Summary
Sugar knits Season 2’s themes and plot together especially effectively in “Cautionary Tale”, with Sugar forced to weigh up which of his personal boundaries to cross.
Sugar is all about decisions in Season 2. Some are easier to make than others, granted. Crime stories tend to have a pretty simple moral framework. There are bad guys, all about their own self-interest, uninterested in the potential ramifications for others. Guys like Ray Vega. And there are good guys, driven by a desire – a need, sometimes – to do the right thing whatever the personal cost. That’s John Sugar. But the curveball is that Sugar’s an alien. His decisions have an additional weight, because doing the right thing might mean losing himself, becoming human in such a way that he can’t stop, even when he might want to. Episode 6, “Cautionary Tale”, which on balance is probably the best outing yet, is compelling partly because it finds its title character closer than ever to breaking his own codes, stepping over the lines he shouldn’t, and giving in to the temptations he has thus far kept at arm’s length.
Fittingly, then, especially given the title, this episode opens with a flashback explaining who the mysterious woman that Sugar sometimes sees in visions is. Her name is Peggy. She, like Sugar, was a fellow interstellar traveller who had settled on Earth with perhaps a little too much enthusiasm. Eleven years ago, it was Sugar who was sent to bring her home. She was his first assignment as a newbie, and thus his first window into some of Earth’s finer pleasures.
And they’re simple ones. Finger painting with kindergarten kids, junk food, sex. But their allure was too powerful for her to resist. Faced with the prospect of abandoning them and going home, she chose the more drastic option of ending her own life, knowing that she’d never again be able to replace the new pleasures she had uncovered. That’s the danger of assimilation, even for Sugar. It’s a one-way street.
In the present day, as in the previous episode, Vega is still trying his utmost to poke holes in the elaborate story Sugar concocted to hide Ji Moon. At the same time, Sugar is determined to bring Vega down, which means getting to the bottom of his entire operation. He gets a boon in this regard after discovering that Ji stole Chuy’s phone from the hospital before he went on the run, and there’s an incriminating video on it that should have Vega dead to rights. When Tom tells Sugar it isn’t enough, you can see him fraying at the edges. There’s something satisfyingly relatable about someone pointing out the obvious of how easy it should be to take down a dirty cop, relative to how difficult it actually is.
Of course, there’s another solution, which would be getting rid of Vega on a more permanent basis. But Sugar has a code. One of the interesting push-and-pull dynamics of this show in Season 2 – and indeed in Episode 6 specifically – is how Sugar considers violating that code; yes, partly because of the dreaded assimilation, but also because from the outside looking in, he can see how little of our society makes sense when you really interrogate it. If the appropriate system can’t punish an obvious bad actor like Vega, what is it for? And why shouldn’t someone just put a bullet in the back of his head?
But after sneaking into Vega’s house and training a gun on him, Sugar realises that this isn’t especially easy to do, not when a guy’s sitting and watching TV with his cute dog. Sugar decides against extrajudicial assassination. Instead, he goes back to the hotel and crosses a line he can violate more safely, which is to say he sleeps with Charlotte. But if Sugar’s entire thing is about not crossing any of these carefully articulated boundaries, isn’t one as bad as the other?
On balance, Sugar might as well have killed Vega. After he leaves Charlotte’s room, Vega’s waiting for him in the hotel bar, having discovered the proof that Sugar faked Ji’s death and hid him. Now, Vega is determined to find him. His conversation with Sugar is frank enough. But Vega can’t risk leaving Ji alive, since it threatens to blow the lid on the Fire Sale operation and put Vega in the crosshairs of whoever he’s working for, which Sugar still hasn’t figured out. As leverage, Vega has taken Danny.
Closer to the truth than ever, Sugar is now in an even worse predicament, with the totally innocent brother on the cusp of paying the price for Sugar’s own decisions. All that de-stressing with Charlotte is unlikely to have made much of a dent in his existential crisis, and if he’s going to save the Moon brothers, let alone himself, he’s probably going to have to cross a few more personal lines before all this is over.
