Why That Major ‘Sugar’ Reveal Happens When It Does

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Sugar Season 1 Episode 6 “Go Home.”]

All season has been building to the final moments of the May 3 episode of Sugar: Colin Farrell‘s character reveals his secret.

First, we get a look at Sugar fighting (he also kills Stallings and the others), then Henry (Jason Butler Harner) comes to him to treat his injuries because he can’t go to the hospital. Then, Sugar confronts Ruby (Kirby) about tipping off Stallings, and she tells him it’s for the mission. It all leads up to him injecting something into his own neck and the reveal that he’s an alien! It’s a lot for one episode.

“This episode is a combination of things that we’ve been exploring in the show up until this point,” executive producer Audrey Chon explains to TV Insider. “There’s been that tension with Ruby and this organization that Sugar is a part of and the conflict there. We’ve seen throughout Sugar struggle with violence and trying to be good and as he uncovers the darkness of these people, how that struggle is emerging to the surface. And that’s why I think all of these things that we’ve been building do come to a climax in this episode. And obviously the big reveal at the end kind gives you some insight into why certain things were perceived a specific way for him throughout the season thus far.”

As Farrell told TV Insider ahead of the premiere, that reveal was supposed to come much earlier in the series originally. But it works very well where it is, after nearly a full season of watching Sugar as a private investigator and trying to put the pieces together of what he’s been hiding.

“Obviously, that is the biggest twist of the season or one of the bigger twists I can think of in a television show or film,” says executive producer Simon Kinberg. “And so there was a lot of talk in the development phase of where and when and how that would happen, whether it would be early, whether it would be at the very end of the season, whether it would be in the middle, and organically it found its place somewhere in between the middle and the end.”

The reason for that was “because we wanted the audience to really come to connect with and care about Sugar as a person and not get too bound up in the other aspect of him. And then the other part of it was not putting it the end gives us an opportunity to let the audience breathe and start to transition the way they look at him, and then hopefully go back to previous episodes looking for clues and Easter eggs that we had planted throughout obviously in very deliberate ways in all the episodes that led to that moment of reveal,” he continues.

For Kinberg, “that moment, just the way it was executed from a directorial and performance standpoint, ended up being this really kind of beautiful tender reveal as opposed to being like a ta-da plot reveal. And that, to me, was one of the great surprises and accomplishments of the season, was something that could feel very, again, sort of plot-based remained emotional and character-centered.”

Now that the secret is out, in the two remaining episodes of the season, “we get to lean into him being an alien,” says Chon. “There’s so many things that we had to be really careful about and look through the lens of, how are people going to receive this? What are they going to be thinking? But now there’s so many other things that we can reveal about his character, his perspective, his motivations, all through the lens of him being something you’re not thinking about.”

Adds Kinberg, “it also, in a great way, raises the stakes because suddenly you’re like, oh wait, all of these people that he’s dealing with aren’t just a secret government organization or spies or someone that are bound to certain sanctions of our world. That’s a whole other playing field with a whole different set of people with different potential powers. And so that unlocks a new gear of jeopardy as well.”

And remember: Just because the audience now knows he’s an alien doesn’t mean that anyone who didn’t before now does. He’s still hiding it from Melanie (Amy Ryan), even though he has told her he has a secret (but can’t tell her) and does go to her and trusts her to call Henry.

What did you think of the alien reveal? Did you see it coming? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section, below.

Sugar, Fridays, Apple TV+

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