Another day in John Sugar’s California. Any L.A. noir worth its salt brings the city to life in its own way. As we cross over into the back half of this series, connecting more dots between Sugar’s missing girl case and the dark cosmic machinations of the city’s most mysterious and influential operators, there’s this nagging sensation that Sugar, for all its emotive genre pleasures, isn’t breathing quite enough seedy, grungy life into its sad, shiny City of Angels. But like John Sugar, this humble TV gumshoe ain’t going anywhere. It’s always a shame to feel that a show is straining to meet a full-season run time, especially when the episodes are well under an hour. But the case is still on, and the real exciting twists and turns are just beginning to materialize.
So where did we leave off? The newly minted David Siegel scandal had just broken while grandfather Jonathan was onstage at a repertoire event. Now he’s unconscious in a hospital bed at home, his son Bernie hovering over him with a nervous air. Bernie gives Sugar the boot about as soon as he shows up at the door, so he goes to Margit’s house for some one-on-one time with David. Margit puts on a big show about her son’s innocence. She offers up another dismissive remark about Olivia’s whereabouts, excessively typical of anyone in the family vying for Jonathan’s attention and influence (“The most likely thing that happened to her is that she met a coke dealer with some really nice abs”). Naturally, Sugar isn’t buying any of it, and David gets up enough courage from the other room to finally offer up his story.
He starts with the typical excuses made for a kid from a famous family who grows up to be a predator. “Women were always weird around me … I just never knew how to be normal with them,” that kind of thing. So David started going to Byron Stallings, a guy he’d heard could “get you girls.” David knew Stallings was trafficking these women from the border and went along with it anyway. He also became “acquainted” enough with Stallings to express his frustrations about his half-sister Olivia telling his victims not to settle and go to the press. “I just thought he would scare her. Tell her to chill. I never thought he would …”
“She was your sister,” Sugar replies. “You were supposed to take care of her.” Seeing, for the first time, a bit of himself in David, but no less fixed on finding Olivia and bringing all of these fathers and brothers and predators to justice, he gets Stallings’s address out of this Hollywood man-child who figured out way too late how not to be a monster of his environment.
Meanwhile, Ruby meets up with Miller (Paul Schulze) in a secluded woodsy spot to have a cryptic discussion about what to do with their resident private eye with a heart of gold. Sugar’s case is getting him awfully close to finding out about some “things.” It’s only a matter of time before he sees things he’s not happy about. “Things that, frankly, I’m not happy about,” says Ruby. “These new methods.”
Miller shrugs. They’re just observing, like always. “This is new,” Ruby replies, with a tone of Lovecraftian dread. Miller doubles down. “New” is “necessary.” And he barely takes a beat to relish in the beauty of the cottonwood trees surrounding them. “Fertile and dead at the same time,” he says with admiration. Very normal and not an ominous thing to say.
This may all feel annoyingly cryptic at the moment, but I also get the sense that we’re not far off from some key clues as to the nature of this Cosmopolitan Polyglot Society. Here’s what we do know: Whoever Ruby and Sugar’s superiors are, they aren’t to be trusted. There’s a psychopathy to their methods and a relationship with life and death that feels cut off from the daily lives and deaths of the L.A. populace.
Later that night, Melanie arrives home to find Stallings’s goon, Carlo (Don DiPetta), waiting for her inside. Charlie is scoping the place out from her van on the street, but it seems Carlo got in before Charlie set up a surveillance shop out there. Luckily, Sugar shows up with some food for Charlie and instructions on scoping out Stallings’s place tomorrow morning, with just enough time to clock Carlo’s truck outside and rush the guy in the knick of time. Faces of ugly, violent men from noirs past flash across the screen (peaking with Orson Welles’s grotesque Captain Quinlan in Touch of Evil) as Sugar beats Carlo within an inch of his life. It’s the first we’ve seen of the killer inside this benevolent agent of observation.
Sugar tells Carlo he’s sorry and lets him go, then takes a shaken Melanie back to his place to keep her safe and off anyone’s trail for the night. He senses her concern immediately. “You wanted to hurt him,” she says. He doesn’t deny it. All he can do is say he’s sorry. Someone once said, tip the world on its side and everything loose land in Los Angeles, thinks Sugar in poetic voice-over mode. Tonight, that guy at Melanie’s. I could say that’s not me, that’s not who I am. But lately, I’m not so sure.
Is there a way out of the internal or external corruption that seems to fuel every move in this city? David Siegel doesn’t seem to think so. He takes himself out of the equation in the putrid glow of his mother’s fanning flames of illusion. “You were great. You are great.” There’s something about David’s suicide that rings false to me. It lands more like a plot-convenience decision than it does a heavy thematic beat. But thanks to Nate Corddry’s performance in this episode, there is something in there about the sins of the fathers reverberating through their sons in the ugliest and most pitiful of manifestations. The shit that sticks with you always falls from above.
Sugar is alone in the darkness, looking up at the ceiling like he’s being watched. He moves to the front room and lays down on the floor next to Melanie. “I have a secret,” he whispers as if his last chance at claiming humanity hangs on saying those words aloud.
