Here’s What Happened in That Disappointing ‘Sunny’ Finale

By Kaleena Rivera | TV | September 6, 2024 |

By Kaleena Rivera | TV | September 6, 2024 |

(spoilers for the season one Sunny finale)

In mysteries, there’s a convention in which one hard sought answer results in several more questions rising up in its place. Ideally this is purposeful on the creator’s part, carried out with the intent to keep the audience wrangling with a hydra-like story before the (hopefully) satisfactory conclusion is fully revealed. Sometimes, however, you’ll come across something like Sunny, which raises more questions than answers not because of any intricate storytelling but due to the fact that it, to use the modern parlance, coasts solely on vibes.

A few answers were provided in the previous two episodes, first a flashback and then the penultimate episode which took place solely in Sunny’s “mind,” for lack of a better term, in a This Is Your Life-style game show. Over these weeks, we discovered how Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima) got into domestic AI, due in part to his biological father’s attempt to get him past a depressive state in what’s probably the strongest episode of the season (Nishijima’s just that good). After an extended period of experimentation, Masa wanted to move the bots from merely being domestic assistants to companions for those with social anxieties, “transitional objects for people who are wary of human interaction.” But programming genuine emotions like loyalty and happiness means that less desirable feelings, such as rage and despondency, can also rear their ugly heads. These qualities present as bugs, and every time one made itself known, Masa would name and isolate each one, inadvertently creating what would come to be known as The Dark Manual. Sunny holds the entirety of it in her, which is why would-be yakuza boss, Hime (You), is so intent on stealing her.

The logic supporting this doesn’t stand up to any sort of scrutiny. Why would Masa allow the manual to exist at all? Even if you had to keep it for some technical purpose, knowing that you’re in danger, why would you leave it with your wife? What’s worse is that uncovering this information not only doesn’t provide us with that much additional insight, it renders several plot points as absurd, especially the one where Hime had successfully kidnapped Sunny and Suzie only to let them go.

But all of this feels like mere flights of fancy compared to the Olympic trial-sized leaps of logic viewers are forced to make in the season finale. There’s Suzie (Rashida Jones), Zen (Fares Belkheir)—apparently killing the man behind this oh-so valuable code (presuming he is actually dead), but keeping his child alive to bait his clueless mother made sense at some point in the writers’ room—Mixxy (annie the clumsy), and Hiromasa’s (Jun Kunimura) great escape that hinges on the miraculous fact that Noriko (Judy Ongg) is incarcerated with their captor’s mother. There’s also the ridiculous public moment when Suzie comes to the realization that Sunny’s inner Winter Soldier is activated with the phrase, “suck a dick,” (Japan’s well-known observance of social etiquette is frequently tossed aside, another of the show’s sticking points) and, of course, the big reveal at the end, which is that Mixxy has been working for the yakuza the entire time as she drives away with Sunny (in a move that also doesn’t make a lick of sense because why would Mixxy be the one to take Sunny to Hiromasa’s unnamed colleague?).

It’s all nonsense. It’s the sort of writing shenanigans that retroactively mars the first half of what was otherwise a pretty entertaining season, even if it was the robot doing most of the heavy lifting. The problem is so severe that it calls into question the series’ very premise, specifically why crash a commercial flight thereby killing dozens of people when you can simply abduct the coder and use his son as leverage.

None of this is helped by the story that accompanies the plot either; it’s tremendously boring making the yakuza the big bad of a sci-fi series set in Japan (megacorporation ImaTech is essentially an afterthought), and the attempt to inject a touch of dramatic stakes with two cousins vying for leadership was dead on arrival. Himé never manages to sell menacing even when committing an act of violence as I could never move past what feels like little more than petulancy on her part, a quality that could be used to great effect were it not for the fact that she’s genuinely not cut out for the job.

Knowing Apple TV’s forgiving ways, there’s a good chance that season two will be greenlit in the not-too distant future. Even with the cliffhanger, I’m too annoyed by Sunny’s willingness to slide significant story issues past us in the hopes that the show’s stylishness will keep our attention (like some bad close-up magician) to commit myself to another ten episodes of this. It’s disappointing that a series with as many interesting roads to go down picks the least interesting shortcuts available.

The entirety of the first season of Sunny can be streamed on Apple TV+.

Kaleena Rivera is the TV Editor for Pajiba. She can be found on Bluesky here.