Los Angeles. A missing girl. A private detective in a dark suit behind the wheel of a vintage Corvette.

 

His name is John Sugar. He knows how to follow someone without being seen, how to spot a lie and what’s next when a conversation becomes a fight. He drinks whiskey like it’s water. He knows Los Angeles from the old movies that taught generations what the city should look like after dark.

 

You know this detective. Bogart played him. Mitchum embodied him. Others gave him different names, different cases, different women walking through the office door. He’s hard because he’s seen too much to expect much from anyone.

 

John Sugar isn’t. He likes people.

 

He’s curious. He notices kindness and hates cruelty. A stranger in trouble becomes his problem before he asks whether getting involved makes any sense. He doesn’t like hurting people, but people keep giving him reasons to.

 

And he watches movies. Old movies flash through his mind. Bogart. Mitchum. Glenn Ford. A face at a window. A gun in a hand. A kiss before someone walks away.

 

Sugar loves these movies. He knows their dialogue, their gestures, their rules. People lie. People betray one another. People fall in love. Sometimes they do the right thing when they have every opportunity not to.

 

But Sugar is more than a movie buff. He watches people with the same intensity.

 

There’s more. Whiskey doesn’t get him drunk. He is stronger than he looks and survives injuries that should put a man in the hospital—or the morgue.

 

But mostly, Sugar watches.

 

This is John Sugar, played by Colin Farrell in Apple TV’s Sugar, which returned for its second season this summer.

 

 

He watches what people do to one another. Kindness catches his attention. So does cruelty. He notices what fear can make someone do, what love can make someone risk, and the choices people make when no one can make them choose otherwise. Then he turns the same attention on himself.

 

A warning before we go further: what follows reveals the central surprise of the first season of Sugar.

 

John Sugar isn’t human.

 

He came to Earth with others like him to observe the human species. They watch us, study us and report what they find. Sugar’s old movies acquire another meaning. He studied them to learn about us. They are part of the record we have made of ourselves.

 

And what a record.

 

We compose music and make war. We care for strangers and torment them. We build hospitals to keep people alive and weapons capable of killing millions. We can risk our lives for someone we have never met, then walk past another person’s suffering.

 

Sugar came here to study that contradiction. Then he started becoming violent himself.

 

He says he doesn’t like hurting people. We believe him. But by the second season, Sugar has killed at least three of them, and extraordinary strength makes the contradiction harder to dismiss. This isn’t a man who always strikes because he has no other choice. And Sugar knows that.

 

Those old detective movies gave Sugar the perfect device for reckoning with it: the voice-over. Those detectives used it to tell us what they saw. Sugar turns it on himself. Why did I get involved? Why did I lose control? What else could I have done?

 

The man sent to observe us has begun observing himself.

 

Jung would have recognized what is happening to Sugar. He called it the shadow: the parts of ourselves that don’t fit comfortably with the person we believe ourselves to be. Sugar’s violence now presents him with something much harder to explain away: the capacity he has been observing in us is also present in him.

 

Jung thought we were especially good at finding those unwanted qualities somewhere else. We project them onto another person, another group, perhaps even another species. It is considerably harder to recognize them in ourselves.

 

Sugar has crossed that line. He can no longer study human cruelty as though it belongs only to humans. But neither can he dismiss humanity as cruel. He has seen people sacrifice for strangers, protect the vulnerable and love when there is nothing to gain from it.

 

The question is no longer what we are capable of. Sugar knows the answer to that. The question is why we choose one over the other.

 

That takes us beyond psychology. Psychology can tell us something about aggression, empathy, fear and cooperation. It can help explain why human beings are capable of both cruelty and care. But explanation leaves another question behind: Why should another person’s suffering matter to me?

 

Human beings have been working on that one for a very long time. Christianity gave one answer a name: agape, the kind of unconditional love that expects nothing in return. Buddhism developed practices of metta, loving-kindness, and karuna, compassion. Jewish tradition speaks of chesed, a steadfast loving-kindness expressed in how one treats another. The traditions aren’t interchangeable, but each recognizes something Sugar keeps discovering: caring for another being is not merely a feeling. It can become a practice.

 

That may be one of the stranger things for an outsider to discover about us. The same species that had to invent laws against killing also invented disciplines for becoming more compassionate.

 

Sugar has seen both possibilities. So have we. Perhaps the spiritual question isn’t whether goodness is our natural condition. Human history makes that difficult to argue. The more useful question may be what happens when we practice one capacity rather than another.

 

Sugar came to Earth to learn what human beings are. Increasingly, he has to decide what kind of being he wants to become.

 

By later life we have accumulated our own dossier on human nature.

 

We have seen astonishing generosity and breathtaking cruelty. We have been betrayed and forgiven. We have disappointed people who trusted us and surprised ourselves with kindness we didn’t know we possessed. Somewhere along the way, the evidence stops being about everybody else.

 

We are in the dossier.

 

Sugar has one advantage: distance. He arrived as an outsider and could look at humanity as something separate from himself. We can’t. The cruelty, compassion, selfishness and love he studies are possibilities within us.

 

Jung thought becoming conscious of that was part of becoming whole. Spiritual traditions ask what we should do once we know it.

 

Age adds something neither psychology nor theology can supply: evidence. We know more about the person we have actually been, and there is less time to pretend we are someone else.

 

Perhaps that is why Sugar’s question becomes more interesting as we grow older. Not: What kind of species is this? We have had plenty of time to study that. Rather, what kind of human being do I still want to become?

 

Sugar is streaming on Apple TV. Both seasons are available now, and they should be watched in order, beginning with Season 1, Episode 1. Give the series time to reveal what it is doing. Those old detective-movie conventions that can seem almost excessive at first are there for a reason.

 

Question for Reflection

What has surprised you most about human nature—and about your own? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

 

Related spiritual themes: awareness, compassion, faith and aging, jung, second half of life

Reader submissions may be lightly edited for clarity and length, while preserving the writer’s original voice.