Sunny barrels into its final third with an episode that’s 80 percent flashback followed by what might be a hallucination. However, after the increasing prevalence of the yakuza subplot in recent episodes, the formal novelty of this chapter is welcome. Anyone who’s been craving mas Masa will feel well-served, as this is the most Masa-centric installment to date.
For 28 of these 37 minutes, Yuki Tanaka — the mysterious figure who reappeared at the end of episode seven, after delivering Sunny to Suzie’s home in episode one — narrates the story of Masa’s life, from boyhood to adulthood. He’s speaking to Suzie, but you have to remember that Suzie cornered him in the basement laundry room of his apartment building at the end of the previous episode to know that. No framing or establishing shots remind us why he’s talking about Masa or to whom. (Even though we learn in this episode that Yuki’s real name is Hiromasa, I will continue referring to him as “Yuki” for the sake of your comprehension and for my sanity.)
We open with a Yuki-narrated flashback of a preadolescent Masa capturing a coffee-cup-sized beetle and storing it in a shoebox. Yuki philosophizes about whether any of us can be certain that what we think of as a beetle or of a more conceptual thing like pain, is the same idea that other people associate with these words. Moppet-aged Masa yammers on about his new pet beetle at the dinner table that evening, which prompts Shigeru to tell young Noriko (portrayed here by an actor who little resembles Judy Ongg, who plays Noriko in the present and in the more recent flashbacks) “he needs to learn to be quiet,” before stomping off without so much as a look at the child. When little Masa asks why his father dislikes him, Noriko doesn’t answer.
There follows a lovely transition as young Masa walks into a hospital corridor and hands a bouquet of flowers to his adult self. For a moment, I believed we were seeing Zen, Masa’s son, give the flowers to the adult Masa, but the chronology of that wouldn’t work. Masa is here because Shigeru, the distant and unaffectionate man he’s been raised to believe is his dad, is on his deathbed. We’ve been told it was Shigeru’s death that sent Masa into his era of hikikomori, and we know he won’t meet and marry Suzie and have Zen until he emerges from that.
After that elegant segue from the distant past to the somewhat-more-recent past, Noriko won’t even let Masa into her husband’s hospital room! At home later, Masa pushes through the assembled mourners on the first floor to make his way to his bedroom, where he shall stay, as Yuki narrates, for two-and-a-half years, “wearing his loneliness like a cape.”
After failing to persuade her son even to speak to her for those 30 months, Noriko finally calls Yuki to ask for his help, proudly telling him that Masa has held down a remote job as a software engineer even while remaining withdrawn from the world.
Masa won’t answer when Yuki speaks to him through the door, of course. Yuki recognizes the music from the video game Masa is playing, “Omode Alley,” and offers the kid a tip, having worked on the game himself. He also offers the kid the use of his “cabin” at Lake Biwa, which will turn out to be less of a cabin and more of a beautifully appointed vacation home. But he doesn’t sell Masa on this relocation by describing the place’s many comforts. He sells it by telling him he could be alone there.
Then he tells Masa that he, not Shigeru, is his father. This is new information to Masa but not to us; Sunny shared this revelation with Suzie and Mixxy after learning it from the kaiseigen koseki four episodes ago. But seeing how beautifully Jun Kunimura, who plays Yuki/Hiromasa, performed this scene opposite a closed door, without his scene partner even sharing a frame with him, made me wonder why creator Katie Robbins didn’t withhold the fact of Masa’s parentage from us up until this point, too. It feels relevant and resonant now; it just felt like clumsy exposition back then. What was the benefit of shoehorning this bombshell into an already-overstuffed earlier episode? Trying to reverse-engineer Sunny often feels like staring at the sun.
Anywho, the next scene is of Yuki showing Masa around the not-cabin. When Yuki refers to the many unfinished projects he has lying around, Masa quips, “Yes. We know you can’t commit.” These might be the first words Yuki’s son has ever spoken to him. Yuki tells Masa he can ask him anything he wants to know, but Masa simply repeats his signature move: withdrawing to a bedroom and shutting the door.
After night has fallen and Yuki has left, Masa starts tearing up the place, throwing books on the floor, and helping himself to the priciest hooch in Yuki’s liquor cabinet. I chuckled when he went into Yuki’s file cabinet and found a Kit-Kat candy bar in the “K” folder. In an envelope marked “INNOVATION FUTURE,” he finds a brochure advertising homebots … and a series of intimate snapshots of a young Noriko and Yuki embracing.
It’s the Kit-Kat wrapper that he’s dropped on the floor that summons Sho, Yuki’s trash-bot, which mistakenly deposits Masa’s mobile device — a previously uncatalogued item in the household inventory — into its onboard wastebin. The way this rolling trash can cheerfully announces “Trash!” in Japanese each time it collects a piece of detritus is weirdly charming. But like so many professional critics, Sho is easily flummoxed by what’s trash and what isn’t. “You were programmed by a moron,” Masa sighs. He resolves to improve the bot’s taste by upgrading its code. He instructs the bot to look for patterns in the way Masa interacts with the various objects to ascertain what should be preserved and what should be discarded.
“It had been years since Masa had allowed himself to care about something as much as he suddenly cared about beating me,” Yuki observes in voiceover. A montage of Masa testing Sho’s evolving trash-identification acumen follows. When Yuki arrives at the lake house to drop off supplies, instead of going inside, he watches Masa through the glass of the front door, later reporting to Noriko that their son was smiling. (Yuki is in the same basement laundry room during this phone conversation with his baby mama that Suzie found him in at the end of the prior episode.) Yuki suggests that Noriko accompany him next time he goes to the cabin. She agrees.
Back at the lake house, Masa corrects Sho as it attempts to collect a can of coffee he hasn’t finished drinking yet. When Sho makes an imaginative leap, correctly observing that coffee keeps Masa powered up in much the same way Sho’s charging module provides the bot with electricity, Masa leaps up in triumph, turns his face to the sky, and demands of the indifferent gods: “Who is moron now, bitches?!”
Grabbing his coat, Masa tells Sho that the trashbot needs a fresh challenge. He leads the bot outside to the lake, where he suddenly recalls the beetle he kept in a shoebox as a little boy. But as with so many of Suze’s flashbacks in this series, his memory is altered in response to new information: When now see Little Masa showing his beetle to Yuki, who unlike that prick Shigeru shows great interest and praises the boy’s curiosity. He rewards Little Masa with a comically oversized Kit-Kat bar.
Sho interrupts Masa’s reverie by announcing that a new pattern in his behavior has been deduced. “You frown at objects that are valuable to you,” the bot says. “Because you value being sad.”
As Masa laughs joyfully at the fact that the bot he’s adopted has finally figured him out, Yuki observes in voiceover that what drove Masa to become a “roboticist” was this realization that bots could help lonely people to discover their own humanity. (How does Yuki know all this? It seems unlikely that the taciturn Masa told him or Noriko about this eureka evening after the fact. Maybe he scraped it out of Sho’s memory bank.) Masa removes the trash bag from inside Sho to place it in a dumpster, and an old woman materializes to chastise him for improperly disposing of burnable trash. Masa bolts from the scene of this possible HOA violation as though he’s just committed a violent crime, the trashbot struggling to keep pace with him.
It’s suddenly daylight as he and Sho arrive back at the cabin, where Yuki and Noriko are waiting for him outside. “Trash,” Masa says, gesturing towards Yuki. Sho dutifully attempts to pick up the old man with its claw arm, earning itself a defensive kick from Yuki. “He was trying to dispose of trash!” Masa shouts. “What else do you call a man who has an affair and then leaves his child for someone else to raise?” As Noriko begins to defend Yuki, Masa intuits that it was her decision, not Yuki’s, to keep Masa’s biological father out of her son’s life. Masa demands to know if Shigeru knew that Masa was not his son. “He hated me my whole life, and I had no idea why,” Masa reflects.
It’s here, at minute 28, that we snap back to the present, with Suzie — the first time we’ve seen her this episode — wondering aloud why her husband never told her about this shocking discovery of his parentage. “Maybe he felt safer keeping part of himself still inside,” Yuki speculates.
The old man then tells Suzie that Masa came to him a few days before the plane crash that killed him, drunk and in a state of panic. He gave Sunny to Yuki, with instructions that Yuki should then give the bot to Suzie in the event of his death. The fact that Yuki did not share all of this extremely relevant context with Suzie way back in episode one was presumably in accordance with Masa’s wishes, too.
“He knew the yakuza were after him,” Suzie concludes.
Elsewhere in the present, Himé and Tetsu are violently interrogating the bot mechanic Suzie and Mixxy consulted in the prior episode — her name is Risa, we learn for the first time — demanding to know what she told Suzie. All Risa knows is that Sunny punched Mixxy, and Suzie wanted to know how that could have happened. For the fact that Risa did not report this to Himé voluntarily, Himé has Tetsu sever the pinky of Risa’s right hand. (I thought this was a custom that yakuza inflicted upon themselves as a gesture of fealty to a superior and/or atonement for a failure. I didn’t realize it was something they do to punish civilians who have crossed them, too.) After this, Himé dispatches her sweet potato truck-driving henchman to collect Sunny from Suzie’s home.
The concluding act of this chapter is, would you believe, puzzling. Suzie explains to Yuki that she and Mixxy have been monitoring three GPS targets from Suzie’s mobile device: One of them corresponds to Suzie’s wedding band, stored inside Sunny’s chest compartment. The second is Noriko, who is in jail “but it sounds like she’s really thriving.” The third is Yuki himself. That’s how they found him. That’s why this conversation is happening.
Mixxy interrupts to say that a fourth tracking dot, a blue dot, has now appeared. Yuki is evidently a more skilled coder than Risa, because he is able to pull up the location history of all four dots going back weeks, rather than just two days, which Risa claimed was the limit of the data. Because this previously-undetected blue dot went to the airport on the day of the plane crash that supposedly killed Masa and Zen, and then returned to Suzie’s home, Suzie instantly concludes that the blue represents Zen.
How she deduced this, I’ll confess, completely eludes me, and I’ve watched this episode thrice. If Suzie’s belief that the blue dot is Zen is simply another expression of her inability to accept that her son is dead, well, that makes sense emotionally, if not rationally.
She follows her device to the building indicated by the blue dot, where upon arrival she begins screaming Zen’s name. We hear him reply “Mama!”, though what happens next suggests that all of this might be occurring only in Suzie’s imagination.
Barging into a large storeroom, Suzie sees Zen standing some distance away. As she runs toward him, Sunny appears by the boy’s side. Then Tetsu grabs Suzie from behind and presses the barrel of a pistol against her temple. Sunny’s giant, animated South Park eyes realign themselves in an expression of anger, and the camera then holds onto Suzie’s eyes in close-up as Sunny charges at Tetsu … and murders him.
Sunny, her gentle voice returning, begins to ask Suzie if she’s all right, and then an klaxon blares and the lighting scheme in the room shifts to submarine-interior red. The floor beneath Sunny dissolves, and Sunny cries out for Suzie’s help as the homebot is sucked down into a featureless void. Is there GPS reception in hell? Only two episodes remain, True Believers!
Subprime Directives
• In the scene wherein Yuki speaks to him through his bedroom door and later, when he arrives at Lake Biwa, Masa is wearing a “Math Counts” T-shirt, which we’ve seen Suzie dressed in before. So she has been wearing Masa’s clothes! I’d assumed this shirt was hers, though, as she told Masa she was employed as a virtual math tutor during their first night together at Ochiba.
• I don’t understand why Sho produces a humming sound when it’s struggling with a decision unless that’s a comforting anthropomorphic habit that Yuki wrote into its code. Ditto Sho’s habit of laughing along when Masa laughs. Sho is the most lovable ambulatory trash can in all of Western fiction. Sorry, R2-D2!
