Summary
Surface Season 2 really languishes in Episode 5, with all the competing subplots becoming more tedious and less interesting.
The word of the day is languishing. That’s the one that keeps springing to mind during Surface Season 2, anyway. In Episode 5, “Daybreak”, we continue to take the most circuitous route possible to conclusions that we just know aren’t going to be worth the aggro when we get there. It’s getting a little dull, which is a shame after Episode 4 felt like it was livening things up a bit.
The plot still revolves around the same key theme – the truth about Sophie’s heritage and history, which folds in everything to do with Eliza and the Huntleys, and now everything to do with James and the real Tess Caldwell, whose truth Callum and Claire are determined to uncover as they look deeper into Sophie. But none of these constituent parts are especially interesting to me. It’s easy to forget there’s a murder mystery underpinning all this, but I’m not sure anyone cares about that either.
I think the problem – the main one, anyway – is how many of the core elements undermine the others. So, for instance, in Episode 4, Sophie discovered that she was a Huntley, and “Daybreak” sheds a bit more light on that. Her mother and Henry Huntley met during their time at Oxford and had a daughter that they gave up for adoption because Henry’s father didn’t approve. Given how Henry is, the idea of being a part of Sophie’s life never really occurred to him, and the fact he wasn’t never bothered him, at least not until Sophie suddenly reappeared.
Henry assumes, understandably, that Sophie is after something, probably money, and so brainstorms the best way of dealing with the situation that won’t tarnish his public image. Given he’s rich, it should come as no surprise that the solution he comes up with is a payout. But little does he know that Sophie was never investigating her parentage to begin with. She was only looking into her mother’s death.
When Callum discovers who the real Tess Caldwell was, and that she’s now dead, it should ring some alarm bells. But because Sophie is an amnesiac and almost everything she has done has been freestyled on the spot, this isn’t all that dramatic. Their “confrontation” amounts to Sophie saying, earnestly, that she doesn’t remember why she assumed Tess’s identity. The real truth remains elusive, something to be discovered down the line. But that doesn’t do much for us in the meantime.
The James stuff in Surface Season 2, Episode 5 is also unsatisfying. When he returned unexpectedly, many theorized he might have an ulterior motive connected to everything else that was going on. That would have been contrived, but it would have at least been a bit more dramatic.
Oliver Jackson-Cohen in Surface Season 2 | Image via Apple TV+
As it turns out, though, he seems to just be after money. After Sophie cleaned the company out in Season 1 he had to pay it back, and that meant borrowing it from dangerous people who don’t take kindly to bad debts. He needs $100,000 from Sophie to settle the books, and she ends up giving him half a million as a sweetener, with the assumption that he’ll just get on a plane back to the U.S. and leave her to it. But he doesn’t do that – instead, he makes a note of the password to her safe and intimates that he’ll be staying in England.
Earlier in the season I was a bit more interested in the Huntleys themselves, but they’re beginning to fall into more overt rich brat archetypes and I don’t suspect there’s going to be any more nuance forthcoming. “Daybreak” reveals it was Henry who ordered Phoebe’s death, not Quinn, but we could have guessed that anyway. It doesn’t bode well for Sophie’s safety if she doesn’t accept the bride to leave things alone, which she definitely won’t, but I’m not sure this necessarily constitutes a twist.
Quinn, at least for now, is the most interesting figure because he’s genuinely appalled by Henry’s actions but also too cowardly to reveal what his father did or challenge him in any meaningful way. Not yet, anyway – I get the sense that Quinn will ultimately be an accomplice to Henry’s downfall since he doesn’t seem to have the stomach for a proper cover-up, but that, like everything else, also remains to be seen.
Time will tell. But if Surface Season 2, Episode 5 proves anything it’s that time is something of an enemy to this show. The longer it idles along trying to fill space between more meaningful reveals, the more people are going to lose interest and fall away. I, for one, aren’t sure this season can find much value in even the three episodes that are left. But I’m open to being surprised.
