A lone shovel. Abandoned golf clubs. Beer cans, a roll of duct tape, and other random items scattered in the desert dirt. An overturned Ford. Sounds of physical struggle. And John Sugar’s soothing voice telling viewers, “I tried. I did. I put everything on the table. I tried my best. But some people here live by violence. And for them it seems…it’s the only language they understand.”
That’s the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul-esque opening scene of Sugar Season 2, Episode 7, “What Else Can You Do?” After the credits sequence wraps, the Apple TV series takes us back two days to show the events that led up to that shocking sight. And Decider spoke with Sugar stars Colin Farrell and Tony Dalton to break down the violent, jaw-dropping end of Season 2’s penultimate episode.
Spoilers for Sugar Season 2, Episode 7 ahead.
With Danny Moon (Jin Ha) in jail, Episode 207 opens with Sugar (Farrell) racking his brain over ways to take down Vega (Dalton). He calls in a favor from Sergey Ojeda — head of Los Universales cartel, whom he did a job for years ago — and asks him to free Danny and get Vega, an enforcer of his Fire Sale business, to back off.
Sugar warns Vega, “It’s over Ray. Sergey can have you in a barrel at the bottom of the ocean tonight…I want Danny out.” And for a moment, it felt as though our guy finally had the upper hand. But in a twist, Sergey’s plane goes down that night. Turns out the cartel leader’s son, Diego, was the one running the Fire Sale and working with Vega. So Sugar turns to Plan B. He offers Vega passports so he and his family can flee to a beachside villa in Panama. Much to Sugar’s dismay, Ray refuses the chance to start over and demands he turn over Ji (Raymond Lee). So Ji takes matters into his own hands — or so we’re led to believe…
Ji calls Vega and offers to trade his life for his brother’s freedom. Vega agrees, puts Danny in the back seat of his car with a bag over his head, and drives to the meeting location. When he fails to find Ji, he returns to his car, only to find Sugar has swapped places with Danny to carry out Plan C: deception and murder. As Vega drives off, Sugar strangles him from behind. Vega loses control of the vehicle, which flips. But both men survive and start duking it out in a brutal, bloody fist fight. Vega smashes Sugar with a hammer, but Sugar strangles the Lieutenant with his own tie, whispering, “I told you. I told you.” After Vega takes his final breath, Sugar breaks down, distraught and fully “assimilated.”
When Farrell spoke with Decider, he teased that the act is not something Sugar will easily get over. “At least with Charlotte, Sugar’s breaking the rules through exploring the world of love, and romance, and tenderness, and sensuality. Whereas with [Vega, he’s] breaking the rules and experiencing anger, and rage, and violence,” Farrell said over Zoom. “So it’s really, really tricky.”
Farrell also explained the death scene was “a work in progress” in the lead-up to shooting. “We still didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, how it was going to be, where the fight was going to take place, how he would kill him, if he would kill him. Did he know he was gonna kill him? Was he intending to kill him?” he said. “So it was fun.”
When Decider caught up with Dalton about the big scene, he also spoke to the serious stunt scenes he and Farrell acted out together.
“I got my ass kicked last year, man, between that Daredevil. I literally got off the set of Daredevil and then came to LA to do Sugar, and Colin beat the hell out of me on that. It was rough. I’m not going to lie to you. It was really rough. I ended up with a couple of bruises off of that. My wife looked at me, and I had all my back bruised. It wasn’t so much from the hitting as it was because the car flipped over, and you have gravel on the floor and the side of the car,” Dalton told Decider. “You just got to keep going, and Colin’s such a pro. What am I going to do, say ‘Stop?’ If you don’t say stop, I’m not going to say stop. So we went at it for hours.”
“I got my ass kicked last year, man, between that Daredevil. I literally got off the set of Daredevil and then came to LA to do Sugar, and Colin beat the hell out of me on that. It was rough. I’m not going to lie to you.”
Tony Dalton, Sugar
While some aspects of the death scene and Sugar’s intentions were being figured out along the way, Dalton shared that there was a clear inspiration behind the fight scene: an Argentine movie called Wild Tales.
“It actually was on the script. It said something like that, and I’d seen that movie, but I watched it again, and it’s just like animals going at it in a really small space. So we tried to do more of that. And because it’s basically one shot, we just had to make sure that the punches landed,” Dalton said. “I think I actually hit Colin a couple of times in the face or something, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry! And he’s like, ‘No, it’s okay, it’s okay. Let’s keep going!”
No doubt about it, the punches definitely landed. Both Dalton and Farrell delivered powerful performances that brilliantly sold the internal and external struggles their characters faced. And though Vega may finally be gone, it’s clear that the memory of him — and the lines he inspired Sugar to cross — will continue to haunt our protagonist. With one episode left in Sugar Season 2, we can’t wait to see what consequences the finale has in store.
New episodes of Sugar premiere Fridays on Apple TV.
