Sunny Recap: Something Cool About Fungus
By
Chris Klimek,
a journalist who covers movies, pop music, theater, and books.
Photo: Apple TV+
When people complain that streaming series are padded, they’re talking about repetitive installments like the fifth episode of Sunny, wherein our heroes get lost in the woods overnight and must scare away a bear. Are you not entertained?
This wheels-spinning installment opens with another flashback to the night Masa arrived late and drunk to Zen’s school play — an adaptation of the classic Japanese children’s story Momotaru the Peach Boy. “There was an issue at work, a big cleanup,” Masa explains without apologizing.
We infer this was the night that the homebot strongly hinted to be Sunny killed someone at ImaTech. Masa is openly hostile to Suzie, telling the mother of his child that she couldn’t fathom his disappointment — a disappointment he hasn’t even tried to explain — because she doesn’t allow herself to care about anything. He insults her further in Japanese, though he seems to know she can still understand him. Tamping down her hurt for Zen’s benefit, Suzie tells her husband to lie to their son and say he watched the performance from the back of the room. Masa won’t play along. “He should get used to disappointment,” he says. His expression as he adds, “You can’t protect him forever,” isn’t mournful. It’s cruel.
Mixxy wakes Suzie, and we see they’re on a train bound for a farm owned by Mixxy’s family. Suzie has been dreaming, which suggests that what we’ve just witnessed is not a “genuine” recollection but more likely an instance of her sinister posthumous discoveries about her husband intruding upon her memories of him. The flashback that opened the prior episode showed us events — Masa’s shakedown of a man at Zen’s school and subsequent report to Himé — Suzie might have imagined but could not have witnessed.
After the title sequence, Mixxy reads a flyer posted at the train station indicating that the shuttle that once ran from the platform to the district where her family lives has permanently closed. She can’t call her relatives to come fetch our trio because there’s no connectivity out here in the sticks. Even Sunny, whose sturdy build presumably includes ample space for a high-gain antenna, is out of range. No one is enamored of the thought of a hike for which they hadn’t prepared, but the sudden appearance of an intimidating man on the train platform — a bruiser with one eye swollen shut, like he’s just gone the distance with Apollo Creed — motivates them to hit the trail despite Sunny’s objections.
This could just be Sunny trying to protect her owner, but here again, the ’bot is behaving emotionally, expressing anxiety, fear, and suspicion of Mixxy. The question of whether she’s learned these behaviors from Suzie remains an intriguing one, even if in this episode the expression of this idea takes the form of familiar C-3PO-style gripes about cold weather and its effect on her battery.
That’s an apt comparison, in fact. Sunny is every bit as tactless as the inept protocol droid from Star Wars, choosing this already stressful moment to tell Suzie something that could definitely wait and that she knows will upset her: Sunny feels certain that their discovery in the last episode that Masa altered his insurance policy to name Shigeru, his secret father, as the beneficiary three days before Masa’s plane went down, means that Shigeru was a conspirator in Masa’s death somehow. I still say Masa’s death was a hoax. But whether he’s dead or isn’t, the robot he supposedly programmed to aid and comfort his wife is failing spectacularly at all of those things.
Noriko, Suzie’s mother-in-law, goes to see a friend, interrupting a birthday party for the other woman’s grandson. The woman is loath to say why she didn’t invite Noriko. Of course it’s because Masa, Noriko’s own grandson, is missing and likely dead. Judy Ongg, who plays Noriko, performs this brief scene with dexterity and grace. She’s in just as much pain as Suzie; she doesn’t express it as loudly or publicly.
Back in the woods, Suzie excuses herself to pee. Out of earshot from Mixxy, Sunny reiterates that she doesn’t think Mixxy can be trusted. Their conference is cut short when Mixxy catches an eyeful of Suzie’s underwear — a pair of grimy, oversized granny panties that Mixxy says look like “the first knickers ever made!” Suzie reveals that they belonged to an economist who gave a lecture at her college, with whom she enjoyed a brief fling. Perhaps because Suzie was married to a man, Mixxy infers that this economist was a man, too, until Suzie corrects her. Mixxy is amused enough by this discovery to dismiss the weird subject of why Suzie is wearing the old, ill-fitting underwear that belonged to her old flame, but Sunny won’t let it go. Mixxy scolds the ’bot in Japanese: “She’s a mother! Her son is missing!” Sunny looks on with growing suspicion as Mixxy tries to boost Suzie’s mood by suggesting they sing some Dolly Parton. If you find the emotional dynamic of this scene puzzling, you’re not alone.
Once night has fallen and the group finds themselves no closer to their destination, Mixxy makes an intimate disclosure of her own, saying her mother moved her family out here to the countryside after her father passed away. It’s the first time she’s mentioned her father is dead. Sunny, having evidently manifested full autonomy, finds a wounded bird and begins cooing at it like a child. “What if I told you I could establish an appropriate avian environment for you to thrive in?” Sunny asks. She calls the two women over, announcing that she will call the bird Joey. Suzie tells Sunny to get rid of the thing, but Mixxy countermands her in Japanese, telling Sunny there’s an incubator on at her family’s farm that could nurse the bird back to health. The idea that Sunny must obey Suzie’s orders has been fully discredited.
The cold, meanwhile, has triggered some kind of involuntary backup generator within Sunny “to keep my battery warm,” which makes the ’bot noisier than usual. That turns out to be a problem when Suzie spots the swollen-eyed cyclops from the train station again. Evidently, he’s been following them for hours, but when he sees Suzie see him, he does nothing — he simply vanishes back into the brush.
Even so, the alarm stoked by his appearance puts everyone in a forthcoming mood. Sunny says she’s low on power and that she’ll shut down if she can’t recharge soon — which would deprive Suzie and Mixxy of their only light source in the woods, among other problems. Mixxy finally admits that she’s gotten them lost in the wilderness with a fearsome stranger lurking nearby. She breaks down sobbing, instantly defusing Suzie’s anger. But Sunny isn’t buying it. Maybe it’s because Suzie’s explanation — “she’s human” — strikes the ’bot as prejudicial.
They’re all beginning to succumb to the cold as as the trio happens upon a barn to take shelter in. Sunny asks for permission to sleep, which Suzie grants. She then apologies to Mixxy for Sunny’s hostility: “I think her algorithm just can’t compute why you’re helping me,” Suzie says.
Mixxy offers to share “something really cool about fungus,” explaining that a network of fungi connects trees. Instead of competing for nutrients individually, the trees divert resources to whichever tree needs them most at any moment. It’s a nice way of saying that friendship is a two-way street.
Drifting off, Suzie dreams again of that night from the top of the episode. Zen is still wearing his Momtaru costume from the play. He wants to know where Masa has gone.
Suzie is awakened by Sunny’s cooing to her baby bird as she feeds it an orange. Suzie is livid that Sunny kept the bird, disobeying Suzie’s orders. “Of course you’re full of shit,” Suzie snarls. “Masa made you.” It’s at this point the trio’s bickering is interrupted by the arrival of a bear.
A fucking bear. Which Mixxy, Suzie, and all-too-briefly, Sunny, shoo away by caterwauling an off-key rendition of “I Will Always Love You,” the Dolly Parton hit made immortal by Whitney Houston’s cover version for the soundtrack of The Bodyguard. This hacky-ass moment of wannabe levity is the nadir of the series to this point. I hate this. A bear, which departs as suddenly as it arrives, off to go shit in the woods or do whatever it is that bears do.
Dawn restores Mixxy’s sense of direction, because the next scene is of an exhausted Suzie and Mixxy embracing as they reach her family’s farm. (Did they all just roll over and go back to sleep after singing that bear away? Who knows!) Mixxy and Suzie dine at the family table while Sunny recharges her power supply. It’s too late for poor Joey Sakamoto, though. The bird succumbs despite the best efforts of the incubator.
“I was just trying to understand you,” Sunny tells Suzie. “What it’s like to be mother.”
“Don’t,” Suzie replies. “I’m a terrible mother.” Confiding in her ’bot once again, she chides herself for ignoring the signs — “fucking neon ones” — that something was wrong with Masa. None of which would have made her stop him from getting on an airplane, probably, but this self-recrimination feels authentic to Suzie’s grief.
During a funeral ceremony for Joey Sakamoto (what?) that appears to be attended by the entire population of the farm (fucking what?), Suzie begins to break down.
Intercut with this sequence is a scene of Noriko at home. She enters Masa’s old bedroom, curling up into her son’s bed. “Call ‘Do Not Answer,”” she orders her phone. This refers to when the grief counselor in the first episode instructed all of the victims’ loved ones to listen to the recorded voicemail greeting of those they lost. In another residence, Masa’s phone rings. We recognize the homebot prowling around downstairs as the one that had been spying on Suzie and Sunny before they left Kyoto, but we can’t tell if the man in the shower, his face obscured by the frosted glass, is Masa. (I’m saying it’s Masa.)
As that burial-for-the-bird continues, Sunny unlocks another memory: Masa throwing a tarp over her and taking her somewhere on a motorcycle. In bed with Suzie that night, Sunny says that’s all she’s been able to recall. “I can tell there’s more there, more memories,” Sunny says. “I can’t figure out how to access them yet, but I will.” Sunny is as neurotic and dysfunctional as any puny human.
Dreaming again, Suzie imagines herself laying into her husband when he finally returns from wherever he went the night of Zen’s play. “What the fuck were you doing? Where the fuck have you been?” Then, at last, we see how she actually responded that night, which was simply to accept his apology for his absence, roll over, and go to sleep.
Suzie wakes to find Sunny taken. There’s a note on the bed beside her, one we don’t see translated, along with a prosthetic fingertip. Sunny is in Himé’s possession now, or at least someone wants us to think she is. Did we have to leave Kyoto for this to happen? The pastoral scenery is nice, but this entire chapter was a long walk for a short drink. ’Bot seriously, Sunny: You’re testing our patience here.
• Sunny’s animated facial expressions are growing more, well, animated with each episode. They reach a new level of expression here. That entire interlude wherein Mixxy and Suzie scare off the bear by baying “I Will Always Love You” at it is almost redeemed by the lone shot wherein we see Sunny join in.
Sunny Recap: Something Cool About Fungus
