I have a confession to make. I’d initially decided to take a pass on watching Sugar, the new Apple TV+ drama starring Colin Farrell as a private investigator in L.A., simply because I have so many other things on my watch list that I’m trying to get to first. Between the return of Hacks and upcoming Netflix series like Bodkin, the list of shows I’m trying to work through is pretty long already.
So why did I spend my weekend burning through every available episode of Apple’s surprisingly addictive series about a hard-bitten PI who solves missing person cases in the City of Angels?
It’s because the internet spoiled Sugar‘s big twist for me — but it’s actually such a jaw-droppingly insane twist, a reveal so completely out of left field, that it piqued my interest enough to bring Sugar all the way to the very top of my watch list. When’s the last time someone spoiled a major twist tied to a show and it made you say, hey, that’s so crazy that I kind of want to try it now? Because that’s exactly what happened to me with Sugar.
I’m going to give you plenty of time to stop reading if you don’t want to be spoiled, but I dare say there might be someone else out there like me who learns this twist and maybe decides to give Sugar a try because of it.
Obviously, though, stop reading now if you want to come at the show without knowing anything about it. Spoilers to follow.
On the surface, Sugar is a cut-and-dried detective drama, the protagonist of which looks to be a classic Hollywood gumshoe type a la Sam Spade. Farrell’s John Sugar loves nice suits, classic cars, and old movies — in addition to really loving his work, which finds him doing one thing and one thing only. He’s paid to find people who go missing, whether that’s on behalf of a yakuza client in Japan or a big-time Hollywood producer in LA whose granddaughter has disappeared.
While watching all of this unfold, meanwhile, if you’re like me you might eventually start to feel like there’s something really off about this show. That there’s an unsettling vibe throughout it, so much so that you eventually start to feel like there’s something more going on — but you just can’t put your finger on it.
Sugar’s hand, for example, will sometimes start violently twitching out of the blue. He never takes guns anywhere, even into dangerous situations. He can drink as much alcohol as he wants, and he never gets drunk. He can also fight with the brutal efficiency of John Wick, and for some reason he has to take some kind of medicine that he injects into his neck.
This is your last warning: It’s time for the big reveal.
The twist that I’ve been hinting at comes in Sugar‘s sixth out of eight episodes, which just hit Apple TV+ two days ago. Are you ready?
Here it is.
Even though Sugar plays like a seemingly straight detective story, along the lines of something like Prime Video’s Bosch, John Sugar is really … an alien.
You read that right. In his natural state, Sugar is completely blue and looks like a cross between Doctor Manhattan and a Star Wars creature that belongs in the Mos Eisley cantina. Sugar dropped that obviously insane reveal at the very end of Episode 6, as Sugar himself looks into a mirror, and with two episodes to go this certainly changes everything we thought we knew about the show. I assume, for example, that everyone in Sugar’s “polyglot” society is an alien as well, and the case that Sugar has been working this whole time also hints at a larger purpose as to why the aliens are on Earth.
The alien we know as Sugar seems to have crafted an entire persona based on a love of old movies and Hollywood. Like I said at the beginning, this felt like one of the wildest curveballs a TV show has ever thrown at me … and it’s so different that I kind of like it. Certainly, I can’t wait to see what the final two episodes have in store for us.