Sugar is on the case: the eponymous hero of new Apple TV Plus noir detective show Sugar has been given his case to investigate, and now he needs to get to the bottom of a strange disappearance.
In Sugar episode 2, entitled 'These People, These Place', it's time for Sugar to begin investigating. If you'll remember, the detective specializes in missing people, and his latest assignment is to find the missing grand-daughter of a famous but ailing Hollywood producer.
After having met John Sugar in the first episode, we know that he's a charitable and courteous man who harbors a huge passion for old movies, especially detective ones. However he's clearly also struggling with a mysterious affliction, and has wounds from his past that this case is re-opening.
So what's next for Sugar? Let's find out with this Sugar episode 2 recap.
Swimming with the sharks
After a morning swim in his hotel pool John Sugar (Colin Farrell) meets with missing girl Olivia's father Bernie Siegel (Dennis Boutsikaris), who's also a movie producer. He thinks Olivia will show up eventually and they shouldn't search for her — he goes so far as to accuse Sugar of wasting money in his hunt.
Bernie knows that Sugar met up with Melanie (Amy Ryan) last night, and he thinks that Sugar doesn't know that Melanie is his ex-wife, until Sugar proves he does. Sugar asks Bernie about the polaroids of Rachel he discovered, and asks whether Bernie took them — the producer denies it, and the detective believes him. Bernie says that he was truly in love with Rachel, and that Olivia is his only reminder of her. He's incensed that Sugar thinks he doesn't care about his daughter and storms away, and the detective decides that the man is still hiding something.
When Sugar returns to his hotel room, he sees with his security cameras that the room was broken into while he was out, by David Siegel (Nate Corddry) and his assistant Kenny (Alex Hernandez). They did some investigating and planted some bugs, but they were sloppily placed, and Sugar simply switches them off.
The next step of the investigation begins: Sugar talks to lots of Olivia's friends. Most of them haven't seen her in ages, and think she had a revelation which stopped her using drugs with them. We also learn that she had a string of lovers, but Sugar shows them the picture of the man he found in the trunk, and none of them recognize this man.
We spend some time away from Sugar: on the set of his movie, Bernie is worried about David, who's set to be the star of the film. Apparently, eight people are accusing him of something, with one of them not taking any hush money, and if the story comes out it could ruin the film.
Update and report
Sugar meets up with Ruby (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) to update her on the case, in particular a meeting he just had with Jonathan Siegel (James Cromwell). Sugar told Jonathan about meeting Bernie and David, and Jonathan vaguely alludes to reasons that they're not a very close family.
The detective and client look through the location data from Olivia's car, and before her disapperance she made multiple visits to a particular house that stands out: it stands out because a Latina woman was murdered in the building during one of Olivia's visits. What's more, the culprit was the body in Olivia's car trunk, a man called Clifford Carter, which Sugar hasn't reported his discovery of to the police despite the law saying he should.
While Jonathan finds this interesting, Ruby doesn't as Sugar recounts it; she just wants the two to have a nice normal lunch. During it, we learn that Ruby has 19 clients that she hands like Sugar, and one of them is being called in to help with the case. As Sugar tries to open his car door at the end of lunch, his hand freezes, and Ruby again asks him to contact his doctor.
Melanie (Amy Ryan) calls Sugar to meet, and he visits her at her Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. She tells everyone that she was 23 years sober until something rattled her two weeks ago, and she's spent the fortnight getting drunk, but a man took her home the night before and looked after her which she considers a wake-up call. This man was, of course, Sugar in episode 1.
Afterward Melanie, who's since discovered Sugar's true identity as a detective, and the man discuss Olivia. He knows that she visited Melanie loads before the disapperance, which resulted in a changed focus from her in her social media output. But then Melanie says that they should just wait for Olivia to return for rehab, echoing very similarly Bernie's word's from earlier, which makes Sugar think that Bernie has got to Melanie. She doesn't give any more information, and the detective thinks that the woman is hiding more information.
Sugar makes a four-legged friend
Sugar goes to the cinema to see an old movie, and on the way back, he notices that he's being followed by someone. He also sees the dog belonging to the homeless man from episode 1, which he follows, but can't find the man. So he tracks the GPS of the phone he gave the man, which leads him to an old motel. The dog claws on a certain door, so Sugar gets the property manager to open it.
The room is filled with alcohol and cocaine and Carl, the homeless man, is dead from an overdose. Another man is in the hotel room, and he won't give Sugar any information when the detective asks what this stranger gave Carl. Instead, Sugar throws him against the wall and leaves, after taking the card and phone he gave Carl.
Sugar takes the dog with him, and goes to Ruby's house to ask if the dog can stay there. Ruby has a cat so it can't. He mentions to her that he was being trailed and he doesn't think it was by the Siegels; also she tells Sugar that he needs to go to the police about the body he found in Olivia's trunk.
However, upon returning to Olivia's car for the body, Sugar finds that someone has already removed it! We also see Ruby again, on the phone with someone, and she's discussing Sugar being followed. She says "Obviously they are watching him". But who's 'they'?
David and Kenny go to Bernie to report what they found from their investigation while Bernie distracts Sugar. They took a few pictures of things in his apartment, so know about the invite he received, and also stole some letters to Sugar from his mother. However since the bug was discovered, they have no audio from the hotel. Bernie is annoyed at his son for not discovering more.
Sugar returns to his hotel room, with his new canine friend. We learn that Jen (the girl Olivia reminds Sugar of, mentioned in the previous episode) was Sugar's sister, but the detective hopes that this case has a different ending.
We end by seeing a young woman and her two children returning home... to discover gangsters there. The kids are taken away while the head honcho reveals that he's Clifford Carter's boss, and we learn that the woman is the sister of the lady who was murdered (mentioned earlier in the episode).
The boss wants to know where Clifford is, so he can retrieve important information from the man's phone and also shows the woman the last text he received from Clifford. It's a picture of Melanie, asking the boss if he knows who this is, and the young woman who's being threatened clearly does!
