‘Sugar’ Season Finale Recap: Alien vs. Predator

It’s always the ones you least expect, right up until the moment they’re the ones you most suspect. Sugar ends its first season with the proverbial final shocking twist. Henry, the super-nice guy who works as a college professor when he’s not saving John Sugar’s life, is a serial killer. He was in cahoots with Ryan Pavich, whose crimes he persuaded his alien comrades to help cover up. The cherry on top: He’s responsible for the disappearance of John’s sister Jen, too. Now, with all the other aliens gone, only two remain on Earth: John Sugar and Henry Thorpe, good and evil, right hand and left hand, destinies entwined forever.

Hot damn, that’s a setup for a show!

I really liked the conclusion of this charming, gentle, yet somehow never twee neo-noir. It was always too earnest in its sadness to be twee, too genuinely bummed out by its own darkness. Watching and listening to John Sugar makes you want to recoil from darkness, in fact, like a slug from salt. If it can maintain that melancholy but optimistic tone — and if that isn’t a descriptor of the Golden Age Hollywood vibe I don’t know what is — it can run for a good long time. It’s The Fugitive, starring Kal-El and General Zod. 

Anyway, Henry’s guilt becomes apparent the moment he shows just a little bit too much interest in the crimes of Ryan Pavich, just a little bit too much curiosity about what vehicle John will be using that day prior to their voyage to their home planet. All John knows is that something seems off about the conclusion of the case. (Sorry, John, but I was ahead of you here, just as I was on the fact that Jonathan was Olivia’s real dad rather than Bernie. Please send me several of your suits as payment.) 

After forcing himself to listen to one of Pavich’s murder recordings — it’s mostly a hideously self-important monologue, and the murder is mercifully brief — Sugar gets the suspicion Pavich is not simply talking to himself. Olivia confirms it: There was another man with him. Sugar initially suspects Ryan���s senator father, but then Olivia delivers the final clue. He never said a word, but she could hear him constantly writing…just like Sugar’s professorial pal Henry.

By the time Sugar gets home to confront him, Henry’s in the wind, at the start of what Sugar suspects will be a long career of hooking up with the worst humanity has to offer and making them worse still. (I no longer have as much of a problem with Ryan Pavich’s high number of victims and high degree of organization, now that I know he had a killer alien helping him out.) Henry calls to taunt him, and to direct him to an alien dress he left behind in a closet. It’s an alien message: It means Jen Sugar sleeps with the fishes, or whatever the fish equivalent is on their homeworld.

Or does she? Sugar doesn’t know, and only Henry can tell him. That means finding Henry. That means saying goodbye to Ruby and staying behind on Earth, likely for good. It also means leaving Los Angeles, and his favorite resident thereof, Melanie Matthews. He telepathically shares his secret with her, his soulful brown eyes turning cyber-Sinatra blue as they look directly into hers. 

It’s a scene I’m glad the show included. Maybe it’s just the Irishness of it all, but Amy Ryan and Colin Farrell have such a wonderful easy chemistry that the show actual had a whole scene where her character visits a friend just to talk about it. Even though the relationship is never consummated, even though they never so much as kiss, they fit so well together and trust each other with such palpable fierceness that you could see them falling into bed at any moment — if, y’know, one of them weren’t an alien. This is a way for them to be even more intimate, and as a fan of good-looking people being intimate on screen, I appreciate it.

Sugar gives her Melanie his dog and drives away, to persevere as the opposite number of Henry. While both men now feel more at home among humanity than among their own kind, Henry sees all the bugs in the human condition as features. It’s Sugar who connects with humanity as a whole — not just some idealized version to counter Henry’s vision of everything as a Hobbesian war of all against all, but the real us, the good parts and the bad, since he has good parts and bad himself now. He knows he’s resorted to violence in a way that goes against his people’s beliefs, and he regrets it, but he can’t change it. It’s like he says to Melanie: “This place, these people…I like them. I’m like them.” As they put it in a movie you might have seen, John: Gabba gabba, we accept you, one of us.

There’s one other moment I want to call out, not least because it shows what a sophisticated actor James Cromwell can be, so subtly you barely even notice it. It happens when he first visits the Siegel estate to wrap things up with the now-happy family. Jonathan and Bernie seem to be on the road to a long-overdue reconciliation over the affair Jonathan had with Bernie’s wife. Bernie and Olivia lie in the grass together, talking in a way they probably haven’t done in years; they may have reason to suspect he’s not her father, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be her dad.

Sugar’s content to keep the police out of the investigation’s wrap-up — not only because it may implicate Olivia and Jonathan in the death and disappearance of that abuser in her trunk from earlier in the season, but because he doesn’t want a big scandal dumped on Olivia any more than they do. “She’s loved,” he tells Jonathan. “That’s all that matters.”

God bless James Cromwell, man. The look on his face, the tone of his voice as looks up at Sugar and says he says what he says: “Grace and sensitivity. To the end.” In that look and in that voice there is admiration, resentment, gratitude, skepticism, and awe, all wrapped up. That’s the effect the thoroughly decent can have on the rest of us. We may not suspect that they’re literal aliens, but we still know there’s something very unusual about them. They can make us feel worse about our own shortcomings, but they can also make us want to try harder when we realize they walk among us.

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.