John Sugar is a stop and smell the flowers kind of guy. He puts it in so many words to Melanie, the ex-rock star who is his semi-partner in the search for her stepdaughter Olivia. Melanie, shaken by the revelation that Olivia’s half-brother David is a serial rapist, feels differently. “The reason we don’t look,” she suggests, “is it’s all so sad and ugly.”
“Yeah, but not everything,” Sugar counters. Then, with effortless delight, he rattles off several roses to stop and smell, so to speak. “Sea lions…Patti Smith…Cypress trees…The sound of your little sister laughing and having fun…Paris.” Even Melanie, who’s never been there, has to admit Paris seems pretty good.
This exchange from Sugar’s fourth episode (“Starry Eyed”) could not encapsulate the mental and emotional battle that consumed my brain for years during a prolonged bout of major depression. The depressed part of me, the Melanie part, fully and truly believed that life is defined by its worst moments, the world by its horrors. The healthy part of me, the not-sick part of me, is John Sugar conceding “Yeah,” then adding “…but not everything.”
Sugar’s optimism about the human condition is interesting — maybe even revealing? — given his repeated statements about not understanding the human condition. “When it comes to people, I have a lot to learn,” he narrates over a semi-swanky Hollywood screening to which he’s been invited, where it seems not a single member of the Siegel family actually wants Olivia found. Bernie remains officially skeptical that she’s in trouble. Margit, David’s mom, is deliberately antagonist to Sugar. Even Jonathan, the paterfamilias who hired him, puts off Sugar’s urgently requested talk until after the movie.
They never do have that talk. During a Q&A with Jonathan, hosted by TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz and focused largely on Jonathan’s legendary late wife Lorraine Everly (Ruby Lewis), news of David’s penchant for revenge-porn blackmail breaks.
“Amazing, the things you can learn from just watching the movies,” Sugar says at another point. Does this situate him in the grand tradition of non-humans learning about human culture through movies and TV? No, I’m not letting go of my alien theory, even if a woman purported to be his mother named Helen (Jayne Taini) shows up and pretends to get duped by David and his henchman Kenny. She reports everything to John immediately thereafter, but she imparts a warning: “They’re not stoppin’ until they figure out what you are.” Not who, what.
On the other hand, “Amazing, the things you can learn from just watching the movies” has meaning on a more immediate level. Watching the movie, Sugar notices that Jonathan’s wife Lorraine is wearing the exact same dress worn by Olivia’s late mother Rachel in the risqué polaroids he uncovered among her daughter’s possessions. John ends the episode almost dissociating, his mind rattled by clues and flashbacks and booze — he glances upward and the ep ends just like that, cutting to black and cranking up the aggressive industrial rock of Kim Gordon’s “Don’t Play It” — so it’s not clear he’s learned anything just yet.
I sure did, however: Olivia is Jonathan’s son, not Bernie’s, which explains the dress, Bernie’s disinterest, and Jonathan being the guy who hired Sugar in the first place. Laying my markers down now, check back in a few weeks.
Anyway, the real issue facing Sugar now is how, or whether, Olivia’s disappearance is connected to the separate Siegel-related crime he uncovered, David’s predatory behavior and the family’s attempts to cover it up. If you guessed it has something to do with Stallings, the aggro gangster David’s involved with, you guessed right. Upon leaving for some kind of job in Tijuana, he gives his girlfriend a big open-mouthed kiss and a reminder to feed the dog. (It’s details like that that really make a villain sing.) He also hands her the keys to his locked basement, and five’ll get you ten Olivia’s on the other side of that padlocked door.
The final unplaced piece of the puzzle is the organization to which Sugar belongs. His girl Friday, Ruby, straight up lies to him about Stallings’s criminal record, reading him various facts and figures off a completely blank computer screen. Dr. Vickers (Scott Lawrence), the Société’s doctor of choice, notes that John has a clean bill of health — other than his IV drug use, his lack of sleep, and perhaps signs of incipient despair. “John,” he says, “we need to know: Are you okay?”
Who’s “we”? The Société, clearly, but who are they? And are we meant to take something away from the fact that John Sugar chooses his physical exam to have an in-depth discussion of a scene from John Carpenter’s The Thing where a man under medical care reveals himself to be an alien in disguise?
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.
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