In the trailer for the second season of Apple TV+‘s psychological thriller Surface, Gugu Mbatha-Raw‘s Sophie is still looking to uncover the truth about her past, this time in London.
After season one ended with Sophie embracing her former identity as Tess Caldwell and going back to the U.K. in search of Millie Brady’s Eliza, whose bloody face has been haunting Sophie, the season two trailer finds Sophie still across the pond and having reconnected with Eliza’s posh British family, the Huntleys.
Eliza is shown recalling how Sophie, whom she knows as Tess, used to work at their family’s stables and the two were friends before Tess disappeared.
But Sophie’s not just seeking to reunite with old acquaintances. She’s overheard saying that her mother was murdered when she was very young and that she thinks the Huntleys were involved in her death.
In order to discover what happened to her mom, Sophie tells Eliza, “I have to go back to where it all started, with you, with your family.”
It’s at this point in the trailer that the danger surrounding the Huntleys is ratched up as someone says, “I’ve seen them erase people for much less.”
Sophie, meanwhile, is shown going through articles and police reports of “multiple missing girls, friends turned up dead.”
And soon Sophie is facing off against the Huntleys as Phil Dunster‘s Quinn says, “She wants to expose the whole bloody thing.”
As Eliza warns Sophie she won’t win in a fight against her family, Quinn threatens her, “Leave us alone, before it gets a lot worse.”
The logline for season two teases a “new chapter,” “set in a whole new world” as the show “follows Sophie to London to unravel the secrets of her past. Having suffered an injury that robbed her of her memories, Sophie follows the few clues she has, using her vast stolen resources to embed herself in elite British society, and discovering a possible connection to a beautiful heiress. But everything changes when a journalist contacts her out of the blue, and Sophie realizes they were working together to expose a shocking scandal about the dangerous people she’s now become close to.”
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter about the season one finale, West explained how Sophie’s past with Eliza was a key part of moving the Surface story forward.
“There needed to be at least one more chapter to Sophie’s past, and that’s why at the end of the pilot you hear the name Tess for the first time and these memories of Millie Brady’s character continue to surface up, and the reason they do is because that was one of the most traumatic things that happened to Sophie,” West said. “In the real-life science of how this stuff works, those memories that are the most traumatic can kind of bubble up to the surface first, even if they’re older. … So having this idea of this subtext and Sophie’s past haunting her through these memories of this woman, we knew we had to embed that in the DNA of the show from the beginning to make it feel like an organic next chapter, if we were going to be lucky enough to make one, of where this show would go next.”
With Sophie seemingly faking her death at the end of season one, before her husband, Oliver Jackson-Cohen’s James, discovers she’s still alive, West said the end of the first season “doubles down on the premise of the show and shows how much [Sophie’s] grown as a character and what she might be capable of in the future.”
In addition to Mbatha-Raw, Jackson-Cohen, Brady and Dunster (Ted Lasso), Surface season two stars Freida Pinto, Gavin Drea, Rupert Graves, Tara Fitzgerald, Nina Sosanya and Joely Richardson.
The series, from Apple Studios and Reese Witherspoon and Lauren Neustadter’s Hello Sunshine, was created by Veronica West, who serves as showrunner. Witherspoon, Neustadter and Mbatha-Raw executive produce.
Season two of Surface premieres Friday, Feb. 21, with a new episode dropping every Friday through April 11.