Meat, sex, murder. As of this episode, John Sugar has partaken in all three. What kind of man — or “man” — does that make him?
For answers, maybe we should look to Breaking Bad, showrunner Sam Catlin’s old stomping grounds and an obvious influence on this season of Sugar, even beyond the presence of Better Call Saul villain Tony Dalton as the evil Lieutenant Vega. This episode starts with a BB/BCS-style cold open, showing us the detritus from a car crash before flashing back two days earlier to show us how that car came to be upside-down in the middle of a desert road.
Breaking Bad’s storyline is so famous by now it hardly constitutes a spoiler warning to discuss it, but the basic idea was that once a mild-mannered but frustrated science teacher started killing people, he’d never stop. The definition of “self-defense” is slowly expanded outward until he’s ordering a dozen simultaneous hits to keep people from snitching. When you break bad, or when you “assimilate” in Sugar’s parlance, there’s no going back.
Just ask Sugar’s assimilated friends Peg and Henry, both dead by their own hands. Is that where Sugar is headed? A life of crime, be it white-collar like Peg or red-handed like Henry, culminating in suicide? Or will he skip the middleman and cut straight to the killing-himself bit? Sugar connects with a cheery scene on his television right at the end of the episode, or else I’d figure self-harm was an immediate possibility.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself: In this episode, John Sugar wins.
It takes some doing. First he reaches out to a local crime boss who he knows can exert control over Vega and his co-conspirators…but the man’s ambitious shithead son sabotages his plane, killing him and keeping Vega’s prisoner, Danny Moon, right where he wants him.
Next, Sugar approaches Vega directly. He tries to make him a deal: a get-out-of-America-free card for him and his family that involves a Panamanian beach house and a small fortune. Sugar is sincere about the offer, which had to have set him back quite a bit, and for a moment it seems like he’ll appeal to the better angels of Vega’s nature. But the deputy elects to stay in the City of Angels instead.
Now the countdown for Sugar to either produce Ji Moon or lose his brother Danny forever is ticking once again. You can tell from Sugar’s demeanor that he regrets Vega’s refusal not just on the part of the Moons, but for Vega, too. I suppose he could never say he wasn’t warned.
So Sugar and his team orchestrate a ruse. Knowing they’re being listened to, Sugar and Val stage an argument in which she claims to have lost Ji. Then Ji FaceTimes Vega from the desert directly, offering to turn himself in in exchange for Danny’s safety. “No tricks, no double crosses,” he says. “Me and you and Danny.”
Vega, a guy who breaks all the rules he forces everyone else to play by, never guesses that he’s being played until it’s too late. When Ji no-shows, he gets back in his car, only to realize the man with the bag over his head in the back seat is not Danny, but John Sugar. A fight ensues, and Sugar wins by strangling Vega to death with his fancy suit’s blue necktie in the wreckage of the cop’s crashed car.
Sugar appears devastated by this act, but he hardly has time to grieve his moral code. Happy harmonica music signals to us that that time is over — it’s now time to watch the Moon brothers’ joyous reunion in the background. Their elation, and the score, suggest Sugar’s sacrifice was worth it. Sugar does not seem so sure, not even after the latest in a series of nights with Charlotte. (I’m happy to report the sex is not yadda-yadda’d in this one, though it does get combined with footage of the beach.)
Of course, there’s one more episode to go, and something obviously doesn’t sit right. Maybe the Moon brothers/LASD/Fire Sale storyline is over. But in this episode Sugar also finds out from his professor friend — who, like most people Sugar interrogates, just coughs up all the info he’s looking for almost instantly, sigh — that the four circles Sugar keeps finding doodled here and there represent “tropospheric nodes” that can be used to control the weather. Not as a weapon, though. Oh heavens, never as a weapon. I’m sure Senator Pavitch, the anti-alien politician with a serial killer for a son, has nothing but the best intentions for this device, which was almost certainly stolen from Sugar’s people and may have been the reason they fled.
The professor scene makes clear that Sugar Season 2 is not a perfect show. Even in the mostly quite enjoyable resolution to the Vega plot, there are lines of dialogue that land with a thud. “Some people here live by violence, and for them it seems it’s the only language they understand” is the kind of cliché that comes out of a Republican congressman’s comms shop for crying out loud.
But it’s ending stronger than it started, and for three episodes in a row now it’s improved demonstrably. I’m actually curious where John Sugar drives us next, and that was no guarantee a few weeks ago.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
