Sunny Recap: Black-Market Code

Underground robot fights? Contraband source codes? The yakuza? Baby, you’ve got a conspiracy going.

In its early chapters, Sunny read less like a conspiracy thriller and more like an exploration of grief and how our relationships with machines will evolve as those devices grow sophisticated enough to appear sentient.

Those ratios get scrambled in the series’ third installment, which offers confirmation that before his death, Suzie’s husband, Masa, was not merely involved in a corporate coverup of a robot-assisted (?) murder within ImaTech’s off-limits Division Five but was also consorting with the yakuza. By the end of this installment, I was more convinced that Masa was, or is, a malicious malefactor than that he is, in fact, dead.

We already know from a clunky scene near the end of episode two that the homebot that delivered to Suzie’s house what it claimed was Masa’s yellow shoes, recovered from the wreckage of the airplane on which Masa and Zen supposedly perished, was sent not by the airline but by some other party that’s been keeping Suzie under surveillance. Who and to what end? We don’t know.

We don’t even know who the lady to whom we’re introduced in the episode’s lengthy cold open is. We can infer she belongs to the management echelon of organized crime. That’s clear from the way she ignores the screams of whoever is being tortured in the next room while she makes pleasant conversation with the younger woman who is fitting her for a prosthetic pinkie finger. The older woman, whom the subtitles will tell us is named Himé, apologizes for the lateness of her visit. “I was up,” the younger lady says, terrified to offend her client. Himé says she is there because of a “mishap at work,” which would seem to confirm she’s down a finger because of the yakuza custom of severing one’s own digit to apologize or atone for an error or offense.

The younger woman also seems unnerved but not specifically concerned about the screaming, which suggests she doesn’t know the victim of this interrogation. So did Himé bring this guy along with her two henchmen on this errand with her? “Let’s hurry this along,” she orders the goons, who’re about to go to work on the subject of their interrogation with an electric drill like a couple of aspiring Brians De Palma, before returning to tell the younger woman, “You’re an artist, truly,” upon seeing the fake finger this young lady has fashioned for her. “I have to look my best at this funeral,” Himé says. Who is she? Where are we?

Well, after the title sequence, we’re back outside Suzie’s place, where that same lying homebot that claimed to represent the airline is spying on her in bed with Sunny while reporting back to its human master that she hasn’t left the house in weeks. “It’s sad, really,” this unknown voyeur remarks.

Noriko, meanwhile, is on the phone attempting to reschedule Masa’s funeral, not for the first time, evidently because of Suzie’s refusal to participate. The two friends visiting Noriko tell her they both have conflicts — if Noriko pushes the date back yet again, they’ll be unable to attend. “Poor Masa-stan, stuck between worlds!” one of them says. “A spirit with no feet.”

Sunny, conversing with Noriko by phone in cheerful Japanese, says that Suzie is still refusing to leave her room. This prompts Noriko to flash back to Masa’s hikikomori period, before he and Suzie met, when he withdrew to his bedroom in Noriko’s home for three years. This younger iteration of Noriko tries to convince him to open the door and let her change the sheets, promising she won’t try to speak with him.

Back in the present, Noriko tries visiting Suzie in person to shake her from her torpor. We see Sunny holding a string of pearls Noriko has brought. They belonged to her mother, she says, and now she’d like her daughter-in-law to wear them to Masa’s memorial. “Please tell her the funeral will be tomorrow,” Noriko tells the dewy-eyed homebot.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Sunny replies, echoing HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey after his attempt to kill the last human crew member of the Discovery. (However, her tone remains bubbly and inviting.) And like HAL refusing to open those daggum pod bay doors, Sunny physically bars Noriko from entry, telling her Suzie has refused to eat and has barely slept.

Noriko is sympathetic, especially considering that she’s talking to a home appliance: She says she can understand why her daughter would not consent to have a funeral for Zen until they know for certain the boy is dead. But Noriko has accepted the return of Masa’s shoes as confirmation that he, at least, is gone, and the funeral will proceed the following day. Before she goes, she leaves a wrapped gift for Sunny to give to her daughter-in-law.

That wrapped gift is Masa’s framed drawing of the wolf that Noriko told Suzie she’d thrown away. It’s Masa’s hanko, or personal seal. The same insignia the girl who told Suzie about the Dark Manual had tattooed on her stomach. As soon as Suzie scans that hanko with her handheld device — it seems to be a translator that works for text as well as spoken language — a telescreen on the wall lights up with all-caps ads for all manner of gnarly shit: Homebot to Slavebot, reads one. Dark Manual Approved Nunchuck, Sledgehammer, and Chainsaw Attachments. Also: Extremely Realistic Genital Attachments Available. 

The most alarming phrases each appear directly on top of that hanko: Torture Until They Beg For Mercy and Fuck Her and Then Fuck Her Up. It’s the most sinister thing the series has yet shown us … give or take one guy getting his skull caved in by a bot in its very first scene.

“You know I would never hurt you, right?” Sunny asks. The bot does a very good performance of human anxiety a second later when Sunny adds, “Uh, I understand that was the wrong thing to say.”

Suzie is up and out of the house, passing a food truck — it’s in the Hot and Delicious Sweet Potato industry, per the subtitles — as she walks. It’s hard to imagine how the driver of the truck, who greets Suzie politely as she walks by and then gets behind the wheel of his van to tail her, a pedestrian, using his large motor vehicle, could make himself more conspicuous. But then Suzie’s myopia is what you would call advanced even when she’s not half-blind with insomnia, rage, and grief. Indeed, she’s dressed herself in mismatched shoes for this outing, as Mixxy points out when Suzie presents herself at her favorite cocktail bar.

Mixxy gets Suzie’s name wrong in what is apparently their second meeting. She tries to blow Suzie off — she’s working, after all — until Suzie confesses that she lied when she claimed to have just broken up with her husband and that, in fact, he and their son are likely dead. Mixxy offers to drop by Suzie’s place after her shift ends. There Mixxy confirms that the framed hanko Noriko gave Suzie is the same one that was on the envelope of code she bought to convert her homebot into a sex toy.

That’s enough for Suzie to ask Mixxy to be her guide into the realm of black-market robotics. Mixxy warns her that she’d be opening the door to a world she wants no part of — actually, the metaphor she uses is that her little bit of vibrator code is like algae on top of the ocean, while Suzie’s investigation could awaken “blind prehistoric monsters snuffling around on the bottom.” But she finally agrees to introduce Suzie to her dealer, a junior-high classmate and “a bit of a twat.”

Takumi, the aforementioned twat, nearly faints when Mixxy appears in his sex shop, stammering in Japanese that her “eyes are all the colors.” When Suzie, Mixxy’s unfamiliar companion, asks him in English if all the marital aids on display come with “Dark Manual code,” he panics, wounded that Mixxy has placed him in danger.

Here, Sunny’s newly developed independent streak comes in handy. She tells the anxious kid — in Japanese — that Suzie is “harmless” and that she’s been burned buying low-quality shit before, but “Mixxy says you’re the real deal.” Mixxy’s approval means more to Takumi than potential legal exposure. He says he’s “not holding right now” — code is like any other contraband, evidently — but he tells the two ladies to go to a club called Wanted and ask for Tendo.

Wanted turns out to be a “Host Club” where ladies pay for the company of attractive young men. How equitable! Suzie asks if Takumi played them, and Sunny has another caustic retort. “The guy who hot-wires teledildonic devices? Never!” Again, whether this is a result of Sunny being programmed to emulate Suzie’s own sarcasm-heavy mode of expression or of some yet-unknown puppet master (Masa, or ImaTech, or the yakuza) pulling Sunny’s digital strings is a far more interesting dramatic question to me than who Tendo is, or what’s going on at Wanted.

At Wanted, a young man invites Suzie and Nixxy to follow him once they mention Tendo’s name. But Sunny, the man says, must stay behind. The indiscreet tail in the Sweet Potato food truck shows up at Takumi’s sex shop, grilling him about his visitors. There’s an insert of a hand holding a miniature device, and we see a video feed of Suzie and Nixxy entering another room at Wanted. The voice instructing someone to “make sure Tendo knows what to do with them” is that of Himé, the pinkieless woman we met at the top of the episode.

“Which one do you want?” Tendo asks the person on the other end of the line as Suzie and Mixxy walk into his office. We don’t hear their response. From the visitors, he demands a cover charge of “a million yen” — about $6,331 in 2024 dollars, if you’re curious, as I was — for “the robot fights.”

Robot fights? That doesn’t seem especially forbidden or debauched. You can see robot fights in Las Vegas right now! Alone in one of the club’s more public areas, a dejected Sunny is trying to reach Suzie by phone, but she’s not picking up. “Shit,” this extremely neurotic bot says to no one in particular. A man in a suit tells Sunny in Japanese that her owner is looking for her. “Suzie sent you?” Sunny asks. “Of course,” the man says. Sunny’s source code does not include a familiarity with fairy tales, I guess.

Again, it’s deflating that the secret attraction here is some kind of fight club for bots. The emcee introduces a combatant named Junko League, which triggers a memory for Suzie: She’s home in her bathrobe, playing ref as Masa and Zen, dressed in matching pajamas, prepare to wrestle in the living room. Zen is correcting his mom’s Japanese pronunciation of “Junko League.”

This tender family scene from her memory is intercut with a present-day bot melee. The robots attack one another with flame throwers, whirling chains, and a medieval mace. The crowd cheers as they inflict massive damage on one other, but so what? They don’t appear to feel pain or have the emotional sophistication that Sunny does. When a man steps into the ring to interfere, the bots cease their attack. “They can’t hurt humans,” someone says. So again, why would this be illegal or illicit?

The ref declares that Little Chunky has defeated Texas Chainsaw and announces the next match: VitaBlitzer versus Baby Boi. Only Baby Boi is Sunny, newly press-ganged as a combatant. Suzie tries to pull Sunny out, but Himé intervenes, insisting Sunny must fight. Sunny shoves her — she’s not restrained by the rules that hold back Little Chunky and Texas Chainsaw — and Himé’s pinkie-extention falls off. “Oh shit, it’s fake!” Suzie exclaims. It’s unclear whether she understands in this instant that a person with a pinkie missing is likely a yakuza. She steps on that fake finger on her way out of the club. Outside, Mixxy asks if Suzie is okay. “No,” she says. “I think Masa was the —”

She interrupts herself by vomiting on the street, and we cut to a shot of a portrait of Masa. It’s on display as part of his funeral the following day; Noriko and Suzie kneel side-by-side in mourning clothes. There are no pearls around Suzie’s neck, but she’s wearing an oversize shirt that might have belonged to her husband. Himé enters and kneels on the floor. She bows to Suzie before fixing her with a stare to end the episode.

Subprime Directives

• The scene when Mixxy visit Suzie at home gives us some major clues about Sunny. “Can you just get rid of it?” the bot overhears Mixxy ask. Supersonic hearing. “Bitch,” Sunny whispers, spatula-ing Mixxy’s meal into the garbage, then throwing a bag of processed crickets at Mixxy, quipping that the snack is “good for I.Q.” In a half-minute of screen time, Sunny has a private emotional response to something she overhears, disobeys an order from Suzie (who requested a meal for herself and her guest), lies about having thrown away Mixxy’s meal, and subjects Mixxy to an insult. Finally, Sunny has a sarcastic exchange with Mixxy in Japanese, which she knows Suzie doesn’t speak. If all of this does not indicate Sunny’s sentience, the facsimile thereof is uncanny. Which I reckon is the point.

• A Brief History of Deceptive Practices Among Specimens of Fictional A.I.: 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the Stanley Kubrick–free 2001 sequel from 1984, posited that HAL 9000 was effectively driven insane by the fact that it had been programmed to lie to its human crewmates aboard the Discovery about the nature of their mission. Ash, the stealth android who’d been placed aboad the vessel Nostromo with secret orders to secure an intact specimen in Alien, seemed to have had his operational efficiency dampened by his need to lie, too. B2EMO, the domestic droid in Andor, complained that lying consumed more power than truth-telling.