Sugar Season 2 Raises A Serious Question About That Bizarre Alien Twist

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for “Sugar” Season 1 and the Season 2 premiere.

If you were one of the lucky viewers watching “Sugar” from its initial release in 2024, congrats on getting to experience one of the biggest, wildest, most creative twists in recent memory firsthand. The Apple series presented itself as a fairly straightforward neo-noir detective show, starring Colin Farrell as our traditionally tortured private investigator John Sugar with an endearing obsession over movies, his gorgeous 1966 Corvette Sting Ray (as explored in more depth here by writer/gearhead Priscilla Page), and his adopted dog. It wasn’t until about halfway through the season that creator Mark Protosevich (along with co-showrunners Simon Kinberg and Sam Catlin) dropped that bomb on us: The man we thought of as Sugar was actually a shape-shifting, blue-skinned extraterrestrial hiding out on Earth. You know, as one does.

That bizarre, out-of-left-field choice singlehandedly reshaped “Sugar” from a seemingly standard (though tremendously well-shot) mystery series into a sci-fi story with global (galactic?) implications moving forward … until the Season 2 premiere, titled “Home Away from Home,” takes another unexpected swerve. When we last saw Sugar, he had elected to stay behind on Earth while the rest of his people made their getaway (thus giving up on ever seeing his home world again) in order to continue his search for his missing sister Djen (Maeve Whalen). Within the first 10 minutes of the new season, however, the episode establishes that his search for Djen was a dead end (quite literally, as the only lead into her kidnapping dies in his arms), and Sugar resigns himself to a lonely existence in Los Angeles as a sad-sack PI.

This status quo reset can’t help but make us wonder whether that alien twist was really worth it after all.

Give “Sugar” this much credit, at least: It continues finding new ways to keep us on our toes. This time, the big twist is actually more of an anti-twist, if that makes sense. Rather than commit to switching genres on us and fully embrace its sci-fi trappings, Season 2 makes a calculated retreat back to more familiar territory. After the cold open and the credit sequence rolls, the premiere essentially recommits itself as a neo-noir story as Sugar listlessly wonders what to do next — until a new client falls into his lap, and the plot kicks back into gear.

Don’t get me wrong; “Sugar” absolutely remains worth watching for fans of throwbacks to old-school noirs, complete with cuts to actual Humphrey Bogart films and other classics as Sugar basically retraces the steps of all his favorite cinematic heroes. (The premiere even includes a bit where Sugar drives to the Hollywood Hills and holes up in a fancy house that may have belonged to Bogart himself.) But what may throw some viewers for a loop is the almost complete and utter lack of focus on any lingering alien business. Sure, there’s the beginnings of a subplot about Sugar looking into the corrupt politician Senator Tyson Pavich (John D’Aquino), one of the humans who somehow discovered that aliens were living among them — and promptly blackmailed, tortured, and otherwise mistreated Sugar’s kind.

But, for now, that hardly appears to be the priority. Instead, Season 2 is much more focused on what seems to be an ordinary missing person case involving local boxer Danny Moon (Jin Ha). Of course, there’s every possibility that this loops back around and factors into the alien storyline … but should it?

Will the real “Sugar” please stand up? For the majority of Season 1, the Apple TV series worked perfectly well as the show all its trailers marketed it as: an ol’ yarn about Colin Farrell being the loneliest private eye in the world, moping around in his immaculately-tailored suit and his expensive convertible while solving crimes. After that game-changing twist, it turned into a fascinating hybrid that had to service both genres at once without compromising one for the other. Season 2 had all the makings of committing just as hard to its cosmic roots, but instead, it feels like we’re right back to square one.

Whether this is for the best or not remains to be seen. We’re not exactly going out on a limb to say that a segment of the fanbase would’ve preferred to see “Sugar” remain exactly where it was when it started, relying solely on the charm of its lead actor, the seductively moody atmosphere of its LA setting, and one heck of a central mystery. (A few of the top posts in the “Sugar” subreddit are to that effect.) Still, many others came to appreciate the twist and how deeply embedded the reveal turned out to be from the very start. (Sugar’s opening narration in the series premiere basically spells it all out, though in a way that nobody would’ve ever picked up on at the time.)

Could “Sugar” have ever succeeded on the strength of its story alone, without any otherworldly twist added on? We’ll never know. All we can do is wait, watch how Season 2 unfolds, and, hopefully, see if this was the right call all along. New episodes stream on Apple TV every Friday.