Yep, John Sugar is an alien. After six episodes of Colin Farrell driving around modern-day Los Angeles in a vintage car, wearing an immaculate black suit and sunglasses, inexplicably flashing to references from golden-age noir films, and poking his nose into the mystery of a disappeared woman no one seems to want him to solve, the Apple TV+ series Sugar finally shows its hand. At the end of episode six, John Sugar has had a really bad day and just can’t hold it together anymore. He gives himself an injection, stares into the bathroom mirror, and watches as his human detective face slowly morphs into a patterned blue alien face. “He’s an alien” is not a satisfying, all-encompassing answer — it is a statement that creates all kinds of other questions. But answering them does not seem like an urgent goal for Sugar. If it were, surely we’d have known John Sugar was an alien right from the start.
Yes, Sugar has been hinting at something going on with this guy from the beginning. In the first episode, while he’s looking at a mysterious document, the scene cuts to an odd, mechanical zoom-in camera shot, as though the eye focusing on that piece of paper is a high-tech camera or some other inhuman observer. The constant insertions of film-noir scenes, too, suggest something’s atypical about this guy and that perhaps he processes his surroundings in an unusual way. He has a handler, and from the start it’s not entirely clear what she’s handling. But until episode six, there’s lots of uncertainty about what the real situation is. Is he a robot? Is he from the future? (Or maybe the past!) Is he an angel? Or maybe he’s a human science experiment?
Generally, this kind of uncertainty is meant to keep viewers invested. They’ll know something’s up! They’ll keep watching to figure it out! It’ll feel so much more satisfying if everyone has to wait for the twist! But, in practice, the exact opposite is true. Not understanding John Sugar’s true nature is an annoyance, a secondary concern that pulses quietly underneath the central mystery of a missing woman like a headache that won’t go away. It’s like your friend who texts “omg guess who I saw” and then hours go by before she sends even one additional message. It’s like you bought a coffee table and a sofa, but the sofa is on back order, and every time you look over to that area you just see a coffee table floating in the middle of the room, oriented around nothing. Just because something is missing does not make that absence fun!
Sugar would be a 40 percent better show if it were remade so that the twist becomes part of the show’s premise in episode one. The slow unraveling of the woman’s disappearance could include a gradual discovery of Sugar’s whole alien deal, hinting at the weird mechanics of his human injections — Where does he get the human medicine? Are there earth things that irritate his alien body? — while the noir-film interruptions represent his desperate attempt to assimilate, rather than inexplicable, intrusive ideas. But barring a complete reshoot of a season that was undoubtedly finished over a year ago, there is a relatively simple, cheap fix that could accomplish approximately the same goal. The first episode of Sugar should begin with an opening title card that reads “What you are about to watch is a show about the extraterrestrial detective John Sugar. Although this information is kept deliberately unclear at the beginning, he is an alien the entire time, and you can feel free to enjoy it with that knowledge.”
This economical, practical solution would not get Sugar that full 40 percent bump in quality, but it could still create a healthy 15 to 20 percent bump. All sorts of tensions that don’t get fully expressed in the first six episodes suddenly become much more interesting and exciting. John Sugar, an alien, is maybe going to have sex with human woman Melanie Mackintosh (Amy Ryan). How’s that going to work?! Who among his friends and colleagues know about him? Is he working under the radar because the U.S. government doesn’t know about him, or because they do know and they’re controlling him? What exactly does being an alien allow him to do? What happens when he gets shot?! Putting this information right up front would give Sugar the freedom to be the show it really wants to be: a silly mystery about alien detective Colin Farrell trying his best to solve crime.
Instead, Sugar keeps tripping over itself for three-quarters of its eight-episode run, stumbling on a poorly hidden cornerstone of its own premise. But there’s no need for everyone to suffer the same fate. Tell your friends! Tell your neighbors! Make T-shirts! Post it freely on social media! “Sugar on Apple TV+ is kind of fun!” you should say. “Colin Farrell is an alien detective! You should know that from the start!” Unenlightened, unsuspecting bystanders might protest, but it’s on every one of us to be the change we want to see in the world. Colin Farrell plays an alien detective, and it’s time to make sure every potential viewer knows.
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