Lest we forget, Sunny is a show set in near-future Japan about a newly widowed American woman and the possibly sentient, maybe homicidal robot programmed to nurse her through her sorrow. Which is to say that the more Sunny begins to resemble a conventional crime drama, the less intriguing it is.
That’s the unfortunate tilt of its fourth episode, which opens with an apparent flashback of Masa, Suzie’s supposedly dead husband, driving Zen, Suzie’s supposedly dead son, to school on his motorcycle. There’s something Wes Andersonian about it: The colorful symmetry of those narrow Kyoto streets, Masa looking sharp in a paisley blue suit, Zen riding in the sidecar. As soon as Masa kisses his son good-bye, a man Masa has evidently come to shake down for money spots him from across the courtyard and flees. Masa pursues the guy into a classroom, slams him down onto a desk, and puts a big, chrome semiautomatic pistol in the guy’s face. “I told you what would happen if I had to show up at my son’s school,†Masa says. Huh? Wasn’t he bringing his son to school anyway? We next see him meeting Himé, that yakuza captain, at the cocktail bar where he brought Suzie the night they met. He tells her he got the money and gives Himé the guy’s gold watch as an additional trophy.
From here, we cut to the present of Masa’s funeral, where Himé has just arrived, and Noriko is scolding Suzie to pay attention. The nature of the edit seems to imply that everything we’ve just seen was a daydream of Suzie’s, but that makes no sense. Even though she’s ascertained that her late husband was a dodgy black-market ’bot hacker, she’s had no reason as yet to imagine he’s the kind of plain-jane thug who breaks legs and packs heat. And yet this entire violent ordeal must be a product of her feverish imagination because if Masa really had beaten a guy and threatened him with a gun at a grade school while classes were in session, there’d be no way to cover that up. The pistol, in particular, seems like a detail Suzie would have imagined, given that she’s an American — firearms are all but impossible for civilians to lay hands on in Japan. The entire pre-title sequence is confusing. Much of this episode is.
At the funeral, Suzie asks Noriko who Himé, “the woman from the yakuza,†is. Noriko scrambles to cover, telling a mourner whose eyebrows have shot up at the sound of that forbidden word that her daughter-in-law meant to say yakuasishi, which means pharmacist, because Suzie’s Japanese is atrocious and obviously she’s medicated, too. Noriko has only just begun to scold Suzie when a man introduces himself as a college pal of Masa’s. He says that Masa told him about how his father guided him out of his period of hikikomori and asks to see Shigeru, Masa’s father, so he can offer his condolences. Reading Noriko’s reaction, the guy perceives that he has now stepped in it by mentioning Shigeru’s name and excuses himself.
None of this jibes with what Suzie thought she knew of her husband, but that’s becoming a pattern. Her understanding was that Masa’s father’s death was the tragedy that prompted her late husband to isolate himself for three years. But this visitor has just suggested that Shigeru is still alive.
Instead of answering Suzie’s questions about her tangled family tree directly, Noriko spins a yarn about Masa’s cousin Yumiko: The woman who was so suspicious of her husband that she would surveil him, which initiated a sequence of events that led to her husband, who’d been faithful up to this point, falling for another woman. Noriko tells Suzie that she and Yumiko are both “sticky.†By this, she means that both women somehow manifested their own miseries.
That Suzie and Noriko, the two people most deeply hurt by the deaths of Masa and Zen, save their cruelest words for one another is one of the elements of Sunny that cuts deepest, however outlandish its conspiracy plot has already become.
Suzie is about to storm out of Noriko’s house when Mixxy arrives. Sunny tries to talk Suzie out of “ghosting†the memorial, but Suzie orders the ’bot to “get us some booze.†The fact the wrapped whiskey bottles in the entryway are all addressed to Noriko prevents Sunny from taking them, but Mixxy’s is not restrained by any such scrupulous source code. She and Suzie walk, taking long pulls from the bottle while the paunchy guy in the Sweet Potato food truck from the last episode once again tails them.
Suzie just can’t parse why Masa would’ve lied to her about his father being dead. She gets a koseki (family register) from the konbini (convenience store). As Sunny reads it aloud, Mixxy — who hadn’t known Suzie’s boy was christened Zen — compliments her on the beauty of her son’s name.
“It just worked in both languages,†Suzie shrugs.
There’s no mention of Shigeru on the koseki. Sunny pipes up that there’s a more detailed family document available, a kaiseigen koseki, but only a blood relative of Masa can request it. The ask would have to come from Noriko, or at least from the near-future equivalent of Noriko’s iPhone.
Frustrated, Suzie storms off again, this time to a sento, or public bath, that Masa favored. When she tells Mixxy and Sunny that she and Masa used to laugh about all the tatted-up yakuza hanging when Suzie would meet him there after work, both her artificial friend and her real one try to talk her out of spying on yakuza. But Suzie is determined to go poking around at the bathhouse. This lady really does not know when to let sleeping maybe-murderbots lie.
Suzie enlists Sunny to lie on her behalf to the bored kid minding the sento desk so that she and Mixxy can sneak inside. They way Sunny alters her LED facial expressions when spinning an unconvincing yarn to lure the kid away for 15 seconds is cute, but I just don’t buy that Suzie can believe that sneaking into a bathhouse is going to bring her any closer to solving the existential riddle of her husband. It feels less like a genuine, if nonsensical, expression of her anguish and more like a storytelling contrivance.
And that’s before she and Mixxy get trapped in a sauna where they can overhear a clandestine meeting of yakuza just beyond the sweaty, frosted glass.
The Sweet Potato truck guy has followed Suzie, Sunny, and Mixxy here. He reports to Himé that Sunny is now alone outside the baths, asking if he should ’bot-nap her. Himé tells him to follow Sunny but not to interfere, and to summon Tetsu to the sento.
Elsewhere, Himé is visiting her aged father, an oyabun. His bedroom is full of floral arrangements, presumably from various constituencies awaiting news of his death. Himé presses him to name a successor.
“You have it, then?†he asks her.
“Almost,†she says.
After demonstrating with some amusement that his meal of sushi has been largely pre-liquified to prevent him from choking on it, the old man tells Himé that her cousin Jin has been his right hand for 20 years — too long for him to promote his daughter over Jin on the basis of almost. “Get the whole manual, then we’ll talk,†he says. So much for nepotism.
Meanwhile, the thug Suzie and Mixie are eavesdropping on at the bathhouse turns out to be that very same Jin. One of Himé’s lieutenants, a guy named Botan, is giving him information about his cousin/presumptive rival — how something happened at Junk League, the robot fights we saw last episode, that threw Himé into a panic, and that she’s visiting her father today. Suzie perks up at the mention of “Junk League.â€
The most delightful interlude of a grim episode arrives as Sunny rings Noriko’s doorbell, claiming Suzie sent her to help Noriko clean up after her guests. She offers to help Noriko write thank-you notes; she asks if she can fix Noriko a drink. This is all another of Sunny’s awkward attempts at subterfuge. She’s trying to get Noriko’s device so she can procure a kaiseigen koseki and untangle the mystery of Masa’s parentage. However, the fact that Sunny is so bad at lying to Suzie’s mom is an endearingly human feature of the bot’s behavior, though the circumstances under which Sunny is capable of lying remain maddeningly unclear. In any event, she manages to get Noriko to drink enough whiskey to loosen her lips: Noriko swallowed her reservations about her son marrying Suzie because she wanted grandchildren, she tells the bot. But she’s come to fear that Suzie has — this is a metaphor, I feel certain — “ate my eggplant.â€
Once Noriko has passed out, Sunny removes a small paper bearing Masa’s hanko from a compartment in her chest and scans it. This seems to restart Sunny. There’s a flash of recollection: a bloody carpet, again implying that Sunny was the bot that killed the man at the beginning of the first episode. Returning to consciousness, Sunny steals Noriko’s device. Presumably she scanned the hanko to disable whatever restraints in her programming would have prevented this before.
Tetsu arrives at the baths and, like Suzie and Mixxy, eavesdrops on Jin’s conversation with Botan. Once he’s heard enough to ascertain that Botan has been disloyal, he makes himself known to the group. Jin and his other flunkies excuse themselves, but Tetsu keeps Botan there to question him. Does Himé know about Councilman Ito, whose homebot killed him in what was reported as an accident? Does she know about four-circle-five, the flight on which Masa and Zen died? Botan says she knows about Ito but not about the plane.
Satisfied, Tetsu begins the lengthy, messy chore of beating Botan to death.
As they listen in horror, trying to keep their silence lest Tetsu discover them and kill them, too, Suzie imagines that Masa is the man committing the brutal murder on the other side of the glass door. After Tetsu leaves, Suzie and Mixxy step over Botan’s body as they flee. On the street, they encounter Sunny, who is on her way back to meet them, having procured the kaiseigen koseki. Scoop: Shigeru is not Masa’s father, she’s discovered. Masa’s real dad is named Hiromasa Matsumoto, and he’s still alive.
The next scene is of the three of them arguing with an insurance-company official. Evidently Masa changed his policy to name this Matsomoto guy as the beneficiary just three days before his death. Has Matsumoto filed a claim since the accident?, asks Suzie. The insurance person stonewalls, saying she can’t discuss four-circle-five. Only then does Suzie realize what she overheard Botan tell Tetsu pertained to the flight on which Masa and Zen perished.
Arriving home, Suzie finds her home ransacked. Mixxy is sure it was the yakuza, which means the police will be of no help. Suzie is upset to find Masa’s office torn apart, but it’s the sight of Zen’s bedroom, his furniture overturned and his toys strewn about, that brings forth another eruption of rage and grief. Sunny and Mixxy warn her they should go; it isn’t safe to stay here. But it’s all Suzie can do to pick herself up off the floor.