Summary
Episode 6 seems to be the chapter that Surface Season 2 has been building towards, but it’s still too easy to question the point of a lot of what’s happening.
Surface Season 2 has been very strange, but with the way Episode 6 plays out, you can sort of see what it was all building towards. Those big swings in the fourth episode and even some of the turgid drama from the previous one all help to set up some of the key moments in “Atonement”. But even though it looks like a big, climactic turning-point episode, it doesn’t feel like one, necessarily.
This is probably my problem more than the show’s, granted, but there’s still something a little off about his season if you ask me, and while episodes like this certainly help it to come together, I’m still not entirely convinced that there was much justification for a second outing, especially the more it contorts itself for the sake of drama.
But nevertheless, here we are. And “Atonement” is aptly titled since it largely revolves around Sophie confronting Henry Huntley about being his daughter, and all the scandal that looms in the background of this revelation. But I’m not overly concerned about the reputations of moneyed dorks at the best of times, and since all the Huntley clan are new to this season, it isn’t like we have any major emotional investment in, say, whether Quinn and Grace get married. You can really feel the episode biding its time by taking the long way around, too, which always gives the sense that there isn’t enough drama to fill the remaining episodes.
Case in point: Sophie’s meeting with Henry. Their initial conversation is a Taken-style phone call during which Sophie lets him know she’s coming for answers, but after he agrees to a meeting, Sophie turns up and discovers he has fobbed her off with Richard, the family lawyer. But she ultimately ends up meeting with Henry in person anyway, so this whole thing feels like a waste of time.
Henry doesn’t have a great deal of interest to say about the matter, either. He claims that Sophie’s mother died in a tragic accident that he was earnestly torn up about, but he also blames his father’s influence for pushing her out and denying Sophie’s existence. That’s an easy thing to say, but we’ve actively seen him brainstorming ways to get her out of the way and keep her quiet even in the present day, so it’s pretty obvious he’s not that bothered beyond how the scandal might affect his reputation and his bottom line.
Joely Richardson in Surface Season 2 | Image via Apple TV+
For some reason, Surface Season 2, Episode 6 never quite realizes that Eliza and Quinn’s perspective in all this is probably more interesting. Although, about the former, maybe I’m going crazy here but all of her dialogue with Sophie – “What happened between us” and so forth – has implied some kind of sexual relationship to me, which would be really thrown for a loop given the reveal about Sophie’s parentage, but it feels like maybe I’m imagining this.
Instead, “Atonement” works pretty hard to imply that Henry is telling the truth about Sophie’s mother’s accident, with a few clues in this regard suggesting she really was gifted a car that she may well have died in. So, the Huntleys may have covered up an accident, not a crime, but then again, we’ve also seen Henry have people killed, so it isn’t like this news would necessarily exonerate him.
The ending of this episode also hinges on us having some kind of fear of the Huntleys, since Quinn kidnaps James – either for being Sophie’s husband, sleeping with Grace, or perhaps both – and bundles him into a van. There’s an element of menace really missing from all this. It doesn’t help that I don’t care about James, and it similarly doesn’t help that I don’t think the show knows what to do with him either.
Sophie falling back into his arms (and his bed) here is really stupid, since the fact that he followed her halfway across the world was creepy enough to be a red flag. It takes a lot of her agency away to have her just surrender to this guy whom she has consistently been able to see right through. It’s like the script requires James to rob her safe just to have some kind of function in the plot, so Sophie has to abandon all her common sense to give him an opportunity to do that. It isn’t organic storytelling.
Considering all this, maybe it’d be best if something bad did happen to James. But I can’t help but think we’re going in the direction of Sophie playing action hero to save him from peril, which seems like a bit of a waste.
