Sunny sets with a reunion, an occasion, a coincidence … and a cliffhanger. I wasn’t expecting that, but I don’t hate it. Colin O’Sullivan’s 2018 book, The Dark Manual, is a one-off, but then so is Blake Crouch’s 2016 novel, Dark Matter, and Apple TV+ just announced a second season of its namesake adaption of that dimension-hopscotching hullabaloo. (It’s also probably why the streamer decided its adaptation of O’Sullivan’s book should be given a different title.)
As soon as the title sequence concludes, we’re back in the warehouse where Sunny appeared to fall through the floor two episodes ago. At last, Suzie is reunited with Zen, the son she’d feared dead, wrapping the boy in her arms. Tetsu lies lifeless on the floor, the whites of his locked-open eyes stained red with blood.
The prior episode, wherein Sunny reflected on her own behavior and decided in the end to wipe her own memory and reset herself, was how Sunny experienced the aftermath of that encounter, wherein she killed Tetsu because he was threatening Suzie’s life. It appears that Sunny’s long, dark night of the soul overlaps with at least the first half of this season-ender, during which Sunny remains unconscious as Yuki, that turncoat ImaTech tech, tries to extract her code.
Presumably, anything we learned during the previous episode could be disregarded, as its events unfolded only within Sunny’s machine subconscious. Alas, the revelation that Yuki was the mole who smuggled the disobedience code out of ImaTech and onto the black market was for real. Sunny dug up this realization from the dusty corridors of her memory banks the way a person might recall a painful experience they’d long repressed through therapy. It’s fascinating that Sunny experienced this attempt at self-negation as something she chose herself after concluding that she deserves it, even though we see clearly in this episode that Yuki is attempting to reset her by force. That’s a smart way of dramatizing two massive, insoluble questions: whether artificial intelligence can possess free will and whether free will is itself an illusion.
Bravo! This is what we’re here for, Sunny. Not the too-familiar yakuza shit, though there’s plenty of that here, too.
Himé’s henchmen drag Suzie, Zen, Mixxy, and Hiromasa away, leaving Himé with Tetsu’s body. As Yuki gets to work on Sunny, he finds that Masa rigged Sunny’s ports to resist any attempt at intrusion into her brain, as Yuki discovers when his laptop gets fried on his first try. He insists to Himé, despite this failure, that he’s “a beast with the zeroes and ones.†Himé slaps those shades off his fool head and, later, puts a blade in his face and threatens to cut out his tongue if he can’t make good on his boasts. She’s a sociopath who blew up a planeload of innocent people, but no jury in the world would convict her for this.
Meanwhile, Suzie, Zen, Hiromasa, and Mixxy have been locked up together in a chicken-wire storage area. “Are you okay?†Suzie asks her son. The kid seems preoccupied with the fact that a baby tooth is coming loose, which allows Mixxy and Hiro to make a fuss over him. When Suzie introduces this pair as her friends, Zen points out, “You don’t have friends!†From the tree, the apple far fall does not, as Yoda probably said once.
I have a question about little Zen’s cucumber-cool emotional state. Masa’s opening narration omits this detail, but it turns out that Setsubun occurs on the last day of winter according to the lunar calendar. In 2025, Setsubun will be observed on February 2. If Zen was abducted at Christmas, when Masa’s plane blew up, and Suzie found him at Setsubun, that means this child was in yakuza custody for at least five weeks. And after his reunion with his mom after just under 40 nights away from his parents, why does Zen act like she’s just back from a brief errand? He doesn’t seem relieved, angry, afraid, or traumatized. He’s so bizarrely chill that I was primed to expect a reveal that would tell us that Masa, like Zen, was still alive and had been looking after his son after faking both their deaths. Instead, the episode confirms Noriko’s loyalty while allowing Mixxy’s to remain suspect.
In captivity, Hiromasa is trying to puzzle out from Suzie and Mixxy’s accounts how Sunny was able to strike Mixxy. Suzie just wants to get her kid to safety, but Hiromasa points out that Masa died trying to prevent the yakuza from figuring out how to weaponize homebots.
Just then, Noriko calls from prison, and Suzie is able to take the call because Zen, her brilliant and defiantly untraumatized little boy, somehow hid her device (no one calls them phones on this show) before the yakuza henchman searched her. Noriko is relieved to hear Zen’s voice on the other end of the line, and the way Judy Ongg plays this moment and her attendant hope that Masa might have survived, too, is another argument for her as the MVP of this shaggy-dog series.
This is where our heroes figure out, by the fact they’re hearing the same Joker-pitched crackle through the phone line from prison and in person, that the henchman keeping them under guard is the son of Yoko — the girlhood acquaintance of Noriko’s, who is now a terminally ill elderly woman doing time with Suzie’s mother-in-law. Why not? Life is full of coincidences. In prison, Noriko grabs Yoko, cuts off her oxygen tube, and tells the woman’s yakuza son that she’ll finish the job unless he sets Suzie, Masa, Hiromasa, and Mixxy free. Mixxy stays to keep the henchman under guard using his own pistol while Hiromasa, Suzie, and Zen venture out into the festival to try to find Sunny.
Jin is fulfilling his ceremonial role as the new oyabun at the Setsubun festival when Himé approaches him, claiming she wants to drink to a new beginning. Her real objective is to trick him into sending his homebot outside so her henchmen can bring it to Yuki, who has claimed that getting his hands on this bot is necessary for him to extract Sunny’s code.
As they move through the crowd disguised in their devil masks, Suzie spots Yuki dragging Sunny away from a distance. At this point, Hiromasa figures out that Masa might have programmed Sunny with an auditory trigger that made the bot attack Mixxy. Zen pipes up that his yakuza captors asked him if there were any phrases his mom regularly used. Putting it all together at last, Suzie runs onstage, pushing aside a singer as she’s performing so she can tell Sunny, via the festival’s public-address system, that Yuki Tanaka can … Go. Suck. A. Dick. It’s the Manchurian Candidate–style code phrase that turns the homebot into a killbot, or at least a punchbot. (I dutifully revisited episode seven to check the scene wherein Sunny drops Mixxy with a right cross to the gut to confirm that Suzie did indeed unwittingly call in this bot strike by telling Mixxy to go suck a dick.)
The ensuing chaos, with a newscaster reporting that “an inebriated American woman is shouting obscenities from the stage,†allows our heroes to escape and gives Himé that extra little shot of encouragement she needs to shove her knife into Jin’s side. He’d accused her before of relying on a bot to do her dirty work; she’s leveled up to doing her own killing. That’s called character development.
Sunny tries to flee for fear she’ll continue to bring Suzie grief, but Suzie runs after her, scolding the bot not to be such a martyr. Hiromasa says he has a coder pal in Tokyo who might be able to erase Sunny’s buried murder code without wiping her memory entirely, but that he wants to bring Masa and Suzie somewhere safe. Mixxy says she has an idea of how to get Sunny to Tokyo, and no one questions her despite Mixxy’s extremely suspect record for as long as Suzie has known her.
We might’ve been less credulous of Mixxy’s offer were we not distracted by Suzie and Sunny’s sweet farewell. Suzie gives Sunny the butterfly-like hand gesture that Masa used to say good-bye to her before boarding that fateful flight. Sunny answers in Suzie’s love language, giving Suzie the finger.
The scene of Hiromasa welcoming Suzie and Zen to his beautiful Lake Biwa getaway, where Sho the trashbot still resides, puts a bow on the season. There’s an envelope pinned to the corkboard addressed to Suzie, which, we can infer, is the source of Masa’s narration from the opening sequence, which bookends the episode. But wait! Mixxy, it turns out, has delivered Sunny right back into the clutches of that bastard Yuki Tanaka, presumably for more yakuza-sponsored dissection.
Subprime Directives
Whatever hold the yakuza has on Mixxy has clearly been withheld to allow Apple TV+ to wring another season out of Sunny. But that’s far from the only thread the season-ender left untied. Here, in increasing order of significance, is a list of items that left me scratching my head as the curtain falls on season one.
• What was the significance of the bloody homebot tire treads on the floor of poor councilman Ito’s home, of which Suzie and apparently no one else took notice?
• Who is Dee, Suzie’s former confidant who ended her friendship with Suzie over some unspecified transgression?
• Where is ImaTech in all of this? The season’s first two episodes created the impression that Masa’s former workplace would be a significant entity in the series, but it was quickly displaced by the yakuza, a more familiar, less interesting malefactor. Did the company have no response at all to the fact that one of their homebots killed one of their employees?
• Why did Noriko deliberately get herself thrown into prison? And would an elderly woman really be locked up if she were arrested for shoplifting and (offscreen) disorderly conduct?
• Why did the yakuza kill Masa if they had not yet obtained from him the code they wanted? Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to abduct Suzie and Zen to try to force him to cooperate than for them to blow up Masa and abduct Zen?
• Even if we accept that the yakuza wanted Masa dead, why crash an entire airliner to kill him? The show makes clear the yakuza is integrated into every stratum of the Japanese government and society. They have an arrangement with law enforcement that allows them to operate their criminal enterprises, presumably within limits. I can buy that such an arrangement might even extend to the occasional murder of a troublesome civilian like Masa, but not if they blow up dozens or hundreds of other passengers on Masa’s flight along with their intended target. That’s some Pablo Escobar shit.