‘Sugar’ Season 2 Episode 3 Review – Colin Farrell Finds Trouble at Every Turn, and Somehow Still Makes It Look Effortless
‘Sugar‘ has always worked best when it lets Colin Farrell wander through Los Angeles at his own unhurried pace, and the third episode of season two leans hard into that instinct. Titled ‘Watch Face,’ this installment picks up in the immediate aftermath of a brutal cliffhanger that left John Sugar bleeding out behind the wheel of his car after an ambush, and the episode wastes no time confirming he survives, even if the road back to full strength is anything but smooth.
Mark Protosevich’s neo-noir detective series has built its reputation on mixing hardboiled genre trappings with something gentler underneath, and season two showrunner Sam Catlin continues threading that needle here. Sugar patches himself up in a private safehouse, removing buckshot and hooking himself to an IV with the kind of grim efficiency that reminds you exactly how far outside normal human limits this detective operates, even before you factor in what the show revealed about him last season.
What struck me most about this hour is how little urgency it actually has, and how confident it feels in that choice. The investigation into Ji Moon’s disappearance inches forward mostly through Danny, whose boxing career finally seems to be taking off just as his brother resurfaces high and paranoid inside a club, forcing Sugar back into the fray to shake off the men tailing them both.
That sequence, along with a tip from Sugar’s contact Tom identifying a gang leader named Guapo, gives the episode its only real bursts of momentum, and they land well precisely because the show has earned the patience surrounding them. Farrell continues to be the reason any of this works as effortlessly as it does, playing Sugar’s exhaustion and physical pain without ever letting the character’s essential kindness slip, whether he is comforting Val over a stolen car or absorbing another dead end with quiet resolve.
Where the episode wobbles slightly is in its pacing, since the crosscutting between Danny’s boxing subplot, Sugar’s investigation, and a new flirtation developing back at the Del occasionally saps momentum rather than building it. It never derails the hour, but there were stretches where I found myself waiting for the plot to catch up with the mood the show had already established, a rare moment this season where the deliberate rhythm worked slightly against itself rather than for it.
The romantic thread involving Sugar and Charlotte deserves a mention too, if only because it is handled with more restraint than these subplots usually get on detective shows. Nothing about it feels forced or shoehorned in purely for stakes, and given how carefully ‘Sugar’ has treated its lead character’s isolation from humanity so far, I am curious whether the show intends to let this go somewhere meaningful or simply use it as another example of how lonely a life like his really is.
By the time Guapo is gunned down before Sugar can extract any real answers from him, the episode has quietly reset its central mystery while still moving the pieces forward in ways that feel earned rather than manufactured. Spotting a deputy tied to earlier hospital footage gives the hour a clean hook into next week without resorting to another cheap cliffhanger, which, after the intensity of the previous episode, feels like exactly the right call.
‘Watch Face’ is not the most eventful hour ‘Sugar’ has produced, but it is one of the more confident ones, trusting its atmosphere and its lead performance to carry a chapter that is more interested in deepening the world than shocking the audience. I found myself perfectly content watching John Sugar solve small problems and dodge bigger ones for another hour, which is really all this show has ever needed to succeed. I am giving ‘Sugar’ Season 2 Episode 3 an 8 out of 10, a patient, character-driven hour that trades spectacle for atmosphere and mostly comes out ahead for it.
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