Sunny Recap: Been Caught Stealing

Sunny rebounds from its midseason slump, if only slightly, with an installment from which its title character is almost entirely absent. This is an odd state of affairs, given that it necessarily puts the show’s grand inquiries about the nature of consciousness and the unreliability of memory on the back burner in favor of still more yakuza conspiracy stuff that has not become any more suspenseful or exciting for the way the show insists on stretching it out. This episode also spends a full third of its run time on Himé’s efforts to persuade Suzie to help her break into Masa’s laptop, but she doesn’t even tell us what she hopes to find. At least it’s funny. Or at most, it’s funny. Funny is still a step up from where we’ve been. I’ll take funny.

The cold open, wherein Noriko anxiously shoplifts a magazine from a konbini, then levels up to a grander, far less discreet act of larceny when her petty crime fails to attract the cashier’s notice, is very funny. The thick-spined periodical she takes has a cheesecake-style drawing of a young girl on the cover, and for a moment, I imagined this as a flashback to Masa’s hikikomori period, thinking Noriko was procuring the magazine for him but was too embarrassed by this possibly prurient publication to hand it to a cashier. But no, we’re in the present. Having gotten away with taking the magazine, Noriko throws it into a waste bin outside the store (where a kid immediately scoops it up), then goes back into the konbini and admonishes the bored cashier: “I’d keep an eye on me if I were you.” She proceeds to load up her shopping basket, then makes a big show of walking back outside without paying, continuing to stare at the cashier through the front window as she unwraps an ill-gotten snack. The slack-jawed, dazed expression of the cashier, reminiscent of one that Jordan Peele perfected and deployed in dozens of Key & Peele sketches, made me laugh too. Slowly, the kid inserts one of his earbuds, presumably to summon the cops.

After the title sequence, we’re in a police station but not to follow up on Noriko’s arrest. A detective is examining the prosthetic fingertip that Himé or one of her surrogates left behind in Suzie’s bed after botnapping Sunny at the end of the prior episode. The detective is wearing a neck brace, one that constricts his movements enough that he asks Suzie to scoot her chair sideways to remain in his eyeline. Funny! The bit when he asks Suzie for a physical description of her friend, apparently under the impression that she’s reporting a missing person rather than missing property, fairly begs for a sitcom laugh track.

“She’s mostly white, with big eyes,” Suzie says. This goes on a bit longer than necessary, but the detective blows Suzie off once he realizes she’s describing her homebot, even though Suzie says she made this clear to whoever sent her to the detective’s desk. (“Sunny is a homebot?” is the only sentence the detective speaks in English during this interview.) Suzie tries to make the cop understand that her problems are bigger than just Sunny’s abduction, explaining her belief that the yakuza blew up Flight 405 and everyone onboard, including her 9-year-old son, just to murder Masa. When the cop asks why the yakuza would do that, Suzie points to their general savagery. “Isn’t that what they did to your neck?” she asks him.

“Eighty percent of household accidents happen in the bathroom,” he deflects. He recommends she check the lost and found at her local konbini, noting that homebots are the second-most-commonly left-behind items after umbrellas. Even in light of how argumentative Suzie has been with Detective Neck Brace, this inane comment feels like gaslighting. It’s clear this cop won’t poke his immobilized nose anywhere the yakuza don’t want him to, but he doesn’t have to make Suzie feel like she’s lost her damn mind.

That surreal vibe continues outside, where a costumed mascot aggressively pushes manjū (a type of pastry with sweet paste filling in assorted flavors) on passersby in a mix of Japanese and English. “So delicious!” its robotic voice box chirps with menacing cheer. Mixxy is trying to excuse herself, explaining that while Suzie was arguing with the detective, she got a call from her boss at Ochiba — the upscale cocktail bar where she works and where Masa took Suzie the night they met — saying she needs to come in because a magazine is doing a photo shoot and one of the other bartenders is sick. Suzie is predictably sour about Mixxy prioritizing her job over Suzie’s crisis. While she tries to discuss the matter with Mixxy, the pastry-pushing mascot gets too close. “Fuck off, Humpty Dumpty!” Suzie snaps.

But the giant manjū won’t take no for an answer, and when Suzie finally accepts a pastry and takes an angry bite, she finds a little white block inside.

“If you do not comply with instructions from here on, you will receive a piece of Sunny every hour until there is no more Sunny!” the mascot sings.

I don’t understand why the yakuza need to bother sending someone in an elaborate disguise to threaten Suzie; they haven’t seemed at all concerned with discretion up till now. But again, I’ll gratefully allow it because it’s funny. The giant manjū tells Suzie to be at a certain vegetable stand in 15 minutes, one that Suzie complains to Mixxy is at least 20 minutes away. I always like this gag in thrillers, when a villain makes our hero hotfoot it from one distant location to another, threatening dire consequences if they’re late. Dirty Harry (the first one) and Die Hard With a Vengeance (the third but the second-best) are two examples that spring readily to mind.

Anyway, Mixxy is behaving awfully strangely by trying to dissuade Suzie from dancing to the yakuza’s tune and by protesting, unconvincingly, that Sunny is “just a homebot.” Suzie points out that Sunny’s memories of Masa are her best and only shot at finding out what happened to her family. Mixxy knows this already.

“I’m just trying to prevent something bad from happening to you,” she says.

“I don’t care what happens to me,” Suzie tells her.

Even so, Suzie would prefer not to be thrown into the back of a sweet-potato truck and blindfolded with her arms zip-tied behind her back, which is what happens upon her breathless arrival at that veggie stand. Her abductors bring her to a workshop where parts of several deactivated homebots are visible behind the chair to which they bind Suzie. They position her in front of a laptop belonging to Masa in the hope that its facial-recognition software will unlock the computer after a scan of Suzie’s features. It doesn’t.

Himé’s theme music precedes her entrance, and she arrives sipping what looks like an iced coffee. Suzie calls her a “fucking bitch” and lunges at her, evidently forgetting she’s secured to a chair. “That sounded painful,” Himé says in Japanese after Suzie and the chair hit the floor hard. Himé observes that Suzie following the giant manjū’s orders is proof of her love for Sunny. This too puzzled me. Her goons have already sacked Suzie’s home, causing her to flee, so the idea that Suzie is doing any of this voluntarily is just wrong. Suzie could object on these grounds, but instead she says, “I hate homebots.”

“And yet you married a roboticist,” Himé says. Roboticist is a new word to me, but I like it. Psychiatrist, podiatrist, exorcist, roboticist.

Suzie tells Himé she knows she was responsible for Flight 405 going down. Himé insists all she knows about the plane crash comes from news reports. Suzie asks why she attended Masa’s funeral. “Unlike you, I was an admirer of his work,” Himé says. “He was a visionary.”

To Suzie’s claim that she didn’t know Masa was a, whatchamacallit, roboticist until she discovered this posthumously, Himé expresses astonishment that Suzie could know so little of her husband of a decade. Did Suzie marry him just so she could stay in Japan permanently, Himé wonders aloud? Or was Suzie so profoundly lonely she could fall in love with someone she didn’t even know?

That draws blood from Suzie. “I knew him,” she states.

Himé says she hopes this is true because Suzie will now have to attempt to guess the password for Masa’s computer.

Tetsu, the enforcer who murdered Himé’s disloyal subordinate, Botan, in the bathhouse two episodes ago, arrives to speak with his boss. Another henchman removes Suzie’s translation device from her ear, believing this will allow Himé and Tetsu to speak privately. So Himé is surprised when, after her conference with Tetsu, Suzie says to her in Japanese, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“I’m shit at languages,” Suzie adds in English. “But I’ve heard that one a lot lately.”

Pressing her advantage, Suzie tells Himé what she overheard at the bathhouse when Jin and his associates were discussing how to deal with a busu — an epithet used to denigrate a woman’s appearance — with leadership ambitions within the yakuza. That earns her a slap from Himé. When Suzie again refuses to help Himé hack Masa’s computer, Himé orders an associate to get Mixxy. Mixxy receives a menacing call at Ochiba, where she’s cutting up citrus fruit for the benefit of a photographer, just as two more leg-breakers appear at the bar. Mixxy’s boss tells them the bar is closed. The two men smile and say they’ll wait outside.

Only by threatening Mixxy does Himé break down Suzie’s resistance. Suddenly, she’s more frightened than enraged. Himé again demands Masa’s password. “I have a processing issue, dyslexia,” Suzie stammers. “I can’t spell words out loud.” She suggests that touching the keyboard herself may help her. Tetsu cuts the zip tie binding her wrists. After one unsuccessful guess, he presses the bit of a power drill against the base of Suzie’s skull. After a second one, Himé tells Tetsu to “take care of her.” Desperate, Suzie flips off Himé, then repeats the rude gesture and its accompanying “fuck you” to Masa’s laptop. Which proves to be the code that unlocks the screen. (“Fuck you” is probably a runner-up only to “password123.”)

A couple of Himé’s thugs then drop off Suzie at home. The yakuza have no more reason to keep her alive at this point, but with the police clearly unwilling to assist Suzie, they have no particular motive to kill her, either. Mixxy is waiting at Suzie’s place, and she’s terrified when Suzie reports that she was abducted and made to help them access Masa’s laptop.

“Did you do it?” Mixxy asks, at least as afraid of the answer to this question as she was for Suzie’s safety.

“They were gonna kill you,” Suzie answers.

“Oh,” says Mixxy. “Thank you.” Clearly, she knows more than she’s telling, but before Suzie can press her on this, she gets a call from the police, who have arrested Noriko for shoplifting. Suzie asks Mixxy to stay at her place in the unlikely event the yakuza return Sunny while she’s out.

In prison, Noriko cuts off Suzie’s greeting, demanding to know if Suzie brought her shogi board. When Suzie asks if she should contact a lawyer for her, Noriko repeats her request for the shogi board. Suzie asks if Noriko got herself locked up on purpose. We know she did, but Noriko dismisses both the question and her daughter-in-law.

At Suzie’s place, Mixxy receives a note summoning her to a temple. She’s jittery and armed with a paring knife, probably the same kind she works with at the bar, as she arrives at the specified location. No one’s around, but she sees the light emanating from Sunny’s faceplate on a rooftop some distance away. It’s flashing and absent any animated expression, as though the bot is restarting or dormant.

At home, Suzie is chugging wine from the bottle, as is her wont. She catches sight of the post where Zen had marked his height at each age of his brief life. Before she can again succumb to her grief, Mixxy returns with a glitchy, unresponsive Sunny. The bot pitches forward, landing on its face. We have already established that homebots, unlike humans, need not be conscious to hold themselves upright. But falls are, you know … funny.