Summary
Surface Season 2 hits an interesting turning point in Episode 3, which is either the best or the worst one yet, depending on how you look at it.
Surface Season 2 hasn’t been very good, at least not if you ask me, but Episode 3, “Kintsugi”, provides an interesting turning point. It’s either the best installment yet, the one that provides the most depth of character and forces you to reconsider a few of your most entrenched viewpoints, or it’s the worst, the one in which almost nothing at all actually happens and the overarching mystery is barely developed. It could, perhaps, be both, but that’d be very weird.
Then again, weirdness is the stock in trade of a show like Surface. It isn’t overtly surreal like, say, Severance, but everything’s a little off-kilter, a consequence of never quite knowing who’s who and what’s what. After the cliffhanger ending of the previous episode revealed that James had followed Sophie to London, how Sophie dealt with that revelation was going to be of paramount importance. I didn’t think the approach the show would take would be to have us reconsidering what we think of James.
It certainly doesn’t help “Kintsugi” that it feels like it has been written as an afterthought, that James getting back in touch with Sophie was the end goal and how he went about doing it didn’t matter a great deal. To this end, the episode opens with a quick flashback showing how James tracked Sophie’s money to London with some third-party assistance and then infiltrated the Huntley shindig by pretending to be a rich guy whose car was too expensive for a valet to dare touch. This happens so quickly and frictionlessly that it’s almost funny, especially the latter part since it was a literal plot point that the secrecy and security around the party was such that Sophie had to be bundled into the back of a car and driven to its real, obscured location like a kidnap victim.
But whatever, right? It isn’t the point. The point is that James is determined to find Sophie, and it seems not for any complex ulterior motive or because he was in bed with the Huntleys all along or anything of that overly dramatic sort. This isn’t just interesting but it’s indicative of the approach of the entire episode, which in many ways is contrary to the approach the rest of the show has taken. It sidelines all the big-picture murder-mystery stuff to focus instead on the core human dynamics. It’s actually more interesting, in hindsight, that James doesn’t seem to be connected to anything else. He’s a husband whose wife left him in incredibly mysterious circumstances and he can’t let that go without an explanation.
Oliver Jackson-Cohen in Surface Season 2 | Image via Apple TV+
One of the key dramatic questions of Surface Season 2, Episode 3 is whether he should. Sophie is our primary point-of-view character but she isn’t strictly the “hero” of this story, especially in this season. Her determination to find out what happened to her mother – and, in the absence of her memories, what happened to her – is beginning to rack up a string of casualties, James among them. This is a show about Sophie confronting her past, but who says that only has to include her long-ago, unclear past? What about the recent past, which includes leaving James without an explanation?
Because this is the underlying point the way it manifests as a suspenseful cat-and-mouse game of chase and symbolism ahead of the eventual, inevitable confrontation is a bit daft. But the conversation itself is pretty good. And it doesn’t lead anywhere all that fruitful, implying there’s more to come from this angle as we go.
In a surprising turnaround, Callum has less to do in this episode and his scenes are less interesting than Sophie’s, when exactly the inverse has been true thus far. I worry about Callum, to be fair. He’s too one-track-minded, chasing any perceived lead with so much enthusiasm that he can’t help running headlong into walls. He’s investigating dangerous people and doing it in a way that is certain to bring that danger his way.
To be fair, though, Surface Season 2, Episode 3 also raises the question of quite how dangerous these people are, and in what way. Quinn Huntley, for instance, is adamant about not being responsible for the death of Phoebe Davis, and I, for one, believe him. Again, as with the explanation about James, it’s arguably more interesting if he isn’t. Because in that case, who is? What’s really going on?
These are the kinds of big questions that “Kintsugi” isn’t interested in answering. However, it is interested in laying a foundation on which those questions can be thought about in new ways. That is undeniably of some value, even if it comes at the expense of the pacing. My main concern is that Surface won’t know what to do with the answers when it eventually provides them.
