Colin Farrell Acclaimed Series Proves Spoilers Don’t Matter
Don’t get me wrong–I never drop spoilers on purpose without warning and, as an editor here at GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT, I’m always conscious of whether or not our writers are going beyond a reasonable spoiler tolerance when discussing media. But I just recently binged all of AppleTV+’s neo-noir mystery drama Sugar in a single sitting, I already knew about the show’s huge spoiler because of my work here at GFR, and the fact that I knew about the big surprise didn’t stop me from falling in love with the show almost immediately. The experience left me with the impression that spoilers just don’t matter.
Sugar’s Huge Spoiler
Whether I think they matter or not, here’s your SPOILER warning–I’m about to reveal something fairly huge about Sugar.
Sugar‘s first season only has eight episodes, and most of it unfolds without any signs of attachment to a more fantastical genre like science fiction or fantasy. Colin Farrell’s John Sugar is a renowned private eye hired by a Hollywood producer to find his missing granddaughter.
There are hints throughout the first season that there’s more going on than we realize, but nothing that prepares you for the mother of all spoilers–John Sugar is an alien.
The sixth episode ends with Sugar transformed to his real form–with blue skin and pointy ears, kind of like a shorter version of Avatar’s Na’vi.
It Didn’t Matter
When entertainment news is your bread and butter, you can’t avoid spoilers. You can try your best, you can watch new episodes as soon as they drop in the hopes that you’ll know all the details before you have to write about them, but eventually the spoilers will get you.
In the case of Sugar, the show wasn’t on my radar so I wasn’t even trying to avoid spoilers. I edited a story about the alien reveal. Not only was I not trying to avoid spoilers about Sugar, but the news of the alien reveal is the chief thing that got me interested in the series.
I soon learned Sugar is an incredible show and Colin Farrell’s John Sugar is a compelling hero. Take a fictional gumshoe like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and force him to stop pretending he doesn’t care, and you get something a lot like John Sugar.
I binged the first (and so far only) season. I don’t do that. If I’m going to binge, I’m going to binge tacos–not TV. But I binged Sugar. I set aside any reading and my renewed passion for Fallout 4 to keep watching Sugar, and there wasn’t a boring second. A whole army of spoilers couldn’t have stopped me.
It Isn’t Just Sugar
When I thought about it, I realized Sugar is hardly the first media I loved in spite of being exposed to huge spoilers.
I knew about Han Solo’s death in The Force Awakens (a Facebook troll spoiled it), I knew who the real killer was in 1990’s Presumed Innocent (a Kids in the Hall episode spoiled it), and I knew all the spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home (editing and writing dozens of stories about it spoiled it).
Yet I loved, and still love, all of those movies.
Even though I’ve never played the games, I knew everything that was going to happen in Season 1 of The Last of Us, and yes I know what’s coming for Season 2. Editing stories about the games made it inevitable, and I will still watch every episode as soon as it’s available to stream, because it’s an incredible show–how could I not?
It’s Still Cool To Not Spoil, And To Not Be Spoiled
I’m not arguing spoilers don’t take away part of the experience for us. I didn’t have the same experience, for example, that non-spoiled viewers did the moment they saw Colin Farrell’s hero transform into a blue-skinned alien at the end of Episode 6 of Sugar.
Any chance I could share that experience is gone–short of an accident that causes amnesia, and since I have no aspirations to become the hero of a JRPG, I’d rather keep my memories.
I still avoid spoilers when I can, and still avoid revealing them when I have a better option. The other night when I was about to talk about the hilariously gross scene I’d just seen in The Boys Season 4, I made sure to check that everyone else either had already seen it or didn’t care.
It Ruins Nothing
But while I don’t spread the spoilers like a drunk Facebook troll, that doesn’t mean they have the power to ruin anything. They can take away something, but they can’t turn a good show or movie into a bad one–otherwise, why would we ever rewatch anything? I’ve seen Predator a million times and it isn’t like I’ve ever forgotten that Jesse Ventura doesn’t have time to bleed.
So, should we take reasonable action to avoid receiving or revealing spoilers? Sure. But maybe it’s about time we stop acting like dropping spoilers is akin to selling secrets to foreign powers.
Good media is good, bad media is bad, and knowing that Edward Norton and Brad Pitt are the same dude isn’t going to change either.
