If Sugar 2.0’s back-to-basics approach is going to work, it’s because of episodes like this. Relying more on the tricks of Sugar’s trade than police-procedural style portrayals of stereotypical gangbangers, this week’s installment is the most solid of the season so far. 

Our man (well, “man”) Sugar starts by pulling off the impossible, killing Ji Moon with an overdose, then bringing him back from the dead, then killing him all over again. After reviving Ji from the lethal injection he himself gave him, John deposits him in a rich-people rehab facility, a million light years from where anyone would think to look for him. Next, Sugar fakes Ji’s death by paying off a funeral home employee whip up a false one for cash in an envelope. No body? No problem! Just say the remains were shipped to Korea per his family’s wishes. His cop friend Tom Flyberg, who’s a pretty dapper guy when he’s out on a case, will look into getting witness protection for Ji when the time comes. 

But for now, Sugar knows even his elaborate ruse is not enough to make a crooked cop like Vega rest easy. Sugar has to continue the ruse, first by going back to the cabin where the OD took place to retrieve his abandoned Narcan inhaler, then by showing up at Vega’s house and cold-cocking him in front of a whole family birthday party to demonstrate his anger. Anything less would be unconvincing. Even then, Sugar still has Val do a lot of the further heavy lifting on the case so as not to arouse suspicion.

Good idea, too: Vega has men following Sugar everywhere he goes, and not even he seems aware of it. They report back nothing unusual — just a rich dilettante detective with some interesting hobbies who has moved on from the case. But Vega didn’t get where he is, answering to…whoever it is he’s answering to, without being smart. He returns to the cabin and stares at a taxidermied bobcat head on the wall that Sugar knocked out of place while he was there. Did he reorient it just right, or is Vega onto Sugar’s presence there?

Sugar continues to look deeper into the hit that Vega carried out, landing Ji in trouble to begin with. He figures that Chuy, the dead man, saw and filmed something he wasn’t supposed to, so he tracks down the guy’s phone…now in the possession of his mother, who has died of an overdose of her own. In the episode’s bracing downer of an ending, her ashes are filed away along with those of countless other people with no one to collect them, and presumably no one to mourn them. 

That’s the kind of observation that would get John Sugar waxing philosophical about how Earth changes people. He has another vision of that woman he hallucinated in the club a few episodes ago, in fact, making this very point. “Cheeseburger, sex, murder — that’s how the assimilation happens,” she says. Sugar has already given in and eaten his first cheeseburger, and he’s rekindled things with Charlotte such that sex feels like it’s on the table. The show has him call his Season 1 love interest, Melanie (Amy Ryan, shown in recycled Season 1 footage), and establishes that she’s out on tour with her band, in case you were wondering.

Meanwhile, Sugar continues looking into his other case: whatever the heck Senator Pavich is up to. Sugar breaks into the home of the professor he’s seen meeting with the senator. He finds a parrot, a room full of cacti and succulents, and a diagram that resembles one he found in his erstwhile nemesis Henry’s crazy-person notebook. He then makes the professor’s acquaintance by striking up a conversation about prickly pear in the park, having given himself a crash-course in cacti to better play the role of a fellow hobbyist and win the professor’s trust. 

Speaking of winning people’s trust, I do not trust whatever is going on with Nestor Rodrigues (Evan Bittencourt), the big-shot boxer who’s willing to give Danny a second chance even after he decked one of his friends. Surely there’s an ulterior motive here. It’s a neo-noir!

But you can see why Sugar would get lonely, nightswimming and sending out messages to no one every night. It’s not just that his people have all gone home, as far as he knows. It’s that his life shows the limits of human connection. I think depression and ennui are a more worrisome sign of assimilation than cheeseburgers.

Sugar is a tough show to root against. With its loving photography of Los Angeles — Paramount, of all studios, gets thoroughly glazed in this one; no indication if Sugar took the studio tour of the ruins of 60 Minutes — and its talented, likeable leads, all it really needs to do is stay out of its own way and let sturdy private-detective storytelling do its job. That’s the tack it takes here, and hopefully will until the case is closed.

Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.