Alex Rider season 2, episode 1 recap – “Surf”

This recap of Alex Rider season 2, episode 1, “Surf”, contains spoilers.

As it turns out, joining the British security services and participating in an off-the-books and probably illegal international espionage mission isn’t too kind on the old psyche, especially not if you’re a schoolboy with all the regular young-adult stresses to deal with too. This is the problem that Alex Rider has as of “Surf”, the Season 2 premiere of his namesake show. He’s in therapy. He keeps seeing Yassen Gregorovich, the Russkie assassin from the first season, everywhere he goes. He’s conscious people think he’s nuts, and to make matters perhaps worst of all, he’s going to feature in the school’s production of Romeo & Juliet (he’s playing Mercutio).

Alex Rider season 2, episode 1 recap

Jack, who is working as an intern in a company looking over Home Office rulings on indefinite leave to remain cases, an immigration ruling that, as someone who was threatened with deportation in order to strongarm Alex in the first season, is work she feels is rather important, books Alex and Tom a half-term holiday to Cornwall. (She’s American, so let’s not judge too harshly.) It seems like the ideal getaway for Alex since it’s full of surfing and pretty potential love interests, but Tom isn’t as keen. A new video game called Feathered Serpent is occupying most of his time since he’s fixated with K7, the player on the top of the leaderboards, and almost everyone else in the world, it seems, is similarly obsessed. The game’s a global sensation and will become important later.

Alex, though, isn’t into it, and neither is Sabina, a young girl who Alex literally bumps into while he believes he’s pursuing Gregorovich. Sabina’s dad, Ed, is a journalist writing a book about Damian Cray, the enigmatic multi-billionaire creator of Feathered Serpent, which, again, will become important later.

In fact, it becomes important almost immediately. Ed and Sabina are renting a modern house on a nearby hill where Alex goes to try and borrow some coffee, and while he’s there he learns that the house is having some problems with its internet connection. One of the technicians sent out by the company looks suspiciously like Gregorovich, and while Alex and Sabina stroll along the beach exchanging important bits of backstory and worldbuilding, the house on the hill explodes in a giant fireball on the horizon behind them.

Alex is able to rescue Ed from what the local police insist was a gas leak. But Alex knows better. He’s insistent that the explosion was caused by a bomb planted by the internet guys, and even tries to get the plod to call the number he still has for Mrs. Jones, but of course, it isn’t in service. Alex is left very much how he started — looking unconvincing and a bit bonkers. But now he’s even more frustrated than ever.

So frustrated is he, in fact, that he breaks into the old HQ that Mrs. Jones and Blunt were using in the first season, but he finds it abandoned. He’s being watched through its CCTV cameras, though, by Blunt himself. It looks like Alex’s libido led him straight into another international espionage mission. Who’d have thought it?

You can stream Alex Rider season 2, episode 1, “Surf”, exclusively on IMDb TV.