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Just Another Toxic Love Story: My Final Thoughts on Apple TV’s ‘Surface’
So, this weekend, Apple TV+ posted the final episode of Season 1 of the series “Surface,” and I was surprised by the conclusion. When I first wrote about “Surface,” I interpreted it as a Black horror narrative, but now that I have finished this first leg of the series, I would describe it as a mixture of “Gone Girl” and “Get Out.” And maybe it’s just me, but I feel like television series are overusing this trope of having deranged characters for no discernable reason.
Especially as someone who loves a family trauma drama and any deep dives into the character development and background of an ensemble cast, it annoys me when we have a character that acts in a way that indicates a mysterious issue or a problem from their past. Yet, the audience doesn’t get to explore that problem because the character’s toxic behavior is a plot point or a means of developing or setting up a specific narrative.
In the case of “Surface,” the protagonist Sophie’s loss of memory is first presented as a problem because she cannot fully comprehend the motives…
