Photo: Apple TV
ImaTech may be a Japanese robot company of the near future, but its headquarters don’t look that different from the giant Manhattan insurance office where Jack Lemmon worked in Billy Wilder’s 1960 classic The Apartment. ImaTech’s junior-level employees sit clacking away at desks arranged in long, privacy-obviating rows. As Sunny’s sophomore episode opens, a public announcement orders them all to rise, don their augmented-reality goggles, and join in a mandatory regimen of guided calisthenics. No one removes their suit jacket before commencing these exercises. One of them gets an urgent notification (“Unauthorized Access — Division Five”) on his laptop, which sends him bolting from the room and knocking a woman to the floor.
After that colorfully animated title sequence set to Mari Atsumit’s ’60s hit “Sukiyo Aishite,” which I’ve already come to love, we’re back with poor Suzie, drinking and smoking in her bathrobe as she reflects on her first meeting with her probably dead husband. In flashback, we hear Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) speak for the first time in the series when he tries to help Suzie navigate a food-ordering machine that she has already deemed an “asshole.”
“Excuse me,” he interrupts. “Don’t blame the machine. You have to pay first.”
“I thought this was a silent restaurant,” Suzie whispers.
She’s struggling to smooth out some paper currency so the pay-in-advance machine will accept it. Near-future Japan runs on cash, evidently. “Bad idea,” Masa says after Suzie makes her selection. (We know from the prior episode that Suzie is dyslexic, which makes reading Japanese characters especially difficult for her.)
Undeterred by her hostile look, Masa slides into the solo-dining booth next to Suzie’s as the extra-spicy soup he correctly guessed she didn’t know she was ordering appears in front of her. A lighting shift signals that here, again, Suzie’s memory is being altered by newly learned information about her husband. “My name is Masa, and I make homicidal robots,” he says. “Care to join?” She blinks, and we hear the line he really used on her years ago.
Finishing her whiskey in the present, Suzie sees a homebot watching her through a window from across the street. And we see the same mysterious man we met late last episode spying on Suzie via that homebot’s video feed.
Back in her living room, Suzie asks Sunny how she — I’m going to use the pronoun she to refer to Sunny, the genderless robot, from here on out — learned to mimic Masa’s butterfly hand gesture, which Sunny used to stop Suzie from hitting her with a bat. “How does a baby learn to breathe?” is Sunny’s too-philosophical reply. Joanna Sotomura, the actor who supplies Sunny’s voice, deserves lots of credit for mining these conversational platitudes for laughs.
“Your inability to answer a question is pathological,” Suzie says, introducing the episode’s key adjective. She wants to know what Masa was doing in his lab with bloodstains on the carpet. Sunny pleads ignorance. But Suzie’s other question — “Did Masa program you for me specifically?” — gets an obvious answer as the widow and her bot begin bickering like an old married couple. “I just want to make you happy!” Sunny whines. Suzie is suddenly very open with her unsolicited but extremely solicitous new appliance, telling Sunny exactly what she’s thinking: Why was there blood on the carpet in Masa’s lab? “I’m sure Masa is a good man,” Sunny says. “If he were bad, then I would be bad too, because he made me,” she reflects. “You don’t think I’m bad, do you?”
The next scene finds Suzie having Sunny examined by an elderly robot mechanic. In Japanese, he tells her that Sunny looks like a standard-model homebot but is significantly more advanced, continually updating its operating system. He can’t say more than that because “the files are locked.” Before Suzie can push back on that, Sunny’s “eyes” go wide as the bot finds itself transfixed by the video coming off of an old CRT monitor. She even slurs her speech as she asks Suzie, “Is this why you drink?” Suzie asks the old man about the guidebook that blue-haired bartender Mixxy mentioned to her in the last episode, a how-to for hacking bots. The guy is suddenly frozen with fear, all but throwing her out of his workshop.
Out on the street, Sunny, whose behavior is taking on more humanlike characteristics by the minute, tells Suzie that her overuse of pathological is, well, “practically pathological.” A young woman, the granddaughter of the mechanic, runs after Suzie to tell her there is a hacking guide. “The Dark Manual,” the girl says. “No one knows who makes it.” She lifts up her shirt to show Suzie a red circular emblem of a wolf tattooed on her belly. “They use this as their signature.”
The emblem looks chillingly familiar to Suzie. She tells Sunny they’re going to see her okassan, Noriko.
“What are you doing here?” is Noriko’s warm welcome to her daughter-in-law. She says the fact that the airline has not yet returned any of Masa’s or Zen’s personal effects might mean they never boarded the plane that went down. Suzie dismisses this hope — there’s something, I’m trying not to say pathological, about her default pessimism. She’s taken aback to find that Noriko’s home is full of guests who have come to be with her in time of sorrow but are now laughing and playing video games. “It prevents dementia,” Noriko reasons.
Suzie asks Noriko what happened to Masa’s drawing of the wolf — the same one she saw tattooed on the girl’s belly, we infer — that had previously hung on the wall of her living room. Noriko keeps stonewalling, inviting Suzie to partake in the “Kentucky Christmas bucket” of fried chicken that one of her guests brought. When Sunny joins Suzie in questioning Noriko, the older woman says she never knew her son worked in robotics, but she’s neither surprised nor troubled by this. When Suzie presses her about the picture, Noriko says she threw it away.
“Do you keep everything Zen makes for you?” Noriko asks Suzie of her own probably-dead child.
Another Japanese pop song, Meiko Kaji’s “The Flower of Carnage,” soundtracks a delightful scene of Suzie pedaling away with Sunny seated behind her on an adult-size tricycle. We already know these homebots are heavy, so this must be a strain for Suzie. She’s back in her head again, reflecting further on her first date with Masa: He brought her to the cocktail bar where she met Mixxy last episode to rescue her from her extra-spicy soup. We learn that she left a job in finance to come to Kyoto, where she sleeps by day and stays up at night remotely tutoring American students in math.
Masa’s big disclosure is that he withdrew from society for three years, becoming hikikomori — a hermit, more or less. He seems offended that Suzie finds the thought of such self-imposed isolation attractive. “I think maybe you do not understand lonely,” he tells her.
Masa says he came out of his shell when he “made a friend through work.” Before that, he says, it hurt when people looked at him. Masa speaks excellent English, but his difficulty expressing this idea sends him briefly back to his native Japanese. Suzie tries to get a look at the drawings in his notebook, but he won’t show them to her. “I work in refrigerators,” he says coldly.
At home, Suzie is tearing through Masa’s office, trying to figure out where she’s seen that wolf emblem before. Sunny joins in, taking decidedly humanistic offense to Suzie’s accusation that Sunny is afraid she’ll find something. She tells her owner her “inability to trust people is completely” — all together now — “pathological!”
“You’re not a person!” Suzie objects.
“Hmm, person in the editorial sense,” Sunny says. And Suzie can deny it all she wants, but she’s already treating this thing like a person, confiding in her that she’s afraid that everything Suzie thought she knew about Masa, her partner of ten years, was a lie. “He’s my best friend,” Suzie says. She says they’d even discussed having a second child “because Zen turned out so good.”
It’s Sunny’s suggestion that they seek answers from Masa’s office at ImaTech the following day. But when Sunny tries to cross the transom at ImaTech HQ, it’s like RoboCop trying to arrest an officer of Omni Consumer Products: She’s frozen in place. Sunny’s voice changes, sputtering, “Division Five denied” and “Can’t. Sorry. Restart” before her face goes blank. Suzie is on her own.
The receptionist refuses to let Suzie into Masa’s office, but she catches a break when she sees Yuki Tanaka the Younger, the same clown who drunkenly insulted her dead husband at the holiday party last episode. Suzie takes advantage of his well-earned embarrassment to make up a story about having lost her wedding ring at the party, and can he let her in to look for it? When he protests that he could lose his job for admitting her to the mysterious Division Five, she borrows a bit of Noriko’s optimism: Masa’s body hasn’t been found, she tells Yuki-san, which means he may still be alive. If he returns to work, what will he make of his subordinate’s refusal to help his wife? Suzie seems surprised that this works. “You’re terrified of Masa, huh?” “No!” Yuki-san insists. “He is the nicest!”
Within the forbidden halls of Division Five, Suzie finds all the windows covered with plywood. It’s revealed now that the episode’s cold open was a flash-forward, with Suzie’s intrusion being the crisis that sent that office drone running out of the room during the morning calisthenics.
Suzie uses one of her dope thick-soled white moon boots to break a window, allowing her to unlock the door to the yellow-carpeted room where she discovered the bloodstain on the floor. There’s evidence of an unsuccessful attempt to bleach it out. (You’d think ImaTech would have the resources for a more robust cover-up than just plywood and bleach.) Hearing a man shouting in Japanese outside, she slips through another door, back upstairs into the large office where those calisthenics were happening, and takes cover beneath a desk. The same announcer we heard at the top of the episode orders another round of group exercises.
Suzie sees Sunny in a second-floor window overlooking the atrium. Somehow, she’s found her way into the complex or been allowed inside. Speaking to Suzie through an earpiece, Sunny tells her she’s playing the morning-exercise announcement again to distract ImaTech’s office workers while Suzie makes her escape. (Remember how Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus guided Keanu’s Neo by phone as he snuck out of his office on all fours in The Matrix?)
At home, Suzie describes what the man pursuing her was yelling. It’s something about “not coming to light,” Sunny says, struggling to translate Suzie’s dodgy command of Japanese. Deciding they both need a drink, Suzie sets up a little projector to give her homebot the inhibition-loosening light show she loves. The doorbell rings, and Suzie lets the instantly sober Sunny get it. It was the airline, the bot reports in a consoling tone. They’ve found and returned Masa’s yellow shoes. Suzie wants to speak with the representative, but Sunny says they already left. “Is this real?” Suzie asks.
In a flashback, she revisits her first postcoital canoodle with Masa. He gently assuages her reluctance to try a relationship, telling her he loves refrigerators because they “cheat thermodynamics,” creating heat from cold. His love language is metaphor, evidently.
There’s an uncharacteristically clumsy scene of another homebot returning to a man we’ve not seen before outside of Suzie’s home. The bot reports that Sunny believed it was from the airline but that the bot could not read its code. Bots spying on bots!
Suzie invites Sunny to lie in bed with her. Sunny starts playing a sound effect of slow, restful breathing. Suzie notes it with some surprise but allows Sunny to continue.
There’s a cut back to the yellow-carpeted room Suzie fled earlier. We see the man who ran out on his calisthenics at the top of the episode, sitting near the body of the man who was bludgeoned to death by the bot in the prior episode’s cold open. He’s speaking to a colleague beside him with a laptop. “It will be fine, Masa,” he says in Japanese. “No one will know.”
Suzie’s possibly-dead husband draws that familiar red wolf emblem on the screen of his laptop. “It must stay in darkness,” Masa says.
As Sunny’s football-shaped animated “eyes” pop open, we discover this sinister revelation is her memory. Suzie, having fully anthropomorphized this sophisticated home appliance, asks the bot if she’s okay.
“Yes,” Sunny answers. “Just a dream.”
Some androids do dream of electric sheep. And this one might be a killer.
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