Beyond its crackerjack climax — we’ll get to it — there’s a lot about this episode of Sugar I don’t understand. Yes, there’s the show’s frustrating retreat to the LA noir private-detective mode it was poised to greatly expand upon by the Season 1 finale to think about, but I’m speaking in a more literal sense. I do not understand why certain things happen, or why they happen the way they do. Do you?

A cold open set eight weeks prior to current events shows how Ji Moon first came into contact with Tony Dalton’s crooked cop character, Lt. Vega. Thoroughly spooked after stealing drugs from the hospital, Ji hides in a hospital room that happens to be occupied by Chuy, the gang member Vega has come to murder. Ji sees the whole thing through closet doors, but gives away his location by whimpering. Vega opens the closet, figures out he’s stealing meds, takes his photo, and tells him to run.

In the present, things get real, real quick. Brought in for debriefing after the massacre at the EZ4 compound, Sugar winds up face to face with Vega, whom he straight-up accuses of murdering Chuy and wanting to murder Ji. He does this in full view of four or five equally dirty cops on the other side of the interrogation room’s two-way mirror, a neat way of making it immediately clear that this criminal conspiracy has deep roots in the department, and that Sugar is in real danger. LA sheriff’s gangs are no joke at all. Only word from someone on high, a “guardian angel” who has dictated he is not to be touched, gets John out of there alive, I suspect.

In a strangely written side plot, Sugar returns to his hotel home and catches his new lady friend Charlotte snooping around his room on his security cameras. When he angrily confronts her in front of her colleagues at the hotel bar, she retorts that she’d merely been let into his room by housekeeping to leave him a note. This raises several questions. First, why would housekeeping let you into someone else’s hotel room? Second, why not just slip the note under the door like a normal person? Third, why leave it, of all places, stashed inside a magazine on Sugar’s nightstand in his bedroom? Are you leaving notes or hiding Easter eggs?

It’s similarly difficult to explain what happens next. Everyone’s watching Ji’s nurse friend Hannah McDaniel — whom we learn got a colleague fired by using her ID card to rob the pharmacy instead of her own — on the assumption that Ji will connect with her to sell the drugs and make his money. Vega goes to her house and portrays himself as a guardian angel in his own right, out to protect Ji from the scary people he’s running from. He convinces Hannah to arrange a meeting with Ji so that he and his men can bug Ji’s car. Sugar and Val, his gal Friday, race to the mall where they make the buy, expecting Ji to be killed by Vega right then and there.

But Val, we’ve been shown, is sitting on Hannah’s house 24/7. Unless she was on a very long bathroom break, how is it that she missed Vega showing up to the house, knocking on the door, going inside, and speaking with Hannah long enough to make a whole confidential-informant arrangement? She notices when Hannah drives off, but not when Vega drives up? Sugar needs to get better help…or better writing.

Speaking of which, let’s jump back to Ji’s behavior in the hospital. I get that he’s jumpy, having just committed a felony by robbing the hospital pharmacy. But as far as anyone can tell, he’s just a visitor carrying a thermos — looking casual was the whole point of doing the theft in this fashion. Why does he make himself seem even more suspicious by turning around and walking the other way every time he sees a security guard? Why hide in the closet when someone else is at the door of the hospital room he ducks into? Why not just say “Sorry, wrong room, I was just leaving” and, you know, just leave?

I’m having trouble fathoming Vega’s actions as well. He assassinates a gang member in his hospital bed — a process that miraculously brings no nurses or doctors running to do something about his crashing vitals — only to discover an eyewitness was hiding in the closet. So he…tells this witness, and I quote, ‘Run’? I understand he takes a picture by which he plans to find Ji later, but why on earth would you let him out of your sight to begin with?

Ji’s brother Danny doesn’t do much better in the “behaving in a way that makes sense” department. Turns out he did recognize the friend Ji was hanging with in the club the other night, but didn’t say so because…well, who knows, because the explanation we’re given makes no sense. Danny suddenly says he doesn’t really care if Ji lives or dies because he’s headed down a self-destructive road regardless — buddy, you’re the one who hired the private detective to find and save him, not me!

After that, he royally messes up his big meeting with the big-shot boxer he’ll be fighting in Vegas, attacking a member of his entourage for calling Ji a junkie. Now, everyone involved in this fight is so clearly up to no good that it’s probably just as well if he did screw up his shot at the big time, but leaping across a booth to deck someone reads as impulsive and unreliable, not loyal.

Sugar manages to track Ji down through the kind of ludicrous inductive leaps poorly written mysteries are fond of making, where a chance glance at an object or mention of a word magically triggers the detective’s mind and points him in the right direction. A movie he sees on TV at Ji’s friend’s house is what sends him high-tailing it to the mall to intervene. 

Once he gets there, he sees a photograph on the wall, which reminds him of a photograph of the Moon brothers on Danny’s fridge, which leads him to the cabin in the Mojave where Ji and his buddy are holed up. It’s literally as simplistic as the existence of a photograph, any photograph, reminding him that there also exists a second photograph, one of the brothers. Not even Colin Farrell can sell the revelation.

Sugar somehow makes it to the cabin before the cops who’ve got a tracking device leading them right to it. (He tells Danny to send him the cabin’s “coordinates,” like he’s the captain of a battleship instead of a Los Angeleno in a Corvette.) In a legitimately clever and tense bit of business, he deliberately pumps a lethal overdose into Ji, “killing” him just long enough for Vega and his men to check the place out and leave. After that, Sugar hits him with Narcan and does CPR till Ji revives. 

It’s a very strong ending, a razor-sharp idea that keeps the spotlight on Farrell and Dalton where it belongs. I don’t know if it’s the influence of showrunner and Breaking Bad veteran Sam Catlin, the presence of Better Call Saul star Dalton or what, but it reminds me of something Walter White might have done to Jesse Pinkman if push came to shove for them. If the Sugar 2.0 can generate more moments like these, then we’d be talking. I’m just not sure it makes up for all the ways the writing had to fudge things to get us there. 

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.