The idea of following a private detective who is not only elegant, cinephile, and obsessed with missing people, but also an extraterrestrial, remains rather bizarre. Perhaps that is exactly why Sugar wins me over. Like John Sugar, I love classic films, the Los Angeles imagined during Hollywood’s golden age, the music, the locations, and a cinematography capable of finding beauty even in the city’s most neglected corners.

An episode that brings together “As Time Goes By,” “Moonglow,” and even Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” has already won me over before it can prove that it knows where its story is going.

So I go along with it, even though I increasingly feel as though I am aboard a drifting ship. I would love to spend hours talking to John Sugar about movies, listening to his references, and joining him on another visit to the Paramount lot. I am less certain that I would trust the writers to explain where this journey is ultimately headed.

The fifth episode of the second season, “Unknowns,” does not solve that problem, but it offers signs that Sugar’s two mysteries may finally be moving toward one another. Perhaps.

We are still in the territory of clues and associations rather than answers. At the same time, the episode reinforces something the series has been doing better than it may appear: using the eccentric premise of an alien detective to modernize noir without abandoning what makes the genre so seductive.

Ji Moon Is Alive, but Officially No Longer Exists

The episode confirms that Sugar’s plan worked. He caused Ji Moon’s overdose, revived him with Narcan, and now completes the illusion: he takes Ji to a discreet rehabilitation clinic, obtains a false death certificate, and registers that his body was supposedly sent to Korea.

To convince Vega that he believes Ji is dead, Sugar even crashes a child’s birthday party and punches the corrupt police officer. It is violence, but it is also performance. As so often happens in the series, John Sugar is acting out a scene he learned from the movies.

The reference he chooses is Vertigo. Sugar remembers that Hitchcock also used a fake death, although he hopes his own version will involve less emotion.

Soon afterwards, he returns to the Paramount lot and talks to a tour guide who already knows about his fascination with film history. His cinephilia is not merely a collection of references for viewers to recognize. It is the language through which Sugar understands the world and often decides how to act.

Ji is safe, at least temporarily, and Danny knows that his brother is still alive. The possibility of fighting in Las Vegas also reappears, as though Ji’s official disappearance has allowed Danny to reclaim his own life.

Naturally, everything seems far too neatly arranged to last. Vega realizes that something is wrong and returns to the site of the supposed overdose, where he finds a small detail out of place. Sugar knows that noir lives on such details, but he can also be betrayed by them.

The case, however, is no longer simply about protecting a witness from a murderous police officer. Sugar discovers that the price of fentanyl has fallen by around 90 percent in the area controlled by Vega.

Someone appears to be flooding poor neighborhoods with cheap drugs to destabilize the market and take control of it. The police officers are not merely accepting money from traffickers. They may have become direct participants in a much larger operation.

Sandra’s death reinforces that dimension. Sugar finds her after an overdose and retrieves Chuy’s phone from inside her bag, a device that may contain proof that he also knew too much.

At the morgue, Sugar learns that hers was the fifth overdose received that day alone, even though the official figures claim that deaths are falling. The city lies about its dead in the same way Sugar has just lied about Ji.

The difference is that his lie is intended to save a life, while the other allows many people to disappear without provoking questions.

The Search for His Sister Finally Produces a Concrete Clue

At the same time, Sugar continues investigating Senator Pavich, convinced that he knows something about Djen’s disappearance.

Following his contacts, Sugar reaches Professor Stanley Ondaatje, breaks into his house, and finds a drawing made up of circles, rectangles, and equations that resembles the alien records seen earlier.

We still do not know what the diagram represents, but it is the clearest indication so far that Pavich and the professor may possess knowledge of the visitors’ technology.

That does not prove that the fentanyl scheme, the corrupt police officers, Pavich, and Djen’s disappearance are all part of the same conspiracy. The series has not gone that far yet.

Still, “Unknowns” brings the two stories closer together in a more intelligent way than simply revealing that everyone works for the same villain. While pretending that Ji’s case is over, Sugar uses his available time and Vega’s surveillance as cover to move closer to the professor.

The professional investigation begins to create space for the personal one.

Perhaps the crimes will eventually connect in a literal sense. It is also possible that their real connection will initially be thematic.

Ji, Chuy, Sandra, and Djen are people who have disappeared or been erased by structures larger than themselves. Sugar is also an unknown figure living among humans, transmitting messages to companions who no longer respond.

The title “Unknowns” refers to the unidentified dead, or those with no relatives, kept at the morgue, but it extends across the entire episode. Everyone there risks becoming someone whose absence produces no consequence.

An Alien May Be the Perfect Noir Detective

This is where Sugar’s strangest premise begins to make sense.

The classic noir detective was always an outsider within his own city. He moved between wealthy people, criminals, police officers, and desperate victims without fully belonging to any of those worlds.

Sugar turns that metaphor into a biological condition. He does not feel displaced merely because he has chosen a solitary profession. He literally does not belong to this planet.

The series modernizes the genre, however, by removing one of the traditional defining traits of those detectives from its protagonist: cynicism.

Sugar witnesses cruelty, corruption, and violence, yet he continues to believe that people deserve to be saved. His lack of cynicism and his faith in humanity become a counterpoint to the dark world he observes.

The noir of Sugar does not abandon shadows, first-person narration, the immaculate car, hotels, corrupt police officers, or mysterious women. It preserves all of those elements because it loves the genre.

The difference lies in the perspective. Its detective is not a hardened man struggling not to care. He is an alien who cares too much and may be becoming human precisely because he cannot maintain the distance he was supposed to keep.

That assimilation becomes more obvious in the episode. Sugar admits that he is learning how to lie, feels increasingly alone, tries once again to contact the other visitors, and receives no answer.

Later, he eats his first cheeseburger, spends the night talking to Charlotte, and imagines Peg warning him that he is going to hell.

Becoming human, for the series, does not simply mean discovering pleasure, desire, or emotional attachment. It also means acquiring our ability to deceive, hurt, and justify what we do.

This may be the most interesting aspect of its modernization of noir.

In the classic films, the detective entered a corrupted city and discovered that he could not pass through it without becoming compromised himself. In Sugar, that process has another name: assimilation.

The alien who arrived to observe humanity begins to absorb both what he admires and what he should fear about it.

Contemporary Los Angeles Replaces the Old Femme Fatale

“Unknowns” also updates the genre by relocating its source of danger.

The great monster is not merely an elegant criminal, a femme fatale, or a wealthy family hiding secrets. It is a structure capable of turning poor people, drug users, immigrants, and unhoused residents into anonymous bodies stored in boxes after no one comes to claim them.

The final sequence at the morgue is less glamorous than Sugar’s drives through Hollywood, but it may be the most genuinely noir image of the entire season.

The city of dreams continues to produce missing people. The difference is that now we know who tends to disappear first.

That is why the show’s nostalgia is not entirely empty. “As Time Goes By” can take us back to Casablanca. “In Dreams,” forever associated with David Lynch’s disturbing use of the song in Blue Velvet, carries within it the collision of beauty, desire, and threat.

The music, the locations, and the framing create a Los Angeles that exists only because cinema invented it, but the crimes belong to the present.

Even so, we have reached the fifth of eight episodes without knowing to what extent the series truly has a destination.

Chuy’s phone, the diagram found in Ondaatje’s house, and Vega’s suspicions must quickly produce something larger than another collection of clues. The love of noir sustains Sugar, but it cannot indefinitely replace the development of the plot.

I continue to go along with it because I love being in that universe. I love the music, the car, the films, the melancholy, and, above all, John Sugar.

He is the kind of character I would genuinely like to sit down and talk to. Perhaps that is both the show’s greatest strength and its greatest risk: I enjoy the detective’s company so much that I am almost willing to follow him without knowing where we are going.

Almost.