Tables Turn on Sophie With 1 Surprise

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Posted 3 hours ago by inuno.ai

The following contains major spoilers from Surface Season 2, Episode 2, “Speak of the Devil,” now streaming on Apple TV+.

Surface Season 2, Episode 2, “Speak of the Devil” is aptly titled, because it reminds Apple TV+ viewers how terrible some of the characters are. This is definitely an episode tilted in favor of the antagonists — or at least the Huntley family, who are made out to be just as conniving as Sophie Ellis believes they are. But all of their scheming pales in comparison to what happens in the final scene.

“Speak of the Devil” picks up not long after the Surface Season 2 premiere left off. Callum Walsh suggests to Sophie that she try and find her way into Quinn Huntley’s engagement party, which leads to another confrontation between Sophie and Eliza. Meanwhile. Callum gets into some trouble of his own. But audience members who can be patient learn more important facts, which will certainly come in handy later.

Surface Season 2, Episode 2 Continues to Move at Its Own Pace

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Surface Season 2, Episode 2 emphasizes the show’s biggest hurdle: viewers have to be patient. The episode is almost glacially slow-moving by TV standards, with the bulk of the hour being taken up by hushed conversations between different pairs of characters. The scenes that aren’t dialogue-heavy involve people looking things up on laptops and texting on iPhones, and it’s imperative that the audience stops to see what they’re searching or what those texts say. This isn’t like Peacock’s The Day of the Jackal Episode 6, in which the slow burn was building to an explosion. It’s a purely information-gathering expedition. Some folks will appreciate that, and others may check out.

But for those who hang in there, a fair bit of information is disseminated across the hour. Sophie gives Callum her mother Emma’s death certificate, and he’s able to dig up a few details about it. Callum finally finds out what happened to Quinn’s “friend” Phoebe: she fell off a hotel balcony. Needless to say, no one (including the audience) believes that was an accident. And thanks to the engagement party setting, fans meet a few other characters that will undoubtedly come into play later: Quinn’s father Henry Huntley, his wife and his sister Anna. By the end of the episode, fans will feel like they know more than Sophie.

That’s actually a very important distinction, too, because the first episode was so heavily tilted in Sophie’s favor. She had a plan that she was executing. She was able to get close to Eliza Huntley. She was getting into the archive and finding the paperwork about her mother. That’s great for her, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting show long-term. If Sophie has all the answers or knows where to get them, there are no stakes and therefore the audience has no reason to care. “Speak of the Devil” sees everyone else making moves, too, so while it’s not fun, it is the kind of episode that will pay off further down the line.

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Surface Proves That Quinn Huntley Is a Villain

Season 2, Episode 2 Leaves No Doubt That He’s the Antagonist

Close-up of Quinn Huntley, played by Phil Dunster, glaring into camera in the Apple TV+ show Surface — Image via Apple TV+

Apologies to fans of Ted Lasso‘s Jamie Tartt or Strike Back‘s Will Jensen: this episode of Surface confirms that Phil Dunster is playing a bad guy. In these sort of “eat the rich” stories, there’s always at least one character who presents as a nice person and turns out to be terrible, and Quinn is that character type. The premiere hinted at it, but Episode 2 includes several conversations between Quinn and the Huntley family’s lawyer Richard that make it explicitly clear. They discuss having paid off Phoebe before her untimely death and having Callum followed. Plus, a series of texts confirms that one of Callum’s colleagues has been acting as an informant for Quinn.

Dunster plays the charming but sleazy act perfectly. There’s a marked difference between how smarmy Quinn is with Richard or when he talks to Callum in a bar, and how he behaves when he’s around his fiancee Grace, so it’s believable that Quinn could pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. In fact, the conversation between Quinn and Eliza at the bar during the engagement party makes them both seem completely disingenuous and insufferable — because it’s clear the whole thing is a game to them. Eliza later gets indignant to Sophie about feeling like she doesn’t matter to her, but that whole scene falls on deaf ears when the audience knows that Eliza only invited Sophie to the party “to see what she’d do.”

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Yet as frustrating as the Huntley siblings are becoming, that’s okay because Surface needs its own charming TV villains. At this point so early in the season, viewers have to believe the family is worth Sophie and Callum wanting to take them down. The fans have to want to learn their secrets, because that’s what keeps the audience coming back. Season 2, Episode 2 makes clear the family has plenty of secrets, beyond just those that relate to Emma or even Phoebe. It’s revealed that Callum and Quinn knew one another at Cambridge University, which just adds one more layer to their budding rivalry. Now it’s not just business; it’s almost as personal for Callum as it is for Sophie. Is it possible Quinn has a good side to him? Maybe. Is it also possible the audience doesn’t care about that right now? More likely.

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Surface Season 2, Episode 2 Brings Back a Major Character

James Ellis’ Return Changes Everything

A close-up of Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Sophie Ellis in the Apple TV+ series Surface — Image via Apple TV+

The biggest bombshell in Surface Season 2, Episode 2 happens in the final scene, when Sophie’s husband James Ellis returns at the engagement party. Sophie is leaving the restroom when she overhears James talking to another party guest about “my wife,” just before he turns and spots her. Fans knew that James had to find his way back into the narrative, since actor Oliver Jackson-Cohen is still part of the main cast. They just had to figure out how, and nobody had “on the Huntley family’s guest list” among their predictions. Given how secretive the party is, James has to be connected to someone in order to have gotten in. Hopefully it’s not Quinn, but anything is possible.

This isn’t just an interesting new piece of the overall mystery, but it’s a great character development piece. Sophie has incredible unfinished business with Mark from the end of Surface Season 1, and the nightmare scene in the Season 2 premiere illustrated that she’s frightened of seeing him again. She not only has to face the consequences of her actions, but someone who legitimately unnerves her, which doesn’t seem to happen often.

Surface Season 2, Episode 2, “Speak of the Devil” may be among the slowest of slow-burn TV episodes, but it gives out just enough clues and reveals to bring the audience back for one more week. By putting Sophie on the back foot, the viewers are also caught off-guard, and by having more reasons to dislike the Huntleys, fans have more reasons to feel tense and nervous themselves. It feels like the natural next step in a master plan — not unlike the one Sophie Ellis is trying to execute.

Surface streams Fridays on Apple TV+.