Sugar Producers Explain the Biggest and Wildest TV Twist of the Year

[Spoilers for Sugar's sixth episode, "Go Home," follow. And they are BIG spoilers. Read at your own risk.]

Much of the conversation around Sugar, Apple TV+'s neo-noir mystery series, has been about how we have to wait to really talk about it. Reviews before the show came out all noted that there is a game-changing twist late in the season that turns Sugar from one thing into something else entirely. 

Now, that twist is out, and we can talk freely about the fact that genteel private investigator John Sugar (Colin Farrell) is... actually an alien. Sugar isn't just a crime drama, it's also a sci-fi mystery.

In Episode 6, "Go Home," viewers get the explanation for Sugar's seizures, and why he can drink copious amounts of alcohol, can speak every language fluently, and just generally isn't like other people: He's technically not a person at all, but a blue, humanoid visitor from another planet. 

In the final moments of the episode, Sugar is physically and emotionally beaten down after fighting Stallings (Eric Lange) and his goons, being betrayed by his handler Ruby (Kirby), and getting too close to the case as he runs himself ragged trying to find a missing young woman named Olivia Siegel (Sydney Chandler). He needs to take a break. He needs to "go home," as he puts it. 

So when he's alone in his hotel room, he takes out the strange, organic-looking hypodermic needle out of the box he previously contemplated but didn't open back in Episode 1. He injects it into his neck, and immediately his brown eyes turn bright blue. His skin turns blue as well, and his hair disappears, revealing lines and markings on his head. He sort of looks like a combination of Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy and Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen. The truth about the observe-and-report mission that's been hinted at among Sugar and his colleagues is that they're aliens living among humans to study them.

While this reveal resolves some of the mystery of Sugar, it raises more questions than it answers. Where did this idea come from? Why does it happen at this point in the season? Where does the show go from here? So we got on Zoom with Sugar executive producers Simon Kinberg and Audrey Chon to find out. 

Kinberg explained that the twist originated with creator Mark Protosevich, who brought the pilot to Kinberg and Chon's production company, Genre Films. 

"We loved many things about the pilot that are in the show," Kinberg said. "The fundamental tone, the character, all of that was in that pilot. And we loved the twist. We loved this sort of mash-up of science fiction and detective genre." 

Kinberg has written and/or produced many sci-fi projects (the X-Men film series, Apple's Invasion) and many mystery projects (Sherlock Holmes, Kenneth Branagh's Agatha Christie adaptations), but had never considered putting them together. 

The sci-fi twist was always part of the show, but originally it happened at the end of Episode 1. But as the producers developed the series, they worried that if the twist happened too soon, the audience might have trouble connecting with Sugar as a character. His humanity – his kindness and empathy – needed to be established before it's revealed that he's not actually human. They considered placing it in the second episode, or at the end of the season. But after careful consideration, they decided on Episode 6 of 8, kind of between the middle and end of the season. 

"We felt like we would be able to lay in enough clues over the previous episodes so that you would look back and be like, 'Oh yeah, now I understand,' but you'd also have had the experience of falling in love with this character, and seeing him as this empathic, struggling human being, which in many ways he is," Kinberg said. "And we would also leave time for the audience and for the story to evolve past that reveal and settle back into a relationship with Sugar." 

It's a wild twist that's hard to pull off. The show is betting on viewers being engaged enough in the noir mystery to stick around even if they don't know the twist is coming, while also dropping enough breadcrumbs that the twist doesn't totally come out of nowhere. On top of that, the twist needs to be well-executed enough that viewers aren't put off by the show they liked turning into something else. "It's an interesting balancing act where you have to make both sides of the thing incredibly satisfying in their own right," Chon said.

It's a very bold choice, but Kinberg said that it's necessary to take big swings to try and stand out in an ocean of TV and movies and social media and a million things competing for everyone's attention. And when he first read the pilot for Sugar, he saw an opportunity to create a moment where people take notice and say "Holy s---, I can't believe they did that. And I can't believe not only did they do that, but it made me love it even more." He hopes audiences find the twist additive, and not like the show suddenly takes a hard left. He hopes it feels shocking but inevitable, like the reveal in The Sixth Sense.

The sci-fi mash-up element is one of the things that makes Sugar stand out from the pack – its classic noir movie intercuts and Fernando Meirelles' woozy, dreamlike direction – but some potential buyers Kinberg and Chon pitched wanted to remove the alien piece. But Apple embraced the whole wild vision for the show. 

The producers do believe that there's a version of the show that could have been made without the sci-fi element, though. "A lot of people love the detective story just by itself, so I do feel like it could have been a straight PI show," said Chon. "There's definitely a version of that that could have worked."

Sugar is intended as an ongoing series, and as it continues through the end of this season and hopefully into Season 2, it will keep trying to find the right balance of sci-fi and noir. Many more revelations about Sugar's home planet, personal backstory, and mission on Earth are to come in the final two episodes. But Kinberg said that throughout the first season, the producers worked to make sure it was "legitimately and primarily" a noir detective show. In these kinds of stories, the detective usually has a secret – a secret addiction, or a secret from their past. John Sugar has a secret too, it's just a different kind of secret.

"If we're so lucky to get to a next season, we would still really remain focused on this primarily as a noir detective show about a really unusual detective," Kinberg said. 

Sugar is available to stream on Apple TV+. New episodes are released on Fridays.