Meat, sex, murder. As of this episode, John Sugar has partaken in all three. What kind of man — or “man” — does that make him?
For answers, maybe we should look to Breaking Bad, showrunner Sam Catlin’s old stomping grounds and an obvious influence on this season of Sugar, even beyond the presence of Better Call Saul villain Tony Dalton as the evil Lieutenant Vega. This episode starts with a BB/BCS-style cold open, showing us the detritus from a car crash before flashing back two days earlier to show us how that car came to be upside-down in the middle of a desert road.
Breaking Bad’s storyline is so famous by now it hardly constitutes a spoiler warning to discuss it, but the basic idea was that once a mild-mannered but frustrated science teacher started killing people, he’d never stop. The definition of “self-defense” is slowly expanded outward until he’s ordering a dozen simultaneous hits to keep people from snitching. When you break bad, or when you “assimilate” in Sugar’s parlance, there’s no going back.
Just ask Sugar’s assimilated friends Peg and Henry, both dead by their own hands. Is that where Sugar is headed? A life of crime, be it white-collar like Peg or red-handed like Henry, culminating in suicide? Or will he skip the middleman and cut straight to the killing-himself bit? Sugar connects with a cheery scene on his television right at the end of the episode, or else I’d figure self-harm was an immediate possibility.
Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself: In this episode, John Sugar wins.
Before I start an episode of Apple TV‘s Cape Fear, I crank up the volume on my soundbar. I want that Bernard Herrmann/Elmer Bernstein/Jeff Russo score to hit like the fist of an angry god. I turn off every light, because I want the ruddy flesh tones and blue-green eyes of these sweat-soaked lunatics to pop off the screen. I turn off the air conditioning, partially because I don’t want to the show to compete with the white noise but partially because if it gets hot while I watch it, well, that feels appropriate. To properly enjoy Cape Fear, you have to give yourself over to it completely.
Boy, does that approach pay dividends here. Titled “The Executioners” after the John D. MacDonald novel that started it all, this season finale plays more like the finale of a fireworks show, with one spectacular scene and set piece after another until the ominously understated conclusion. It’s a sensory experience, a parade of lurid sights and bombastic sounds best represented by a single shot: Max Cady, standing on the roof of the Bowdens’ house in the middle of a hurricane, as the theme song blares. I was grinning from ear to ear. A moment like that is why you make this show — a masterpiece of modern TV horror.
Hot damn, this is the kind of episode you build mystery boxes for. This obviously pivotal episode of the third season of Silo is titled “Memory,” for multiple reasons. In part, it’s because we are afforded glimpses of the past we skipped over in the transition between seasons. In part, it’s because with the help of her friends, Juliette begins, at last, to remember.
Okay, so this episode leaves in a crime-does-not-pay suicide but edits out a love scene like it’s a Hays Code Hollywood movie. Other than that, though, it’s the second in a row I’d call the strongest of the season to date. Director Adam Bernstein and cinematographer Marshall Adams really outdo themselves here, with one crisp, gorgeous shot of the Los Angeles night after another. Colin Farrell and Laura Donnelly look radiant during their date, like Golden Age movie stars. There’s a view of the sky at dusk that John and Peg catch before her death that takes your breath away.
Meanwhile, the mystery now feels much more focused. We know what Vega is up to and why, though as Sugar notes he’s just the muscle and his real backer has yet to reveal themselves. Ji’s plight makes more sense, particularly now that Vega has gotten Danny dragged off to jail where he can be killed if John fails to cough up Ji’s location. Vega and Sugar have established some hero-villain understanding like Pacino and De Niro in Heat. And Peg works much better as a real, traumatic memory than a series of cryptic hallucinations. I’ll wait until a third strong episode in a row establishes a pattern for certain, but after its initial growing pains, it seems Apple TV‘s SugarSeason 2 may have righted the ship.
Suddenly I wonder if the tables will be turned in the finale. In previous iterations of the story, Max Cady assaults the Bowden family at Cape Fear. But Tom is in prison, Natalie is with Noa, and Zack is who knows where, possibly in Max’s trunk but most likely not given the timing. That leaves Anna alone with Max, Crystal, Robert, Luke, and mama Hester (Jill Larson). (Granted, she’s busy breastfeeding dolls she believes to be Crystal, but she’s still out there.) Will the finale, which I fully expect to be batshit insane, feature Anna as a one-woman army, an unstoppable force destroying the Cady family before it destroys hers?
It’s time to talk about the past. Or, rather, the present. It’s time to have a tough conversation about the pre-apocalyptic flashbacks, is what I’m saying.
On some levels, they have a lot going for it. This is the storyline that will ostensibly answer the big question, Why are they down there?, and as such it has undoubtedly held my interest. It’s charmingly acted by Jessica Henwick as investigative journalist Helen Drew and Ashley Zukerman as idealistic freshman congressman Daniel Keene. (They’re very good-looking people.) But man, the material is like styrofoam packing peanuts, designed to transport you safely from point A to point B, nothing more. I hate those things.
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.
I can picture it now. A mausoleum somewhere in Savannah, holding four corpses. HERE LIE THE BOWDENS, reads the legend above the entrance to their crypt, below which is printed a single explanatory sentence for their collective demise: “IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME.” Over and over, Anna, Tom, and Natalie — Zack is in a mental institution recovering from his brainwashing — do what feels right in the moment, only for it to come back to haunt them in the most horrifying way possible.
When portraying a functionary in a dystopian regime, it helps to have resting scowl face. Actor Denise Gough, for example, made the most of what she has called her “downturny mouth” as the sneering Imperial officer Dedra Meero in Andor. Richard Burton’s hard-bitten hangdog looks made his O’Brien in the film version of 1984 seem possessed of some terrible wisdom that burns from within.
To this list, we can add Alexandria Riley and her character, Camille Sims, on Silo. For a long time I struggled with Camille, wondering why she was so much less sympathetic even than archvillains like Bernard or her own husband, Robert Sims. Even when she was helping Juliette before the rebellion and her exile and return, something in her eyes just defies empathy. She has the face of someone who’s about to explain to you why they had to betray you, and will be irritated that you don’t understand.
This, of course, is all by design on the part of the writers, the filmmakers, and the actor. In fact, Camille’s fundamental dislikability is made canon in this episode, by no less an authority than the Algorithm itself. Why was she chosen by the AI that runs the Silo to become the new head of IT and guardian of the Silo’s terrible secrets? “Your ability to lie,” the program says placidly. Her manipulative nature, her willingness to play both sides of any given conflict, is ironically how the Algorithm knew she could be trusted.
A couple years ago I wrote an essay about a TV style or subgenre I called “the New Lurid”: Dead Ringers, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Idol, Copenhagen Cowboy, and other hyper-lush depictions of the incestuous degeneracy of the ultra-rich — Saltburn-core, basically. Since then, recent seasons of shows such as The White Lotus, Industry, Euphoria, and Interview with the Vampire as retitled The Vampire Lestat have carried the New Lurid torch. Cape Fear, a raw psychosexual thriller about a one-percenter family in which everyone is related, as they fight and fuck under trees whose branches appear ready to snap from the weight of their greenness, does so too.
“Like a televisual vanitas,” I wrote, these shows are “sensual but death-haunted, lush to the point of rottenness, like a once-magnificent family finally, terminally, gone to seed.” If that doesn’t describe Cape Fear, I don’t know what does.
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.
Ironically, given the nature of the titular structure, Silo’s lore does not run that deep. I’m fond of pointing out that rather than take the usual mystery-box approach, keeping the core question in the dark as you add more and more questions to maintain momentum, Silo keeps it simple. There’s really only one mystery here: Why are they down there? Everything else flows directly from or to that central gap in the narrative.
But it’s not just the mystery plot, Juliette’s often interrupted quest to get to the truth, that reflects this welcome simplicity. As a result of that storytelling decision, all the backstory, the fake history, the world-building, the lore must also point in the direction of that one big question. In a lore-heavy episode like this one, we see the benefits of that approach. The information still opens up new vistas of understanding, but the camera, so to speak, is always focused on the exact same landscape. We just see it more clearly now.
I’ve written that Sugar is a fantasy of a frictionless, trafficless Los Angeles, in which our angelic alien glides from destination to destination, easily earning the trust of people from across the town’s tapestry of cultures. It enhances the show’s dreamy tone, sure. But does the fact that John Sugar is, for all intents and purposes, a rich white man in a suit influence his ability to do what he does so effortlessly? The other explanations — highly stylized writing, or as-yet undisclosed alien pheromones — are satisfying, but they don’t make for a particularly rich text.
What has always distinguished Sugar is the off-kilter excellence of its execution. In some senses that’s still there: the photography of Los Angeles, whether at night or in broad daylight, remains absolutely beautiful, and so does the photography of Colin Farrell.
But the wheels are really starting to creak everywhere else. The sequence in which Sugar walks through the EZ4’s base of operations is frankly an embarrassment, a series of glowering tattooed Mexicans with white socks pulled up high, mean-mugging the only white person on the screen. To paraphrase Community, I can excuse racism, but I draw the line at a boring walk through a yard controlled by drug dealers when The Wire did this for season after season without ever once being dull about it twenty damn years ago.
We live in a time of unsubtle metaphors. The White House lies in ruins so the billionaire president can build a combination ballroom and bunker for himself and his rich pedophile pals, the Reflecting Pool is full of pond scum and guarded by soldiers and cops who arrest people for touching a monument that belongs to them. So by all means, stick psychotic omnisexuals in the walls, have a misogynistic freak buy the house across the street, leave literal trails of blood everywhere you go. You could not possibly be less subtle with the subtext than reality itself.
The point being made by Neveah’s existence within the very walls of the Bowdens’ happy home is that nothing is sacred, nothing is safe, home and family provide neither security nor succor. This is borne out by the plot time and again. Not a single member of the Bowden family trusts any of the others.
The last we saw Juliette Nichols, she was on fire. Played by Rebecca Ferguson, Juliette is the working-class hero of the post-apocalyptic bunker called the Silo and the protagonist of the series. Expelled by former mayor Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) for investigating the Silo’s secrets, she survived the poison atmosphere of the outside world long enough to make it into a different Silo entirely. Its few residents helped her make it back home, leading to a fiery confrontation with Bernard just outside the original Silo’s airlock before her storyline cut to black.
Three months later, it’s a whole new world down there. Juliette has been elected mayor. Hell, some people seem to view her as a kind of messiah. In addition to miraculously surviving both the poison air and the fiery reentry chamber, her return to alert the Silo residents that it was deadly to go outdoors ended the facility’s brief civil war.
What’s more, her actions exposed Bernard’s schemes to society. Though he himself died during the fire, his surveillance camera system is being dismantled, his abuse of the governing Pact has been curtailed, and the Pact itself is being rewritten by Sheriff Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche). Now there’s a whole governing council comprising representatives of every level and department in the Silo: Juliette, Paul, Judge Robert Sims (Common), and his wife Camille (Alexandria Riley), Juliette’s handler and chief of staff.
There’s just one problem: Juliette doesn’t have the first clue how any of this happened.
But the episode’s loveliest shot isn’t one of Sugar’s visions of the cosmos, gorgeous as those are. It’s when he visits the grandmother of a murdered friend of Ji’s, sees that her grief has rendered her unable to do basic tasks like the dishes, and voluntarily starts doing them for her. Unwilling to let a guest in her home do all the work himself, she gets up and helps dry. This goes on for a wordless minute or two — a moving moment of human connection. (Well, half-human, anyway.)
What Max is doing is playing the most long-term, high-stakes game of “not touching you! not touching you! not touching you!” of all time. Over the course of years he built his plans for revenge, turning various people (mostly women and girls) to his cause. (Tabitha, the vapid journalist, seems on the verge of becoming one of his disciples herself.)
There’s no law against bumping into people, or having a daughter, or buying a house. He’s not doing anything, not that they can successfully pin on him anyway. Since every word Max speaks to the Bowdens is friendly, at least on the surface, there’s little grounds for any kind of legal protection. They just have to sit there and take it as he tricks them into being their own undoing. Judging from the number of unforced errors they make this episode, that won’t be too hard. Cape Fear is a journey into brains as overheated and unhealthily vibrant as the colors of the show itself.
Cape Fear is overripe. Its colors are too rich — and rewardingly so. The skin tones glowing pink to the point of redness, the foliage so green it looks like something might descend from the canopy to eat you, the air itself seemingly tinted aquamarine, as though you could as soon swim in it as walk through it, like the humid air of a late summer afternoon before an evening storm. When Max prays in front of his Santería altar at home, his face is so red he looks like he’s inside one of the candles.
A lurid show in terms of its color palette, Cape Fear follows suit with its subject matter. Putting the plot aside for a moment: As a practical matter, this show is about — let’s not kid ourselves here, we’re all adults — the tremendous sexual charisma of Javier Bardem, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that he’s playing a cackling psychopath. When his dapper Max Cady plants a surprise kiss on Anna Bowden in the middle of a park, you can tell she’s feeling a lot of ways about it; “Ewww” is not one of them. Nor does it appear to be the first time their lips have met, either. Amy Adams makes Anna look like she’s ready to vibrate out of her skin as she walks away; I half expected her to rub one out in the parking lot before she drove home.
John Sugar’s Los Angeles is back. It’s a fantasy LA, a frictionless LA, an LA where you can cruise around in your perfect car in your perfect suits and never hit traffic. It’s a place where clips from old movies help you wax philosophical about the human condition and your own place in it, as the the buildings and the neon glow in your windshield. It’s colorful place, with heavily saturated reds and blues in particular, an unusual color palette for a streaming show. (You do see it in Michael Mann films.)
It’s a place where nurses willingly incriminate themselves to help you after knowing you for all of two minutes, like you’re Sgt. Joe Friday on Dragnet. It’s a place where a middle-aged Irish guy like Colin Farrell can meet cute with a different beautiful middle-aged Irish (or Irish-American) lady every season and get a whole cool stylish sci-fi mystery out of it. It’s a city of immigrants, like Ji Moon, like John Sugar.
It is, in short, very much my kind of place. And if both the Season 1 twist and this Season 2 reshuffle are any indication, there’s no way to get a sense of its boundaries until you’ve been there. I’m ready to hop in.
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” In Widow’s Bay as in the real world, Karl Marx was right. In a sense, Widow’s Bay is a complex metaphor for trying to survive and stay sane in that nightmare world. Life is a horror show, driven by the failures of our dead forefathers, and the cost of putting an end to it may not be one we are willing or able to pay. By fighting it, we are forced — or we choose — to become monsters ourselves.
That’s the fancy-pants, mainland way of looking at this episode. The other way, the island way, is Holy shit, they did human sacrifices depending on the number of times the cursed church bell tolls, and now Loftis is trapped on the island forever because his son Evan is the final descendant of Richard Warren, and as long as he’s alive the sacrifices must continue???
All that and it’s funny, too? To borrow a term from Stephen King: Dear Reader, that’s good TV.
