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Season 1 of Surface ended in September of 2022. Do you remember what you were doing back then? Probably, but the details are foggy, right? That’s sort of the feeling we got while watching Season 2 of the series, which stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Then we remembered why Season 1 was so forgettable.
SURFACE SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A woman opens a safe in a London hotel suite and takes out a USB drive with a PIN. With that USB drive, she transfers out thousands in cryptocurrency. She then puts the USB drive back and grabs her passport.
The Gist: Sophie Ellis (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), going by the identity Tess Caldwell, then goes to a charity auction run by The Huntley Foundation and far outbids anyone for philarmonic season tickets. She attracts the attention of Eliza Huntley (Millie Brady), who is from the powerful family that runs the foundation and is also a cellist at the philharmonic. Apparently, Tess and Eliza knew each other quite intimately ten years ago, but Tess suddenly left Eliza without explanation. Separately, Tess meets Eliza’s brother Quinn (Phil Dunster), who doesn’t at all recognize her.
She gets a text from a reporter named Callum Walsh (Gavin Drea), following up on a call they had before Sophie/Tess lost her memory. When they do meet, he senses that something is different about her, especially when she bristles at his recording the meeting. He listens back to their previous call, which only lasted a minute, where Tess says she has evidence against a powerful family that she can retrieve when she gets back to London.
A story Callum is pursuing involves Quinn Huntley, and a sex worker in Paris that is a source. But when the Huntley’s attorney gets wind of the investigation, he calls Callum’s editor to have the story killed. One thing that does worry Callum is that the sex worker hasn’t been heard from in a couple of weeks.
Tess continues to probe into what she was looking into prior to her losing her memory back in San Francisco. Something about seeing Eliza’s face bubbling up from the deep recesses of her damaged memory. When Callum sends her the recording of their intitial phone call, she hears her tell him that her mother was murdered when she was a girl.
Eliza, against her better judgement, invites Tess to her flat for a party. There she tells Tess how hurt she was when she suddenly left. Tess also meets Quinn’s wife Grace (Freida Pinto).
Tess continues to probe, finding a personal archive of articles about the Huntleys and her mother in a university library, then managing to get into her sumptuous flat. She puts it all together and calls Callum to tell him she needs his help to tie the Huntleys to her mother’s death.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? It feels like memory loss plots are more prevalent these days, so Surface, created by Veronica West (with Mbatha-Raw and Reese Witherspoon among the EPs), now reminds us of the Fox medical drama Doc.
Our Take: We weren’t fans of the first season of Surface because it never did a great job cluing the viewers in to the details about Sophie/Tess’ life. Being left as in the dark as the show’s main character makes for a slow-going narrative, where there’s a lot of clandestine meetings and scenes of people staring at computer screens. Not much has changed in the second season, even though now Sophie is going full-time as Tess and infiltrating her way back into the posh London social circles she once moved through.
Given that it’s been two-and-a-half years since the first season ended, we felt we needed a little more context about how and why Sophie is now Tess than what we got. Sure, a “previously on” catch up montage will help, but Sophie’s disappearance at the end of the first season consisted of a lot of moving parts, and being dropped into London some months later with Sophie going around as Tess caused our brains to bend a little bit.
One of the things that annoys us about the series is that, given that we’re supposed to be as in the dark about things as Sophie/Tess is, we tend to put the pieces together more quickly than she does. The idea that she figures out exactly why Eliza’s face has bubbled to the surface of her damaged memories is easily figured out, and is pretty obviously telegraphed as Tess figures things out about her previous life in London.
There seem to be some logic gaps in the first episode, as well, like the idea that she has this posh flat when she’s supposedly been in San Francisco for almost a decade, or the fact that the archive she has in the library seems to consist of newspaper clippings that she could have kept in a folder somewhere in that posh flat. We’re not even sure what led her to the library to begin with.
While we still love watching Mbatha-Raw, we have little patience for a thriller that seems to make little sense and takes its time to unknot itself.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: When Callum tells Tess how dangerous the Huntleys are, she tells him, “I left a whole life behind to come here. I don’t have anything left to lose.”
Sleeper Star: Phil Dunster, late of Ted Lasso, is menancingly smarmy as Quinn Huntley.
Most Pilot-y Line: Sometimes we feel that Sophie/Tess lies her way to getting information way too easily, like when she bluffed her way into getting the spare key to her flat.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Surface has not improved its slow pacing and logic gaps in Season 2; it’s just moved the locale from San Francisco to London.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
