Summary
Surface gives its Season 2 mystery some shape in Episode 1, but the pacing is still a little lacking, which is a shame after such a long wait.
Despite a three-year gap between seasons after having left things on a pretty significant finale, the main takeaway from Surface’s second season premiere is that it still doesn’t seem in much of a hurry to get where it’s going. This is par for the course for Apple TV+’s mystery series, one supposes, which has always had pacing issues and relied on the steady drip-feeding of new information to keep things interesting, but Episode 1, “New Money”, adheres to this formula almost to a fault.
It’s not all cause for concern, though. The cast remains excellent and by the end of the premiere Season 2’s mystery has formed a pretty clear shape, with obvious key players and a coherent end-goal for Sophie – or should we say Tess? – to pursue.
Sophie is in London now and ingratiating herself into high society by flinging cash around and hanging out in the right places. The core dramatic principle is that she still can’t remember much about her past but is having to tease out new revelations by pretending that she does, which gives Gugu Mbatha-Raw (as seen in The Cloverfield Paradox, Irreplaceable You, Summerland and Lift) a lot to work with. She’s up to the task, at the very least.
This isn’t the first time Sophie has been in England. On her last visit, she met with a truth-to-power journalist named Callum Walsh, though of course, she can’t initially recall that meeting when he leaves her a voicemail asking to continue it. Her first request is that he sends her a recording of their previous encounter, for her own amnesiac admin.
This all relates to Eliza, whom Sophie has been having flashes of since she lost her memory and who, we discover, she shares a past with. But things aren’t exactly starting off on the right foot, since Sophie ghosted Eliza completely and never explained her disappearance, which Eliza is still smarting from. So, Sophie has to essentially cosplay as an apologetic Tess to make amends with Eliza to get closer to the truth of her past, which it’s strongly implied is connected to Eliza’s wealthy family, the Huntleys.
Phil Dunster in Surface Season 2 | Image via Apple TV+
This all comes together gradually throughout Surface Season 2, Episode 1. Sophie looks up the family and discovers that the Huntley patriarch, William, is connected to a string of murder cases. When she eventually gets the recording from her previous conversation with Callum, she talks about her mother having been murdered by powerful people. The connections make themselves. Sophie believes William Huntley killed her mother and needs to play nice with Eliza in order to prove it.
Sophie explains this outright to Callum at the end of the premiere, and she’s determined to go through with it despite the dangers (I’m not a fan of the girlboss “I have nothing left to lose” line, which suggests a bit of a tone pivot that I’m not sure will suit the show, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.) Do you see what I mean about this season already having a shape?
The key question is whether it’ll have any real staying power. Callum seems particularly vital to me since he’s someone with the motivations and the skillset to put together the pieces that Sophie has been gathering since Season 1. But he’s also spot-on to consider Sophie’s sudden reappearance and deeply mysterious behavior to be a red flag, so his loyalties are a little in question. The same can be said for Eliza, who will invariably be forced to choose between her family and the connection to Sophie/Tess that she developed in the past, but in “New Money” Eliza’s a little bit archetypal.
Either way, there’s plenty to chew on, but given the lackadaisical pace and the lack of a real injection of excitement in the transition between seasons, the jury remains out on Surface for now.
