Sunny – Season 1 Episode 9 “Who’s in the Box?” Recap & Review

Who’s in the Box?

Episode 9 of Sunny starts with Sunny being unveiled out in the woods. As she enters a set of double doors, she finds herself on a gameshow. Noriko and Tanaka are here, within this gameshow, aptly titled “Should Sunny wipe herself?” She has to prove herself worthy, and with different questions thrown at her, we basically get a recap of the series’ events, with extra context. The crowd is full of Masas, and Sunny finds herself scrambling to catch up with what’s going on.

It’s here we learn more about the past through Masa’s ingenious home-bots. Suzie was one of six siblings when she was created, with Masa setting out to find a cure for loneliness. He developed a new series of home-bots to be wary of human interaction and develop them as proper companions.

To do that, the robots were paired up before bringing human in to help as lab techs. Masa was in a bad way during his own isolation but it was nothing compared to a man named Asahi. Masa had never seen someone as lonely as him but Bot #6 and Asahi slowly grew closer together, bonding through baseball. Fast forward a year and it’s proof that these bots work as the pair have a proper, genuine connection.

Unfortunately, these big emotions can sometimes get the better of these bots, and although glitches are easy to fix, they can also lead to big outbursts. We see one inside the lab where Bot #6 hits back at a bot doing dental work. For Masa though, this is a big breakthrough, and sees him double down on his work.

As we soon see though, Tanaka sabotaged the bots by rigging the outlets and causing the bots to go haywire. Unfortunately, this causes all the bots to start displaying negative behaviour, with Bot #17 smacking Bot #6 with a table. Asahi, having now bonded with his Bot, gets in the way and ends up dying as a result of this Bot going crazy.

After turning the robot back on, Masa gets that same table and destroys Bot #17. With a murder on their hands, and knowing Asahi has no relatives, those inside the lab decide to cover this up. However, Masa knows that the Yakuza are interested in him, and he deliberates over exactly what to do with the code. Eventually, he chooses to stay in darkness.

4 hours later, Masa has been drinking heavily. He apologizes to Bot #32 and this is enough for him to work harder on fixing up Sunny and creating new boundaries so this doesn’t happen again. So how does Hime play into this? Well, it turns out Sunny has actually modified her code herself. Every time she was willing to break the rules and push the boundaries just a little bit further, she stepped out he comfort zone. Hime simply gave her a little “boost” to speed up her progress and live to her full potential.

When the game show ends, Sunny makes the decision herself to wipe her memory, which is where the episode comes to an end.

The Episode Review

So Sunny rolls round with another stylish episode, this time with exposition and details of the past, all wrapped up in this gameshow format. While the visuals are great and lean into that idea of Japanese culture, including the live audience and the sound effects etc. it also exacerbates a lot of Sunny’s problems. The show has dragged on for far too long and we should have got this episode 3 or 4 weeks back, with everything tightened up considerably rather than dragging out to this length.

Learning about what happened with Masa and the lab is a nice touch, especially knowing that this all stemmed from good intentions. It also leans into that idea of human and AI companionships and how one could effectively have a relationship with a bot and take a proverbial bullet for your companion.

It all comes down to this finale now though; will Sunny and Suzie get a happy ending? What will happen after the wipe? We’ll have to wait and see!