Summary
“What Else Can You Do?” is a beautifully shot episode that seemingly brings the case of the season to a close. But Sugar’s personal crisis remains very much ongoing.
Given there’s still an episode to go before Season 2 of Sugar comes to a close, it’s a little weird to see Episode 7, “What Else Can You Do?”, operate so much like a finale. By the end of this outing — which runs longer than most, for what that’s worth — the main case is pretty much closed; Danny and Ji Moon are reunited, Ray Vega is dead, and Sugar has, technically, “won”. But what has he won? His mission to play Moon matchmaker might have been a success, but his more macro issues of finding his sister, figuring out a way off-world, and avoiding assimilation remain very much ongoing.
This episode deploys a little in medias res framing device for suspense’s sake, opening with Sugar crawling free of a car crash before cycling back two days to explain how he got there. It’s a nice touch, one of several neat formal choices in what is indisputably a lovely-looking 50 minutes of television. This show always looks good, to be fair, but I noticed some of the framing and audio design more than usual here.
Anyway, after his most recent conversation with Vega, Sugar’s on the back foot. He still has Ji, who is hiding out with Val playing video games all night, but Danny is in custody, his freedom being wielded as a weapon by Vega, so Sugar has to think outside the box. He asks Tom to arrange a meeting with Sergey, the head of a cartel for whom Sugar had once done a job he left half-finished, and then he heads to see Danny, knowing that he’ll be walking into the lion’s den by doing so. Tom’s warning that there will be “eyes and ears everywhere” ends up being setup for a later twist, but we’ll get to that in due course.
Before he meets Sergey, Sugar gets a call from Stanley. Now seems as good a time as any for Sugar to confess that, while he has come to rather like cacti and enjoys Stanley’s company, his real reason for befriending him was to discover more information about Pavich. Now that they’re friends, Stanley, while nonetheless a little wounded at the betrayal, reveals that he’s an engineer who has been enlisted to scale up an operation using tropospheric nodes to repair the climate. Pavich’s motivations are apparently entirely altruistic, which is difficult for Sugar to square. But he has other things on his mind to be worrying about in the meantime.
This includes Vega and the Fire Sale. Sergey, who respects Sugar’s honesty, provides a useful way to lean on Vega and strongarm him into letting Danny go, and Sugar thinks he has gained the upper hand once the old man starts making calls. He even takes the night off to lounge around eating room service with Charlotte. Their conversation flits from music to ice cream to Sugar’s sister, Djen (Colin Farrell is really great here), and you’d be forgiven for thinking he had nothing much on his mind. Maybe that’s what assimilation means in this context. It isn’t liking sex and hamburgers, really — it’s being unable to see the forest for the trees, because the trees are shaped like beautiful women.
Problematically, Sergey ends up dying in a plane crash. Since it’s actually his son, Diego, who’s in charge of Fire Sale, Sugar has lost his leverage and needs an alternate solution. The cinematography, which keeps flashing up images of guns and knives from old movie scenes, is making the implication pretty clear. Vega needs to be taken off the board on a more permanent basis, and the remainder of Sugar Season 2, Episode 7 is about that happening in a neat sleight-of-hand way.
In short: Sugar offers Vega a set of new identities for him and his family to move overseas and start a new life, but he rejects the offer, as bad guys are wont to do, leaving Sugar to argue with a worried-looking Val, who reveals to him that Ji has run away. Vega is listening to this conversation, since he has Sugar bugged, and he doesn’t know that Sugar knows he’s bugged, so when Ji video-calls him offering to trade his own life for Danny’s, Vega buys it. He takes Danny and drives him to the middle of nowhere with a bag over his head.
When he gets to the desert meeting point, though, he finds the place empty, and when he jumps back in his vehicle, he finds that Danny has been replaced by Sugar, who puts him in a sleeper hold while he’s driving, causing the crash the episode opened with. Both of them survive it, but in a surprisingly nasty-feeling little fight, Sugar finishes Vega off. Danny and Ji are happily reunited, and the day seems to be saved. But is it?
Since there’s still an episode to go, I’d assume not, and not just because Sugar is feeling pretty bad about having crossed another moral line. He spends the evening watching Here Comes Mr. Jordan, a movie about a boxer who dies in a plane crash, finds himself in Heaven before his time, and is given a second chance back on Earth. You can say a lot of things about this show, but based on this and the needless little montage that explains how Sugar pulled off his really rather obvious bait-and-switch plan, you can’t exactly say it’s subtle.
