‘Sugar’ Episode 5 Recap: Beat My Guest

“It’s not romantic,” Melanie Matthew says of her feelings for John Sugar. “It’s not sexual. I can’t explain it.” Melanie has gone out of her way to see an old friend to talk about the state of her life, and the conversation keeps coming back to the enigmatic private investigator. Melanie trusts him completely. She believes he wants to find Olivia nearly as badly as she herself does. How can a self-described “ex-junkie rock’n’roller,” reeling from the disappearance of her beloved stepdaughter and just four days sober after falling off the wagon, trust a man — a man she’s just met, a man who at least in part lies for a living — so implicitly? She doesn’t know. She just does.

And she continues to, even after she sees a side of him both of them would prefer she hadn’t. While having Melanie’s house watched, Sugar almost misses the home intruder sent by Stallings to shut Melanie up, but notices his car and races into the house. He comes in at the end of a tense sequence that owes a lot to both The Shining and Body Double, as the attacker tries to break down her locked bathroom door with a drill and she stabs his grasping hand with a pair of nail trimmers. 

Sugar is on him in that moment and pummels his face relentlessly, snippets of sinister characters from films like Touch of Evil and The Night of the Hunter flashing through his mind. With the threat neutralized, Sugar and his assistant Charlie let the guy go. Stallings is their real target. 

How do they know? Because in a major twist, David Siegel just up and tells them. Not in so many words — he wants it made clear he never says Stallings’s name — but yeah. Famous from a young age, David never learned how to properly behave with women, so he resorted to coercion, blackmail, lies, and rape to get what he wanted. In the end, Stallings provided him trafficked women rather than actual sex workers, for the sick thrill of it. 

When Olivia got wind of it all via Taylor, the young actress from the previous episode against whom David ran his usual game, she threatened to expose him. But David had his big comeback vehicle on the way (we get to watch his dailies; he’s hilariously insufferable), and exposure would destroy him. So he told Stallings about his sister, hoping the gangster would scare her straight. Instead, she’s gone.

“I always felt like [Olivia] didn’t like me,” David tells Sugar (who’s missing a sister of his own), “so I decided not to like her.” This could also describe his attitude towards all women.

This surprising scene follows an elegantly edited overlapping sequence in which both of David’s parents try to shut Sugar down — Bernie with threats, Margit with transparent bullshit about David’s innate nobility. “Can you believe? My sweet, sweet boy?” she says to him, pleadingly. “Hm,” he replies. “No.” “You don’t even believe what you just said,” he adds later. He’s similarly soft-spoken but blunt when Margit tries to have Kenny throw him out of David’s house: “You’re not going to be able to make me leave, Kenny. I promise.” It is great fun to watch this preternaturally decent man make verbal mincemeat out of his ops without even trying.

Which is why I so look forward to his inevitable confrontation with Stallings. In much the same way that Colin Farrell — an actor I like quite a bit but have never found endearing, largely by design of the roles I’ve seen him in — imbues Sugar with sort of ambient “I’m a good guy” vibes, actor Eric Lange radiates low-grade evil at all times as this irritable human trafficker. That’s his game, as it turns out, and as we learn from David: He smuggles people over the border, seizes their daughters, and enslaves them for people like David. (One’s sympathy for him only stretches so far, in the end.) Sugar’s knack for knowing just the right white-hat thing to say clash versus Stallings’s black-hat equivalent? Ooh baby, gimme all of that you got.

But perhaps this is why Sugar’s organization is so bound and determined to keep him from the truth. Behind her employer’s back, Ruby goes directly to Miller (the fine character actor Paul Schulze), who appears to be a figure of some importance in the Société. Ruby tells him she’s worried he’ll see things he won’t like, people he won’t like. “We’re just observing,” Miller says; it’s meant to be a “hey what’s the big deal” for Ruby, but it’s awfully portentous to us in the audience. Miller tells Ruby to do whatever it takes to stop Sugar from seeing…whatever it is she’s so afraid for him to see. 

This brings us back to Melanie, and her trust in John. Despite his brutality with Stallings’s hired muscle, she still goes back to his hotel room with him for safety, crashing on the couch as she was wont to do in her touring years. At one point he guilelessly talks to her with his pants off, which is how you can tell he might be an alien: Only an alien would be unaware of the effect a pantsless Colin Farrell has on women.

Anyway, John once again is having trouble sleeping. From a viewer perspective, we’re right in his anxious head with him. We’ve just seen a cavalcade of horrors: Stallings separating families and kidnapping their teenage children, David giving up on his ruined life and career and shooting himself with a final declaration borrowed from his mother: “Fuck this town.” (Like his grandfather Jonathan, it appears David will live to see another day.)

So we’re all messed up and jangled too, when he slides onto the floor next to Melanie’s couch. “I have a secret,” he confesses to her. She takes his hand in the dark, bridging the gap. “Tell me,” she says. “Tell me,” she repeats. “Tell me.”

Cut to black, and the whispered words “I can’t.” Aw, man! Talk about a cliffhanger!

There’s an energy to Sugar that’s hard to describe. A lot of it is the performances — a stacked cast of tremendous supporting players, headed by a bonafide movie star, with all the looks and charisma such a job entails. Some of it is the frenetic, finger-snapping editing by Fernando Stutz and John Petaja, which feels more be-bop than the old attention-deficit MTV style. Its dreamy vision of Los Angeles is unique for a noir mystery, in that we’re seeing the city through the eyes of a sweet guy who truly loves the place, not a hard-bitten thrice-around-the-block gunsel or a femme fatale’s hapless patsy.

 I think that may be why a lot of people I know, even professional artists, erroneously pegged the opening credits as AI (it’s not): This is not quite a version of L.A. we’ve seen before. This is not quite a version of the private investigator story we’ve seen before. I’m really not sure what it is, and that’s a wonderful place to be with any story, let alone a mystery.

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.