[The following story contains surface spoilers for episode 6) of Season 1, “The Myth of California.” ]
Starting with a psychological thriller for Apple TV+Surface , Oliver Jackson-Cohen’s James sees his wife’s near-death experience as a chance for the two of them to get second in their relationship next chance and look beyond their past mistakes.
But at the end of Sophie’s (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) Fulfilling episode 5, she’s the one James disguised with the lost money he was trying to recover, she could be the bad guy, the new beginning for Sophie and James is over.
“It opened the floodgates for James to realize that the idealized version had nothing more to hide,” show producer Veronica Weiss Te told The Hollywood Reporter . “There’s no second chance — that’s a fairy tale.”
With this discovery, Episode 6 shatters what audiences thought they had about the drama’s central characters and motivations Understand. Today’s timeline takes place in the living room of their luxury townhouse as James tells Sophie how they met and fell in love early in their relationship, until he started jealous of her and as she started her affair , things went from bad to worse with Stephen James’ Baden. He also reveals how a mysterious investment led her to take the money and what happened between them before she got on the boat.
As for deciding which parts of James and Sophie’s story to show, West, who co-wrote the episode with Raven Jackson, said they focused on ” The most important moments for James feel like really pivotal things in the relationship, but also the things that Sophie might have in the relationship the most misunderstood, like why she was with Bardem in the first place.”
West said James’ interpretation reframes some of the key choices and discoveries Sophie made “not just James’s story, but the more complete story, once he Allow yourself to be honest about her actions and feelings, and about her past actions and feelings, at least what she is willing to share with him.”
But revealed in episode 6 The new information doesn’t necessarily contradict what Sophie and the audience have said, learned in previous episodes.
“When this show started, nobody was what you thought it was,” West said. “Every character and person you suspect, we want to make sure that everyone feels very real and has real character motivation, and once we reveal the truth and the different truth about everyone, everything that happened before that still makes sense. You Can’t just try to make someone look like a villain because it’s good for the story. To tell an episode from that particular character’s perspective, it has to do a 180, put everything that happened before in the mirror and explain to you why that person behaved the way they did, even for reasons we didn’t expect.”
James tells Sophie about their relationship, West says, inspired by Netflix documentary Tell me who I am with Surface Larger concept inspired by
1961 French Cinema Last year in Marimbad .
For James, in the first few episodes of the series, he seems to be controlling behavior, but he tries to help Sophie.
“This protection of her,” West said, “comes from a deep, though possibly misguided, love.”
She added, “Finally arriving at the same story from his point of view allows us to really feel how he feels about Sophie and understand that even if he does something very The thing in question, their real motives, they all really stem from this idealized version of her who fell in love a long time ago. That’s why it’s key to start the episode with the purest versions of both of them and see him bring Coming here with a pure heart and things starting to go wrong may actually be Sophie’s fault.”
When asked what initially attracted James to go after Sophie , Jackson-Cohen told THR , “There is a force he admires, kind of like the way she sees the world so intensely that James is probably more afraid of the world than she is. I Think it’s her ferocity and her view of the world that makes everything possible. She’s his confidence and rock.”
Jackson-Cohen explained that in his Shortly after working on the project, he learned about James’ storyline.
“I think the first thing they sent me was a bible explaining the story of the whole series. That’s pretty compelling in itself. See how the script would be It was great to show up,” he said. “But I knew from the beginning where everything went, where James went, what the twists were. I don’t think you can get into blind spots like this, the show would be all over the place. We had to root it.”
By the end of the first season of Episode 8, West teased that viewers will fully understand “the truth about everyone but Sophie.”
“She’s the one who still has mysteries and I’ve purposely embedded something, even in the DNA of the pilots themselves, so that this show can answer all the mysteries first Season, still have the legs to move on,” West said, adding to one of Sophie’s lingering questions. “Sophie’s Brit: She came to America; she lied to everyone about her past. What is she running away from? There must be those nuggets to give the story a chance to move on beyond this season.”
