I finished watching the Apple TV show Sugar this week and had intended to tag it on the end of my television roundup post, but the last few episodes made it deserving of a longer review.

Firstly, it’s important to say it was a good show and I enjoyed watching it. The first couple of episodes were interesting but potentially not mind-blowing, but some good online reviews convinced me to keep watching and it definitely got better. If you can get past the name Sugar, which is odd when people say it out loud, each episode was more intriguing than the last until episode six when everything was turned on its head.

Spoiler alert, definitely revealing some plot twists from this point onwards.

The marketing for Sugar called it a genre-bending detective show, and I thought that just related to the arty style which was so well done. The craft gone in to selecting clips from black and white movies and placing them at exactly the right moments, the planning, the care, the creativity… really exceptional work from everyone involved.

But that wasn’t what they meant by genre-bending. What they meant was, this private investigator character, suave, sophisticated, a bit mysterious, that you’ve been watching for six episodes… turns out he’s a blue alien from outer space.

Huh? What now?

Weirdly, I had guessed this twist without taking it at all seriously. At one point the group discuss the fact they should be observing only, and making notes on those observations rather than keeping a diary about thoughts and feelings. I said, hmm, it’s like they’re aliens if they’re here to observe. But it wasn’t a serious suggestion, this is a classy show filmed gorgeously in Los Angeles, as if they’re going to make it about aliens.

But they did. And I don’t know how I feel about it. I wondered if it annoyed me because of the feelings I experienced watching From Dusk Till Dawn. But it was nowhere near that bad. Sure the show flipped into something new but it didn’t throw out everything that had gone before, and there was still a focus on the mystery at hand.

What I think has annoyed me about it, and it’s hard to describe the feeling really, annoyance is too strong a word, is that it didn’t really feel relevant. It didn’t add anything to the plot and it more likely got in the way of several things. If they’d revealed it earlier and we had more time to play with the concept of observation versus getting involved, I think it would have had a stronger impact.

It does seem like the decision on when to reveal was a difficult one though, as interviews with Colin Farrell have suggested:

I knew it was decided to take it from the first episode and put it to the sixth or maybe the fourth or maybe the fifth that much… it was certainly decided to be removed from the first episode because we just wanted to not rely on what is of course a contrivance… In the first episode, we wanted to get into the human drama first and win people’s trust and see if we could win an audience’s favor in regard to Sugar’s journey and everyone else’s journey before we drop that bomb in six.

Which makes sense and I do get that. Hopefully there will be a second season to actually have time to explore this backstory and mythology in more detail, because the moments where we glimpsed the home planet had me rolling my eyes in this first series. But on the other hand, I do think the idea of Henry being out there and causing chaos has potential for good storytelling and some interesting ethical questions.

So, wow, I have no conclusions but it’s definitely worth a watch - the cast are brilliant, the storytelling effective and the cinematography electric. And there’s a twist that one way or another will blow your mind.