Season 2 episode 5 of the AppleTV+ psychological thriller series, Surface, makes matters a bit more clear, especially after the revelation, or rather, suggestion, presented at the end of last week’s episode. After Sophie had returned to the Huntley family estate upon Eliza’s invitation, ten long years after she had last been there, her sudden glimpses of memories from her childhood made it apparent that she had been to the house earlier as well. Surface season 2 episode 5 takes us deeper into the possibility of Sophie being a member of the very family she has been trying to expose, while Callum Walsh also makes some discoveries of his own, and James Ellis comes to his wife, asking for help.
Spoiler Alert
Is Sophie really a member of the Huntley family?
Surface season 2 episode 5 begins inside the Huntley estate house, where enough signs of a revelry are evident from the previous night, when Eliza and Sophie had finally spent time together after ten years of separation. Eliza wakes up in the morning, alone in her room, with some distress clear on her face, possibly because she is still not sure about what exactly Sophie’s intention at present is. She walks down to the hall to clear the mess that she and her friend, or lover, had created the last night, to be met by Anne, who has been up for quite some time. It is she who informs Eliza that Sophie, or Tess, as they call her, had woken up at the break of dawn and had looked as if she had not slept at all throughout the night. Sophie had also left the place early in the morning and had told Anne that she was returning to London.
Eliza has to pretend that her friend had told her of this plan of hers, because she can feel that Anne had sensed something odd about them. Anne even asks her niece whether all is fine, and the latter does not want to open up to her aunt just yet, since she herself is confused about the situation. The episode soon makes it clear that Anne has already had some doubts creeping in her mind, and her suspicions are finally confirmed when she takes a detailed tour of her house in the morning. At some point, Anne reaches the study, which Sophie had gone to on the previous night, and immediately notices the lamp still switched on. Both from this and the door of the study being ajar instead of shut, she is able to tell that someone had come into the place earlier.
While Anne could have initially thought that both Sophie and Eliza had entered the room during their merrymaking, her mind quickly changes when she sees the door to the dark room slightly ajar as well. Inside, she glances upon the photographs of Emma Antoine-Day and figures out what had really happened. Anne understands that Sophie had sneaked into the room, seen the photographs of her mother, and had then become distressed, because of which she had left the estate so early in the morning. Based on how conveniently the photographs, which must have been taken and developed more than twenty years ago, had been laid open on the slab in the dark room, it is very much possible that Anne had left them at the specific spot, only to check whether Sophie had gone sneaking around and whether she would react in any way after seeing those photos.
Quickly, Anne calls up her brother, Henry, and informs him of her findings, and she states with conviction that Sophie had come to the house with the intention of learning about her real identity. This confirms that Anne had indeed known about her brother’s illegitimate daughter, and had perhaps helped him bury the truth in the past. She tells Henry that there can be no doubt that Sophie is the same woman who had come to the estate ten years ago as a stable hand, for she resembles her mother far too much. This means that when Anne had seen Sophie at Quinn’s engagement party, back in season 2 episode 2, she had immediately recognized her as Emma’s daughter, and so might have made the plan of setting a trap for her at the estate house at that very moment. Incidentally, James had also seemingly remembered Emma after seeing Sophie, since they have such a strong physical resemblance, and he too had been looking at the photographs that he had taken of his beloved Emma during their youth.
Later on in the episode, Sophie manages to find the old apartment where she used to stay with her mother during her childhood, and speaks with a kind-hearted woman who moved in after them. The woman recognizes Sophie right away, as she used to be her mother’s friend, and also a neighbor, and she, significantly, does not call her Tess. The lady refers to the protagonist as Sophie, which is not the name she seemingly used in England, and was apparently given to her only in the USA. The elderly woman also opens up about her family, and reveals that James Huntley really loved Emma, but it was his father, William, who refused to allow the relationship to graduate into marriage, and it was apparently because of him that they had broken up. James did pay for child support for a few years, before he eventually got married, had children and stopped paying Emma.
This report does line up with the manner in which old William Huntley behaved with Sophie in the previous episode, when he held her at gunpoint and asked what she was doing there. In his delirious state, he must have confused Sophie with her mother, Emma, and therefore wanted her off the property. Incidentally, Sophie had also seen a painting inside William’s house that reeked of racist undertones, and so it is most likely that he had refused to let his son marry Emma only because she was Black and, therefore, could not fit in among the British aristocracy. But there can be no more doubt left about Sophie’s real identity, for she is really a Huntley by blood.
Why does James ask for Sophie’s help?
After James had spent the previous night getting intimate with Quinn Huntley’s fiancée, Grace, it appeared as if he would drift even farther away from Sophie, despite them still technically being married. However, this does not happen, and James actually calls up Sophie, asking to meet her in public. Despite having learned of the extremely toxic and manipulative nature of James, Sophie still agrees to meet him, and then even opens up to him when he asks for some help. James states that after his wife had faked her suicide and had actually fled the USA with the enormous sum of money she had withdrawn from the company’s funds, he had had to pay back the company out of his own pocket to avoid any legal trouble.
Therefore, he had apparently borrowed the entire sum from some unlawful source, suggesting some criminal moneylender who was now threatening to kill him if he did not pay back soon. James opens up about his helplessness, saying that he had sold off his house and everything else he owned to get hold of the money, and was now still short of a hundred thousand dollars. He asks Sophie to give him this amount as a favor, and she is quite appalled to hear that James does not even have such a meagre sum in his bank account. But what is more significant in this situation, though, is that Sophie sees the vulnerability in her husband, and decides to open up to him as well. Thus, she tells James about why exactly she had come to London—not to build a new life for herself, but to understand what had happened to her mother. James agrees to help her in this mission, and it is he who takes her to the old apartment complex where Sophie had grown up, and the elderly lady confirms her suspicions, once and for all.
That evening, Sophie brings James to her swanky new apartment, and since she trusts him so much all of a sudden, she even shows him how she has been making crypto transactions, with the help of a password-protected thumb drive. Sophie sends over money to her husband’s account, but intentionally increases the amount to 500,000 dollars, as if doing charity for him. But as James leaves the apartment, he opens a note on his phone and types in the password of the thumb drive that Sophie had just used to transfer the money, meaning that he has no intention of actually being helpful to his wife.
Based on his bank balance, it does seem like James is on the brink of bankruptcy, but once he gets the chance to see Sophie’s password, he does not hesitate to make a note of it, since he does genuinely want to hurt his wife, after all. It might also be that James uses a different bank account here, and he might have made up this whole story about nearing bankruptcy, so that he could get close to Sophie and find out the password to the drive. Back in San Francisco, he had learned from the hired hacker that Sophie had been using crypto transactions, and so he might have decided to find out her password, meaning that he will try to steal the thumb drive next. Either way, it is clear that James has not turned to his wife’s side again, but still remains extremely vengeful against her, and the biggest mystery here is why Sophie trusted him so easily after all her past experiences.
What had seemingly happened to Phoebe?
In this episode, we also learn that it was most probably Quinn’s father, Henry Huntley, who had ordered the hit on Phoebe Davis, the sex worker who had started speaking to the journalist, Callum Walsh. Ever since Phoebe died in her hotel room in Paris under mysterious circumstances, Quinn has not been himself, and so when he confronts his father about having murdered the woman he had very strong feelings for, a conflict in the making can be sensed. Quinn now finally opens up to Grace as well, although he keeps his feelings for Phoebe a secret and tells her that his father must have killed the sex worker.
Henry has apparently been extremely protective of his father’s image, and so it must be he who has been hiding all evidence regarding the allegations of murder against William Huntley. Therefore, when he found out that Quinn had spilled some family secrets to Phoebe in his drunken stupor, he seemingly ordered a hit on the woman. Upon the advice of the family lawyer, Henry now also tells his children about Emma and their illegitimate daughter, Sophie, and this truly unsettles the familial bonds among the Huntley members. It is also revealed, in this episode, that it was Callum’s trusted assistant, Claire, who had been leaking information to Quinn, but she now refuses to work for him anymore.
What does Callum discover about Sophie’s childhood?
Callum and Claire continue with their investigation of Sophie, or rather, Tess Caldwell, and they realize that the first-ever document that exists of the woman is from a government transitional facility called St. David’s. However, when they matched the name of the facility with the address that was officially listed, there was no result found. Instead, these search parameters were leading to a church called St. David’s, which is located only a little distance away from the Huntley estate. When the two journalists reach the church, and Callum sneaks into the archives at the building, he finds a file bearing the name of Tess Caldwell, but it is not the same Tess that he knows. Instead, the file belongs to a different girl, who had died as a child, and her identity was supposedly transferred to someone else.
This confirms that Sophie’s real name was not Tess Caldwell, as had been suggested till now, but it was all a fake identity created for her. It is now suggested that the Huntleys wanted to put Sophie up for adoption, and they did so through St. David’s Church, where she was given a completely new identity to avoid any further legal issues. At the end of Surface episode 5, Callum is seen delivering the file he had found to Sophie and also confronting her about her real identity.
As Sophie takes a glance at the picture of the founder of the church, Father Martin, some memories from her childhood come flashing back once again, which confirms that the scene in episode 4 indeed showed a young Sophie staring into the fireplace. Based on the information provided so far, it seems like Emma Antoine-Day had started to create problems when James stopped sending her money for their daughter, following which she was killed upon the orders of William, who wanted to avoid any public scandal. Father Martin had then come to take her away from the house, and he had then put her into the church’s adoption center. Therefore, how Sophie deals with the whole situation, and whether the younger generation of the Huntleys take a stand against their father and grandfather, all remain to be seen in Surface season 2.
