Do not let anyone spoil Sugar’s big twist for you
It took a good friend of mine three episodes of the Apple TV Plus show Sugar before he texted me to say that he thought he knew the big twist the series was hiding and that it was “so insane” he had “no choice but to respect it.” Intrigued, I dove into Sugar myself, and three episodes in, I came to the exact same conclusion — but I’m not going to share it with you here because you really need to see it for yourself.
Sugar’s twist has become a point of some contention in the lead-up to its premiere, with a few critics who reviewed the whole season calling it “disastrous,” among other things. Me? I love a disaster. I also love watching Colin Farrell drive around in a cool blue roadster trying to solve a mystery. And those two things are not incompatible.
To be clear: It’s not hard to guess what Sugar creator Mark Protosevich (I Am Legend) has up his sleeve. The hints begin with really large breadcrumbs in episode 1, and they only get bigger until the show abandons all subtlety around the third episode, which has a sequence that basically dares you to guess what it won’t divulge for several more weeks. It’s also something easily found online, as lots of viewers watching week to week have figured it out on Reddit and other platforms, and critics who have seen the whole season have not been shy about sharing the skinny.
What makes sussing this out even easier is the fact that Sugar is an otherwise run-of-the-mill noir pastiche, about private detective John Sugar (Farrell), who’s on a case to find the missing granddaughter of a legendary Hollywood producer. In such a familiar genre, anything out of the ordinary — like its frequent interpolations with scenes of classic cinema, or its flashy editing style, which presents scenes in an impressionistic, overlapping montage of conversations and movement — registers as exceedingly meaningful.
This has been the biggest criticism of the show: It’s not an inventive noir, so its big swerve overwhelms the story. I don’t happen to
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