'Surface' Creator & Cast Unpack the Season 2 Cliffhanger Ending

For the entirety of the second season of Apple TV+’s mystery/thriller, Surface, protagonist Sophie Ellis/Tess Caldwell (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) has made it her mission to peel back the proverbial layers of the onion that is the powerful, old monied Huntley family of Britain.

Of course, that’s a little ironic, considering Sophie is a serial dodger of her own shady past, much of which she couldn’t remember due to a case of extreme amnesia. But by the end of Season 1, Sophie confirmed that she’d blown up her life before; was an embezzler using multiple pseudonyms, including that of Tess Caldwell; and then abandoned her equally deceiving American husband, James (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) in San Francisco so she could recover more of her hazy origin story in England.

Back in London, Sophie doggedly pursued the Huntley family for answers because her pre-amnesia self had collected a file folder’s worth of evidence pinning the blame for her mother’s death on someone in their family. By season’s end, Sophie discovered that she was the product of a relationship between Henry Huntley (Rupert Graves) and her mum, which in turn laid the groundwork for her mother’s murder on the Huntley grounds. A sorrowful outcome in the end, with no easy answers as to what comes next for Sophie and James.