‘Surface’ Finale “Doubles Down”

[The following story contains spoilers from the first season of Apple TV+’s Surface, including the season one finale, “See You on the Other Side.”]

The first season of Apple TV+’s Surface ends on a cliffhanger, with Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s main character, Sophie, embracing her past 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.

While Apple has yet to renew the psychological thriller, showrunner Veronica West says as she was thinking of an ending for season one, she wanted to find a way for the show to move 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 tells The Hollywood Reporter. “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. They have this analogy that a sled cuts grooves in the snow the more times it goes over and over again, the deeper these grooves get, and if someone had thought about this traumatic moment or something seminal in their life many, many times before the injury happened, those grooves would be the deepest and those memories would kind of come back more quickly. 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.”…