. To the end.
Is Jen still alive? Was Henry really the one who took her in the first place? We’ll probably never know. A fraught eight-episode run ends with neither a bang nor a whimper. Consistent with the rest of the show, the finale is a little trite and obvious and tells more than it shows. But it does stick a satisfying landing of sorts — serviceably hitting all the sci-fi-noir genre beats while actually teeing up a compelling case for a second season (not that that’s likely in the wake of the “big alien reveal” and its near-universal lukewarm-to-icy reception). The tides of television turn fast in Los Angeles. For now, it’s as good a place as any to say farewell to the lovely John Sugar.
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