‘Sugar’ Episode 7 Recap: The Rescuer

Okay, so he’s an alien. By now we’ve had a week to digest that John Sugar is a blue superhuman who can stop bullets with his bare hands — a sort of combination Dr. Manhattan/Ozymandias from Watchmen (the comic; we do not speak of the others here). Sure, I’ve been wondering what will happen next, but it was how it would happen that had me worried. Would Sugar still feel like the same offbeat, upbeat neo-noir suggested by Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge’s smoky theme music and Colin Farrell’s impeccable tailoring?

Yes and no. Sugar’s unraveling of the conspiracy against him feels like the Sugar we know. But there’s an element of the resolution of the Olivia mystery — which does get resolved, though there’s a whole episode left for aftershocks and final twists — that rings phony, even in a show about alien private investigators with fists of steel, a heart of gold, and eyes of electric blue. 

It’s all simple enough to explain in the end. After a rumble with his freakishly strong boss, Miller, Sugar relocates Melanie to his hotel, using the partial truth — he’s a member of a top-secret organization of “observers” that he lets her assume is a foreign spy ring — as cover for the chaos. He follows Miller to a house where the whole gang can be found, including his betrayer Ruby and his buddy Hank, kidnapped by Miller himself as a consequence for helping Sugar out. 

That’s where he learns the truth: They’ve been discovered. Powerful government officials are threatening them with exposure and elimination unless they help cover up the involvement of a senator’s son in Stallings’s human trafficking operation. By threatening to expose her brother and thus Stallings, Olivia puts the son at risk as well. Therefore, Olivia can’t be found. And with the whole mission on the verge of ruin, they’ve all been called back to their home planet, effective tomorrow.

Since the end is here anyway, they decide to let Henry tell Sugar all of this, as well as Olivia’s real location. Sugar shares how he killed Stalllings “because I felt like it,” leading Henry to suggest that the traumatized alien’s residual grief over his sister will always haunt him into that kind of murderous desperation, whether or not he saves Olivia. 

But save her he does — from a swaggering serial-killer villain straight out of a movie. He’s Ryan Pavich (Cameron Cowperthwaite), who in actually fairly realistic fashion is a rent-a-cop when he’s not abducting, imprisoning, torturing, and murdering dozens of women in his elaborate, pristine, emphatically un-realistic  subterranean chamber of horrors. Pavich thinks he’s got the drop on Sugar, but we know how that kind of thing goes. Pavich shoots himself to death in the struggle that ensues. (Sons of powerful men tend to do this when they mix it up with Sugar.)

By the looks of Pavich’s extensive collection of recordings, he would be one of the most prolific such murderers in American history if he were real. Fortunately for us as humans, but less fortunately for us as viewers, such supervillain-style serial killers are entirely a creation of airport paperbacks, mid-budget thrillers, and alphabet-soup cop shows. Shapeshifting humanoid aliens walking among us? That I can buy, since it’s pure fiction. A serial killer who’s a lair-dwelling mastermind, instead of a sad piece of shit who hates women or assaults his teenage employees or whatever? That myth is actually pernicious in the real world, giving such men an intellectual and aesthetic glow-up they in no way deserve and contributing to a climate of hypervigilance against crime that has, haha, not served this country well.

That said, if I can sit here and tell you that the one hundred percent preposterous Hannibal is one of the best television shows of all time, I can put up with one slightly improbable serial killer in the alien private eye show. And how can you not be happy that a decent sort like Sugar battled his demons and rescued Olivia, a woman shown to have the kind of pluck required to sing Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” while chained up under some guy’s staircase? I’m not made of stone. 

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.