Sugar Recap: Sea Lions and Patti Smith

By
Andy Andersen,
a writer and critic of genre films and TV

Starry Eyed

Season 1

Episode 4

Editor’s Rating

2 stars

Sugar
Starry Eyed

Season 1

Episode 4

Editor’s Rating

2 stars

Photo: Apple TV+

“John, we need to know: You okay?”

Sugar has finally paid Dr. Vickers a visit for that checkup Ruby ordered. “We need to know,” he says. And that we feels ominous in its scope — like there’s far more than just Vickers and Ruby behind that we. True to his day-job persona, Sugar is trying to keep his cool and spar wits, talking about the defibrillator scene in John Carpenter’s The Thing like the alien jaws that materialize from the patient’s stomach and bite down on the doctor’s arms are — metaphorically speaking, of course — ready and waiting to strike from Sugar’s stomach, should anyone try to divert his path of “finding the missing girl.”

The Thing reference may also reveal something about Sugar’s relationship to his own body, some nagging disconnect between what’s inside and what’s out, exposed and walking around breathing the same air as every other lone drifter in Los Angeles. But that’s a worry for another day. Today, the case is still on. Melanie is still on the case, too. She shows up at Sugar’s hotel just as he gets back from his doctor’s appointment. Our guy’s also just confirmed via driveby phone call with his “Mom” in Flagstaff that David Siegel and Kenny bought her rouse. One less tail to worry about for now.

Anyway, Melanie’s uncovered a memory that might help them track down Olivia. Six weeks ago, Olivia had canceled on her and Melanie’s usual date at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, but later that day, Melanie saw her at a cafe in Silver Lake, intending to go up and say hi but stopping short when she realized Olivia and the woman she was with were in deep, seemingly strenuous conversation. Queue the next montage of detecting and questioning at the cafe and around Silver Lake. “I’ve seen this a million times on TV,” Melanie says as she tags along. “Where the detective shows a photograph to people. I gotta ask you, does that really work?”

“You’d be surprised,” Sugar responds. “Most people want to help.”

And help they do when Melanie crosses paths with a fan working at a local record store. They have a cute exchange and her fan feels safe enough to say she knows the girl they’re looking for. “She’s a friend of Taylor.” Sugar and Melanie show up at Taylor’s and confirm she’s the one Melanie saw with Olivia six weeks ago. Again, Melanie’s reassuring presence gives Taylor the gumption to tell her story. After seeing a bunch of Olivia’s Instagram posts focused on activism for abused women, Taylor DM’d her saying that “instead of looking in East L.A., she should look at her own backyard.” A couple of months prior, she’d been up for a role in a Bernie Siegel film and mentioned it to Davy Siegel, whom she knew socially and had casually hooked up with once. When she ignored his attempts to initiate a meet-up to “help her with the audition,” he sent her a video he’d secretly taken of their hookup at his place, and tried to blackmail her into more sex with the video. “He’s done this to dozens of women,” she tells Sugar and Melanie.

Here’s where the show is starting to lose me a bit on a tonal level. There’s a stilted, vaguely Me Too–signifying quality to these proceedings that feels obligatory where it should be gripping (the cloying artificiality coming off of every one of Olivia’s “Instagram posts” isn’t helping). I think the idea is to connect the dots between real-life abuse against women in modern Hollywood and the seedy, distressed dame stories of yesteryear’s pulp. But the show’s overall lack of grit and grime in this and many other aspects of its genre machinations is proving a stumbling block of vagary (rather than an illuminating kernel of ambiguity) as we veer into the halfway mark of the episode and the series as a whole.

I’ll tell you what’s not a stumbling block, though, is Colin Farrell’s performance. His equal-parts empathetic and enigmatic response to stories of suffering continues to prove Sugar a fantastic star vehicle for my guy above all else. When Melanie wonders if the reason we never “stop and smell the roses” is because “it’s all so sad and ugly,” Sugar, with his twinkling eyes makes a case that some things hold beauty. There’s “sea lions and Patti Smith,” after all. “The sound of your little sister laughing, having fun.” And what about Paris? It can’t all be bad in a whole city of light. But yeah, it’s a bummer time right now, and they both know it. Also a bummer about Bernie’s probable involvement in this Davy stuff — something to which Melanie, it seems, is just getting hip.

Only time will tell. Tonight, we know that Davy is a predator, Olivia found out about it, and now Olivia’s gone. I need to know how deep the rot runs in this Siegel family, Sugar thinks. He calls old Siegel patriarch Jonathan to schedule an in-person chat, and winds up at a special screening of The Winds of Change, a classic of Jonathan and his late wife, actress Lorraine Everly’s respective filmographies. Sugar gets a good, long look and a little bit of face-time with the whole Siegel clan, including an intro with Margit Sorensen (Anna Gunn), mother to Davy and semi-supportive frenemy ex-wife to Bernie. It seems her sights are fixed on getting her son’s new movie and accompanying Oscar campaign off the ground, and she wants Sugar to know she’s none too happy about his presence either.

“It’s gonna come out, Bernie. Davy, the women, you trying to cover it all up.” Bernie denies it, and Sugar wonders why no one in this family seems to give a shit about the possible connections between Davy’s crimes and Olivia’s disappearance. When it comes to people, I still have a lot to learn, Sugar admits to himself when he catches Bernie and Melanie exchanging glances and texts from either side of the room. Melanie’s coming clean seemed genuine, so what is she still hiding? From the CCTV up in the projector booth, he sees Bernie and Melanie erupt into an argument by the elevator, only sparking more questions. And to top off a night of little in the way of answers, the story of Davy’s sexual-predator exposé drops online right when Jonathan is onstage, mid-conversation with the real Ben Mankiewicz. Jonathan leaves the stage abruptly and makes it a few paces behind the curtain when he drops to the floor in apparent heart-attack mode. Looks like Sugar’s post-interview interview with his benefactor will have to be postponed.

Meanwhile, the mysterious psycho-criminal Stallings is suiting up to go to Tijuana “on business” and makes a quick phone call to Davy to threaten him with a swift skull-fucking should his name come out of the former child star’s mouth. He enlists two of his guys to hang back and “find out who the parole officer is with the good hair” and his tall girlfriend to guard his “special project” behind a padlocked door with a loaded shotgun. And Sugar is left with a photograph of Olivia’s mother wearing the same dress as Lorraine Everly’s in The Winds of Change, spinning his wheels through a thick fog of mounting questions.

Sugar Recap: Sea Lions and Patti Smith