Summary
Surface Season 2 limps to a conclusion in an odd finale that denies us drama and emotional payoff to instead set up an unearned Season 3.
Surface has had a very strange trajectory in Season 2, hasn’t it? It started out feeling very inert, then it gradually whipped up some steam and began to feel like it was going somewhere, only for its ending in Episode 8 to be a naked tease for Season 3. The finale, “Unearthed”, provides just enough closure that people won’t be up in arms about it, but very little dramatic payoff. Most of the plot threads are rather unceremoniously tied up enough for this to constitute a climax, but it never feels like one, with the emotional intensity and drama that you’d expect.
And the cynicism of those beggy final moments doesn’t sit right. Surface hasn’t done enough to justify this season, let alone another, so teasing more to the story as if we’ll be waiting with bated breath is a little ridiculous. But maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, Quinn and Grace’s wedding provides the frame for this finale, which picks up more or less where the previous episode left off, with Sophie and James fleeing from Quinn’s henchman, Lucas. The subsequent crash and tussle leave Lucas dead and the police curious about what happened, a car crash once again opening the Huntleys up to trouble and tying Sophie more intimately to their moneyed clan.
Not that the moment feels especially dramatic. It’s confusingly shot and under-lit, so what should be a big moment feels like a minor one, an assessment that applies to most of this finale overall, though for varying reasons. The biggest fake-out is probably the wedding. We’re expected to be properly invested in whether the whole thing will go ahead, and for a moment it seems like it won’t, but then the situation is resolved rather easily and the nuptials take place with such little fanfare that I was expecting some kind of last-minute twist that never came. This sense of inertia pervades the entire episode.
The most meaningful development pertains to the circumstances surrounding Sophie’s mother’s death, and particularly the effects this has on the surviving Huntleys. Through a fairly convoluted series of sudden memories and soft confrontations, it’s eventually revealed that Emma was murdered by Quinn’s mother, Olivia, who claims not to have known who she was. This is left open to interpretation, which is how the show earlier treated Henry’s claims about the same event. Now, we know that Henry was mostly telling the truth, but if you ask me, there’s more to support the idea that Olivia knew what she was doing than mistook Emma for a threat.
Millie Brady in Surface Season 2 | Image via Apple TV+
Either way, this does lead to what I’d consider to be the only meaningful emotional payoff in the ending of Surface Season 2, which comes from Henry and, to a slightly lesser extent, Eliza. With Henry, he murders his father after he badmouths Sophie and then sobs over the spot on the estate which we’re to assume became Emma’s final resting place. Eliza sees this and, combining it with her mother’s testimony, she comes to realize that Emma is probably buried there and tells Sophie the same. It’s a key moment, with Eliza finally taking Sophie’s side over her family’s, but it doesn’t land with quite the impact it was clearly intended to.
I think the most detrimental choice here is to essentially silo everyone off, so instead of the big blowout confrontations we were expecting we get a lot of quieter sequences that are well-acted but less memorable. Sophie and James spend a lot of time hiding out and waiting to hear from Callum, and Callum spends a lot of time cooped up in an interview room, so the payoffs are all low-key one-to-one affairs. There’s some satisfaction in Callum sticking to his guns and a bittersweet, almost longing quality in Sophie and James reminiscing, but for what?
Well, it seems like it is for the purposes of setting up a third season. But as intimated at the top, it’s such a bizarre decision to make here in a season that has felt so flat and so confused about where it was going. How are we supposed to buy into more when the storytelling avenues it could go down are so hazy? And why would we bother to care when the more meaningful character conclusions were delayed to account for more will-they-won’t-they teasing? Sophie’s final scene with Callum is a brief conversation about her being willing to go on the record, but we don’t see her do so, and her final scene with Eliza is the one telling her where Emma is buried, but it’s a phone call with no in-person stakes.
What we actually get is Sophie going to the police station to give evidence about her mother’s murder, and then being thrown for a loop when the police tell her that there are multiple warrants out for her arrest. What has she been up to? We’ll have to wait and see, I guess. But it wouldn’t surprise me if this lacklustre season had put people off caring one way or the other.
