Sunny – Season 1 Episode 8 “Trash or Not-Trash” Recap & Review

Trash or Not-Trash

Episode 8 of Sunny starts with a look at little Masa. Despite being a kid, he realizes very early on that he’s alone and his parents don’t spend much time with him. Masa does his best to try and connect with his father, who appears to hate him. This leads all the way up to his dad on his death-bed, who continues to reject him.

Masa snaps and turns to the dark side as he decides to embrace his loneliness. Having tried everything, Noriko rings Hiromasa to try and help. This is the same guy who dropped off the bot to Suzie… and he also happens to be Masa’s biological father, apparently. This makes sense over why Masa’s dad doesn’t accept him before dying.

Noriko manages to convince Hiromasa to throw Masa a bone. He offers his son the opportunity to come stay with him in a summer cabin and work on electronics. Masa does just this and alone, he stumbles upon a prototype of a trash-bot called Sho, alongside a whole bunch of photos of his mother and Hiromasa.

Masa is enthused by this bot and he throws himself into electronics, but his real incentive is to beat Hiromasa, making the Trash Bot way smarter than his dad ever could. Masa’s crippling loneliness appears to be healing through working on fixing up this bot.

The thing is, he’s managed to work on this Trash-bot to such a degree that it understands Masa better than anybody else ever could. This, it turns out, is what drove Masa toward being a roboticist in the future. He wanted to help build in order for it to help people discover their humanity, rather than the other way round.

Heading back to the cabin though, his anger comes back full-force. He spies Hiromasa and Noriko together, and tells the Bot that they’re both trash. He’s livid that Hiromasa had an affair and now it becomes clear that Noriko’s husband knew too, explaining why he never said anything.

Fast forward to a few days before the plane in the middle of the night. Upset and worried, Hiromasa explains that Masa was drunk and handed over the home-bot to him, under instructions to pass it to Suzie. It would appear that he was on the run from the Yakuza for reasons we’re still not sure.

Suzie tries to piece together what all these coloured dots are on Sunny’s GPS display. It would appear that Noriko, Hiromasa and Suzie are all caught on the GPS but there’s another marker that hasn’t moved and it goes all the way back to the airport on that fateful day Suzie said bye to Zen and Masa.

This could well prove that Zen is still alive. As Suzie rushes to the area, Sunny is also heading toward this dot too and she gets there first. Sunny approaches Suzie and seems to knock out the guard who has her up at gunpoint. The ground then comes apart and Sunny ends up falling.

The Episode Review

So we finally learn a bit more about Masa but this mystery is still being dragged out. We don’t know what happened that day at the airport exactly, nor how nobody has seen Zen or Masa since they presumably died on the plane. It seemed obvious from the first episode all those weeks ago that the pair would still be alive and now we actually understand and see that this is true. But damn has this show taken its sweet time to tell us that.

If that wasn’t egregious enough, we also get more flashbacks here and while interesting, it takes a long time for us to get solid plot development given we keep cycling through a bunch of artistic, slow-paced scenes. Sunny has really come off the rails in recent weeks which is a shame. While this is a better chapter, this has undoubtedly been a disappointing series, all things considered.