Surface Season 2 Review: Lukewarm Thriller Gets on Your Nerves

In the second season of this fan-favourite Apple TV+ series, Sophie is back to figure out the mysteries of her past life. Set in London, Sophie tries desperately to use her stolen resources to enmesh herself within the wealthy and elite British society only to realise that she was working with a journalist at some point to expose the heinous actions of the very people she has become close to. Will Sophie finally figure out what was going on in her life before her memory loss?

Surface Season 2 has 8 episodes, each with a runtime of around 40 minutes.

Surface Season 2 Review

Psychological thriller series Surface comes back with a second season to deliver some much-needed closure to Sophie’s story. The series, which started off with an amnesia plot in the first season holds on to that narrative this time as well, only going deeper into the conspiracy theory that Sophie was apparently looking into before she lost her memories. Sophie tries to get close to her old friend Eliza and stumbles into a forgotten shocker surrounding her mother’s mysterious death and a connection with the Huntley family in the midst.

The entire show primarily hinges on Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s ability to sell this insane conspiracy and she’s fantastic in her role. She’s a thoroughly confused protagonist who is piecing things together with the audience in order to get to the bottom of her fragmented memories. On top of that her ex? husband James has found her once more and he is on the hunt for vengeance. I have said this before and I will say it again, poor Oliver Jackson-Cohen always finds himself at the crap end of the stick in most of the things he stars in. It’s baffling and hilarious at the same time.

Anyway, the series brings forth a convoluted story where Sophie goes through these whirlwind situations involving her mother and a murder conspiracy surrounding an elite British family. It’s nothing new, to be honest, and the amnesia track doesn’t really add anything to the ordeal. While watching the conspiracy open up I found myself frustrated with the onslaught of characters making these random decisions and changing their minds multiple times. There are a few twists and turns that will make everyone sit up and take notice, but the path to the end seems a bit all over the place.

I won’t lie and say that the series doesn’t present a delicious end to a confusing situation. It starts alluding to interesting avenues by episode 4 which will make anyone interested. But the episodes before and after this delicious revelation are just so annoyingly slow sometimes that it takes away from the charm of the series. It’s not as tightly wound as you might expect and it weighs heavy on the runtime. At only 40 minutes, that’s a shame.

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Surface Season 2’s biggest problem is that it sits and sits with these different characters who don’t have a lot to add to the central mystery. James, for example, is a ghost from the past who has nothing to contribute to the season. At first, you wonder whether he will go into psychopath territories and go after Sophie but he turns out to be quite the dud and is uninteresting as heck before long. He is there for extended lengths of the runtime and it turns out to not have any impact on the story in the end. There are many moments such as this in the series that make you question the point of its existence.

Final Thoughts

Gugu Mbatha-Raw is the star of Surface Season 2 but the series is all over the place will its multitude of aimless characters who add nothing to the central juicy plot. The season is a lukewarm watch that has its moments, but it’s nothing ground-breaking in any way.

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