Sunny Recap: Bot of La Mancha

Do androids dream of electric sheep? A: It’s rhetorical, and anyway, the answer remains opaque no matter which cut of Blade Runner you consult. But Sunny’s penultimate episode reveals the conflicted conscience of its eponymous AI, and just like that patricidal, tears-rainin’ replicant Roy Batty, she’s got blood on her hands. It turns out that what homebots dream of when reflecting on their sins … is game shows.

That’s what this neurotic homebot dreams up, at any rate. For the entirety of this installment, she’s the sole contestant on a hallucinatory trial in the form of a quiz show called Should Sunny Wipe Herself?!?! [sic], replete with cheerfully animated titles and cartoonish sound cues.

Our hosts, both dressed in shiny satin, are Yuki Tanaka — the younger one, who was so drunk at the ImaTech holiday party in episode one that he casually insulted Masa when speaking to Suzie, having forgotten he was speaking to the widow of a man who’d just died — and Noriko. The pair operate like the three ghosts in A Christmas Carol, accompanying Sunny as she revisits pivotal moments from her brief life and encouraging the studio audience to indicate by applause whether it believes Sunny’s actions in each instance warrant condemnation or praise — “Wipe” or “Don’t Wipe,” respectively, with regards to Sunny’s memory. A “Wipe” verdict will send her back to the sweet oblivion of Factory Settings. The plot revelations that trickle out over these 35 minutes are as muddy and contradictory as we’ve come to expect, but the game-show device through which they’re delivered makes this installment sing in a way that Sunny hasn’t since maybe its second episode. This one is such a wild formal outlier that it doesn’t even have a title sequence.

Yuki explains that what we’re all experiencing is a “maphole,” outside the bounds of Sunny’s programming, and “down here, anything goes.” When Sunny killed Tetsu at the end of the last episode — the henchman was threatening Suzie with a pistol, you will recall — she violated the moral principles Masa programmed into her so profoundly that “your weird algorithm sent you here to confront your crimes,” Yuki says.

The game show kicks off with a segment called “Who’s in the Box?” wherein Sunny must try to identify three guests whose faces are visible to the audience but not to her through touch. The first one is the tiny avian corpse of Joey, the sickly baby crow Sunny adopted against Suzie’s wishes and tried to nurse back to health in episode five. Sunny now says that this was her effort to understand Suzie’s pain at having lost a child — which prompts the dead bird to spring back to life and start squawking. “So I was just a prop!?” Joey demands, in colorfully animated subtitles. On the strength of this line reading, I’d like to petition Tim Cook to give the miniature crow puppet that appears onscreen for maybe five seconds its own three-season series on AppleTV+.

The occupant of the next box is Takumi — the “dildo dealer,” Sunny calls him accurately — who has been made to suffer at the hands of the yakuza for helping Suzie and Mixxy score some black-market bot code. He’s missing teeth, his eyes are so swollen he can barely open them behind his broken glasses, and his right ear looks like it’s been chewed on by a rabid dog. “It feels like it could be infected,” Sunny says unhelpfully.

Occupying the third box is Mixxy, the object of Takumi’s crush and of Sunny’s ire. Addressing Sunny in English but the audience in Japanese, Mixxy alleges that Sunny attacked her, calling the bot — that word again — pathological. “She had a blade to Suzie’s throat,” Sunny protests. “What was I supposed to do, compliment her knife skills?”

Noriko calls for a playback of the scene from episode seven where Sunny slugs Mixxy in the gut. This clip is our first glimpse of Suzie in this episode, and it plays out just as we saw it two weeks ago. There’s no knife; Sunny’s attack is unprovoked. The bot is confused and horrified. “Did I really hurt all those people?” she asks. (Does this also mean that Sunny imagined the gun that Tetsu was holding to Suzie’s head in the last episode when Sunny killed him?) As this first round concludes, the Clap-o-Meter indicates an overwhelming preference among the audience for “Wipe” over “Don’t Wipe.”

“Tough crowd,” Yuki quips. Then the house lights go up to reveal that the audience is, in fact, 50 doppelgängers of Masa. (What is this, Dark Matter?) One of the Masa-gangers stands and addresses Sunny, speaking into a Should Sunny Wipe Herself–branded microphone: “Seems like maybe you’re not that great a bot.” And so we reach the game’s second segment, “Why Would Masa Make Such a Bad Bot?”

It kicks off with what appears to be an ImaTech-produced promotional film, complete with artificial nicks and scratches to suggest a much-handled reel of celluloid (even though we’re supposedly in the future), narrated by Noriko. In the film, Masa recalls how his own experience of hikikomori convinced him that homebots could be made emotionally sophisticated enough to help painfully reclusive people reintegrate into society. “A scientist and a poet,” Noriko swoons over her son as the promo film plays.

After an experimental period of encouraging homebots to form emotional attachments to one another, Masa says, he began human trials. His most important subject was Asahi, a young man so afflicted by shyness that “he could barely be in the same room as another person, let alone make eye contact.” In the video, Masa recounts how a homebot designated No. 6 slowly acquires Asahi’s trust over the course of a year, culminating in Asahi’s embrace of No. 6 as they watch a baseball game on TV together. Admittedly, this seems like flimsy evidence of Asahi’s emotional growth, but we are watching an ImaTech commercial — as generated by Sunny’s glitchy artificial subconscious. So take all of this with a grain of possibly irradiated salt.

The video then moves on to footage of two homebots performing dentistry on an ImaTech lab assistant named Kaz. One of them, identified as No. 32, asks the bot that actually has its big white digits in Kaz’s mouth to be more gentle, as Kaz has begun moaning in pain. When the dentist-bot does not obey, No. 32 shoves it into a wall and begins throwing punches, telling Kaz, “I won’t let them hurt you!”

In the present, Sunny cries out for the footage to stop, and it does. She’s surprised to learn that she can control the playback. “We’re not supposed to do that,” she says of her own attack on the dentist-bot.

“In order for our system to work, we had to cultivate authentic emotions in you,” says Masa from the audience. Anytime a homebot violated its programming, he would isolate the errant snatch of code and give it a name. In the surveillance video or whatever playback we’re seeing — it’s no longer an ImaTech promo — Masa says, “I’ll call this one ‘Junk League’” and then draws his familiar hanko with his finger on the touch screen of his laptop.

When the playback of the dentistry incident starts again, we see that Asahi has run into the operating room to make sure that Kaz was not injured in the bot-fight. Masa points out that this empathy from Asahi would have been unthinkable before his year of homebot-enabled therapy.

This concludes the second round of the game. The applause from the crowd of Masas (I counted 50 of him) indicates a clear preference for “Not Wipe.” Yuki congratulates Sunny on her survival, but the bot is more anxious than ever. “I went to a robot fight called ‘Junk League,’” she protests. “So clearly the bug got out!”

So begins Round 3, for which the animated title card reads, “How the Fuck Did This Shit Get So Fucked Up?”

This section commences with Kaz complaining to Masa how he could’ve been blinded or worse when the fight between the homebots broke out. It’s unclear how Sunny has access to this footage; this part is not presented as an ImaTech promotional film. But then the entirety of this episode is set inside Sunny’s machine consciousness anyway, so electric-sheep dream logic abounds. And that’s before Masa and Kaz are joined in this flashback by Yuki, the same man who in the “present” is hosting this game show in a red satin suit, but who in the flashback has barged into Masa’s office dressed in his ImaTech lab coat.

Yuki stops the playback and tries to conclude the game show, but Sunny puts her (purely metaphorical) foot down, demanding that the footage be allowed to play on. Within that playback we see Yuki use a small data drive concealed within a vacuum cleaner to steal the tainted code that allows bots to misbehave. Newly aware of his subordinate’s duplicity, Masa charges at Yuki from his seat among his look-alikes in the audience. Yuki tries to flee, but Noriko conks him on the head with her fan and drags him into a Mr. Frigid ImaTech Smart Fridge. “I learned that one in prison!” she quips.

The flashback continues as we see one homebot breaking up with another because it has fallen in love with Asahi. No. 17, the spurned homebot, begins beating No. 6, the bot who dumped it, with a chair. Asahi, who had been sitting with actual human beings in another corner of the room, runs over and jumps on top of No. 6, shielding the bot with his body, which does nothing to stop No. 17 from continuing to rain down blows until it has opened a gnarly, fatal wound in Asahi’s forehead. This is the robot murder we saw in the cold open of the very first episode. We had been led to believe this was Sunny’s original sin. It was a misdirect. Sunny did not commit this violent act, but she witnessed it. She’s remained traumatized by it.

After making a futile effort to revive Asahi with chest compressions, Masa orders No. 17 to sleep and then to wake again. It greets Masa calmly, its memory of having been broken up with and then having bludgeoned poor Asahi to death seemingly erased. Masa then grabs the murder weapon — the smoking chair — and beats No. 17 with it.

As other ImaTech staffers arrive to clean up the bloodshed, Masa confides in Kaz that he believes the yakuza has been following him. He orders Kaz to go home and says that he will purge the homebots, accepting the entirety of the blame for this tragedy himself. Again, we see him draw his hanko on the screen, an image we’d glimpsed in prior episodes but for which we now have greater context.

As this flashback/playback/whatever-it-is ends, Noriko contests its authenticity. “Masa would never do that!” she says. A title card tells us four hours have passed, and the perspective shifts again to that of No. 32. A drunken Masa has ordered the bot to awake so he can apologize. He addresses it as “Three Two.” Spoken aloud in Japanese in that sequence, those Japanese numbers sound like “Sunny” in English. But Sunny is too horrified by what she’s learned about her creator to be charmed by the origin of her name.

“What kind of monster covers up a man’s death and then saves a robot?” Sunny demands of Masa. “For Suzie,” Masa answers.

He says he knew that if the yakuza learned one of his homebots was capable of murder, they would come to him and demand the errant code that made this possible — and probably kill him once they got it. (This doesn’t tell us why Masa believed the yakuza was watching him before this all went down.)

“Suzie’s like I used to be,” he says. She wouldn’t survive the loneliness his death would bring. In this scenario, declares Masa, Sunny was “the poison and the antidote.”

So he wiped Sunny’s memory, reprogrammed her to obey and protect Suzie — though he made a hash of it, obviously; he probably should’ve stayed in refrigerators given his litany of deadly fuckups — and then brought Sunny to his father, Hiromasa, to deliver to Suzie. Right?

Wrong. Sunny isn’t buying this explanation. She demands that Masa be subjected to his own round of “Who’s in the Box?” The next guest is Himé, the embittered Oyabun’s daughter/lover of Tetsu. But instead of further implicating Masa, Himé demands that Sunny take responsibility for her growing propensity for violence. “Do you know how to boil a frog?” Himé asks, explaining that each of Sunny’s small transgressions expanded her ability to contradict her programming incrementally. Eventually, she was capable of ignoring it entirely.

Sunny says she “felt different” after Himé abducted her and then returned her to Suzie; her cold behavior toward Suzie in episode seven was intended to push Suzie away for her own safety. But Himé denies having sabotaged Sunny’s code. She manipulated the bot emotionally, not technologically.

“You took advantage of how much I love her,” Sunny whimpers.

Suddenly, the audience of Masas has vanished. Sunny must decide her own fate. Here, the show revisits the visual language of 20th-century film stock to represent a memory, as Sunny plays back a flickering recollection of Suzie inviting — ordering, actually — the homebot to lie beside her in bed. This moment from episode two is the happiest of Sunny’s short life. A Japanese-language version of “Dulcinea” begins, and it hasn’t been included merely for its haunting chorus: In the 1965 musical Man of La Mancha, the ballad expresses Don Quixote’s eternal devotion to a woman he believes to be a queen, though she is in truth a waitress and a sex worker.

At peace with her decision, Sunny rolls herself through the red double doors marked “Wipe.”

Subprime Directives

• Even after the studio audience has been revealed to contain 50 Masas and zero non-Masas, we still hear the audience ooohh and aaahh in response to the events of the game, in what is audibly a mix of male- and female-sounding voices. He contains multitudes, I guess.

• This is the second consecutive episode in which star Rashida Jones is almost entirely absent, with Suzie appearing only in a brief flashback in its final moments.