It’s time for Sunny to start harvesting the seeds of intrigue it’s been planting over the prior three-plus hours of screen time. Sure enough, the seventh of its ten episodes opens with the solution to a whodunit that even the most solar-powered fans, the positively sunburned, extreme-melanoma-risk cohort of Sunny-philes, probably haven’t thought about in weeks.
Yep, it was Himé who assassinated Councilor Ito, the public official whose death in a mishap at home was twice referred to in the series’ very first episode and then once more in its fourth. Here, we see him out for a slow morning jog, accompanied by his homebot, and then smiling in satisfaction as he sees a clip of himself on TV declaring that his new legislation will stop the yakuza from menacing law-abiding citizens. He’s heading upstairs for his bath when we see a hooded figure in black, still easily recognizable as wannabe-oyabun Himé, push his bot down the stairs on top of Ito. The councilor’s skull hits the floor, hard, his eyes locking open in dramatic fashion.
Frankly, this appears to have been a lucky shot. Dropping an appliance on someone seems like a dangerously survivable means of attempted dispatch, especially from an organization that may have blown up an entire planeload of people just to make sure they got the one person onboard they were targeting. We then see Himé use Masa’s hanko to reactivate Ito’s homebot, which she had evidently disabled in the moments since Ito returned from his jog. After purging its memory, the bot cheerfully announces it will get to work making the pancakes Ito requested, ignoring the fact that its owner is now a corpse on the floor in front of it.
After the titles, Mixxy wakes up in Suzie’s bed and there’s some business I didn’t really understand involving which of Suzie’s clothes she will borrow for her commute to work after Suzie tells her she shouldn’t leave wearing what she had on the prior day. I’ve wondered whether Suzie is frequently costumed in unflattering and ill-fitting garb as a way of expressing her disconnect from the world generally or because she’s meant to be wearing clothes that belonged to Masa as an expression of grief for her presumed-dead husband. Mixxy’s reluctance to borrow the outfit Suzie offers her in this scene certainly seems rooted in something more profound than just sartorial preference. Mixxy is younger and hipper than Suzie, but that’s not what actor Annie the Clumsy is playing here.
Mixxy is also adamant that Suzie should not try to wake the damaged, glitchy Sunny in Mixxy’s absence.
And yet Suzie does exactly that as soon as Mixxy leaves. Sunny had refused to wake up when Mixxy brought her back to Suzie’s place the prior night, but this morning she does. This introduces a puzzling but fun scene — it’s just so lovely when this show remembers to be fun — where Sunny behaves like a put-upon, annoyed partner rather than an artificially intelligent servant. “Why did you wake me up, Suzie?†she asks, voice actor Joanna Sotomura conveying the bot’s scorched emotional landscape in just a few syllables. Suzie offers to put Sunny back to sleep, but Sunny, says no, she’s up now, displaying all of the maddeningly inconsistent sleep habits endemic to puny humans. Sunny settles in front of the TV, cackling away at what appears to be a game show. I’m trying to think of when we’ve seen robots or androids laugh before, to any purpose other than to demonstrate their inability to understand humor. Here, it seems Sunny gets it completely.
She also gets passive-aggression: When Suzie remarks that she never got the appeal of the show Sunny is watching, the bot quips that she’d have to understand Japanese, for one thing. Sunny dismisses Suzie’s suggestion that she — the homebot — might be showing signs of PTSD, and then shuts down Suzie’s PMS-joke rejoinder by matter-of-factly stating that homebots do not menstruate. The button on the scene comes when Suzie says she’s hungry and the bot supposedly programmed to wait on her ignores the comment entirely.
Noriko calls Suzie from prison, immediately criticizes her daughter-in-law’s skin-care regimen, and then asks to speak to Sunny-chan, who greets her in Japanese with a warmth absent from her exchange with Suzie. Suzie sips her morning wine while looking at photos and videos of Zen.
This bit of reflection spurs her to phone a character called Dee, saying she’s been trying to reach her for weeks and that she’s sorry for what she did. “I know I was a terrible friend,†Suzie says. We haven’t met Dee, have we? We don’t know what Suzie did, do we? More seeds, certainly. More intrigue, maybe.
Mixxy returns to Suzie’s place with the news that she’s been fired from Ochiba, the cocktail bar where they met as Suzie was attempting to drown her sorrows. When Suzie appears to minimize the gravity of this event, Mixxy lays into her for her selfishness, accusing her of wielding a “Grief Shield†that empowers her to ignore the feelings of others. She’s deep into the psychology of someone she’s only known for a short while, demanding to know why Suzie has no other friends, doesn’t have a job, and hasn’t learned Japanese. (Suzie has mentioned more than once that her dyslexia makes the language particularly difficult for her. For all of Suzie’s excuse-making, this sounds like a very fair point, given that the direction in which one reads Japanese characters depends on which of the three writing systems that comprise the written language is being used.)
The scene climaxes with Sunny, whom Mixxy had not realized was awake, punching Mixxy in the stomach. It’s a shocking act of violent rebellion, if that’s what it is, from a bot that had appeared since its abduction to stop trying to read and respond to emotional cues from its putative master, and that we know probably bludgeoned a man to death within the halls of ImaTech. “The only reason I care about Sunny —†was the sentence Suzie had begun to speak when Sunny cut her off with that shot to Mixxy’s gut. So it’s possible Sunny was acting strategically rather than emotionally here. Suzie immediately orders Sunny to sleep. She’s still obeying that command, anyway.
Meanwhile, Himé pays her respects to her recently departed father in true Himé fashion, asking the dead man why he couldn’t have held one a day or two longer: “You asshole.†His nurse tells Himé that Jin, her cousin, visited her father just prior to his death and that despite his long illness, the old man’s final hours were peaceful, marked by “the kind of speed we all wish for in the end.â€Â This arouses Himé’s suspicions. She barges in on a yakuza meeting for the purpose of selecting their next oyabun, accusing Jin of having killed her father rather than waiting for him to die naturally. Jin insists that the old man had summoned him to his bedside to anoint him as his successor, the job Himé believed that she would be given if she procured the complete Dark Manual. “We’ll talk†is the closest thing to a promise we’d heard from her departed father, though. Noting that Himé has brought a knife to this electoral fight, Jin points out that his homebot is present, so why doesn’t she just dispatch him in the same cowardly, bot-assisted way she rubbed out Councilor Ito? That gets a laugh from the assembled hoodlums. “You idiots,†Himé chastises them. “That was research.†She tells them all that she’s securing the yakuza’s future. By obtaining the means to hack homebots and make political assassinations look like household accidents, presumably? We still don’t know.
This scene introduces some more of that familiar Sunny confusion: In the fourth episode, Himé’s disloyal soldier Botan told Tetsu that Himé knew of Ito’s killing but not of the downing of Flight 405 before Tetsu killed him in the bathhouse. But Tetsu was sent to kill Botan by Himé. We’re also about to learn that Tetso and Himé are lovers. This is some Slow Horses–level counterintelligence high jinks in a surreal robot comedy that keeps trying to reinvent itself as a crime drama. The show’s eclecticism is looking more like a bug than a feature as the weeks go by.
The next scene is of Suzie and Mixxy bringing Sunny to the under-the-table mech mechanic who tipped Suzie off about the Dark Manual back in episode two — the same young woman who has Masa’s hanko tattooed on her abdomen — to try to figure out why Sunny was able to punch a human being. Reviewing Sunny’s source code, the mechanic says there’s no evidence of any Dark Manual–enabled hackery. She does, however, discover that Sunny has been reading a tracking device planted on Suzie and another on someone at the prison Noriko had herself thrown into on purpose. Also a third device on someone “at an apartment building near the train museum.†All of these beacons, the mechanic says, have only been active in the last day, the time frame since Sunny was abducted by Himé and her henchmen. The mechanic does something to allow Suzie to track these three beacons from her phone, but upon learning that the people who messed with Suzie’s bot were yakuza, she urges Suzie to burn Sunny or throw her into the river. (Suzie has already tried the latter but not the former.)
In prison, Noriko’s girlhood friend — who must’ve done something really bad to get locked up there, given that she has terminal cancer but has not been given a compassionate release — shares a threatening anecdote about a former inmate who got herself imprisoned deliberately, then was moved to isolation “for her own safety.â€
At home, Suzie removes garments one at a time to try figure out which one has been bugged. As with her peeing-in-the-woods scene two episodes ago, she seems bizarrely squeamish about the possibility of her friend catching even the slightest glimpse of her in a state of undress. The tracking device turns out to be embedded in Suzie’s wedding band. Maybe it’s the fact of yet another disappointing revelation about someone she thought she knew that makes Suzie launch into a heartfelt apology for being so shitty to Mixxy.
“Historically, I’m a terrible friend,†Suzie admits. “Currently too.â€
Mixxy accepts all this with a smile, prompting that prude Suzie to realize that her nipple is showing. “I guess she wanted to apologize, too,†Mixxy says. The shot is framed to keep the scandalous body part off-screen. Suzie says she’ll check out that mysterious third tracking dot by the train museum on her own, but Mixxy, ever faithful, insists on accompanying her. Suzie deposits her wedding ring inside Sunny’s chest compartment so they can track it. She’s back to referring to Sunny as an inanimate object.
Before they leave, Mixxy — snooping on Suzie’s phone — intercepts a reply from the mysterious Dee telling Suzie they are no longer friends and not to contact her again. Mixxy deletes the message. We don’t know whether this is a misguided attempt to spare Suzie’s feelings or something more sinister. The sweet-potato truck driver who abducted Suzie and tied her up in the prior episode is sitting outside her house, unnoticed and yet making no effort to conceal himself. He reports to Himé that Suzie is on the move but that the tracker they planted on her is staying put.
Receiving this message, Himé sighs and relays the news to her lover, Tetsu. This is a revelation; we didn’t know they were sleeping together. “Say hi to your wife,†Himé says. When Tetsu protests that he loves her and would do anything for her, Himé tells him to get his gun.
This pushes us into the surf-guitar-scored concluding sequence wherein Suzie and Mixxy go a-knocking in a visually striking apartment tower wherein the doors to each unit are painted in an array of vibrant colors. The tracker only registers position in two dimensions, requiring Suzie and Mixxy to check the unit situated in the same position on each floor of the high-rise. Tellingly, when an unfamiliar woman answers the door to the first apartment they try, Suzie instinctively yells, “Zen? Masa?†over the woman’s shoulder. To another tenant, the exasperated young mother of a screaming tyke, Suzie explains, “I’m looking for my son.â€
“You can take mine if you want,†the woman replies in Japanese.
Only when it occurs to them to check the basement of the building do they find someone Suzie recognizes. It’s Yuki Tanaka, or at least that’s what he claimed his name was when he brought Sunny to Suzie’s home in the first episode. “Suzie-san,†he says in English. “We should talk.â€