Dog Day Afternoon, With Cat
SURREALESTATE – Season 2 Episode 8 – SPOILERS
Luke Roman
Strange things are afoot. Phil (Adam Korson) wakes up to what the closed captioning calls “eerie vocalizing”. He is downstairs, and his husband Anthony (Paul Ewan Wilson) is nowhere to be seen. Phil pauses at the hallway mirror, steels himself, and slowly climbs the stairs. The source of the eeriness is quickly found to be their recently adopted baby, Felicity, who giggles when she is picked up. “I know you’re new here,” Phil tells her, “but generally we try to sleep this time of day.”
Elsewhere, Luke (Tim Rozon) decides to follow up on the information Phil gave him about his mother. While driving to the nearby town of Westindale to see her, Luke gets a call from Zooey (Savannah Basley), who needs career advice.
LUKE: “Zooey, you are really good at a lot of things.”
ZOOEY: “Yeah, and yet so few can be monetized.”
LUKE: “No, seriously, everybody talks about doing something they love. My advice? Do something you’re really good at. Love is for the weekends.”
ZOOEY: “God. Love is for the weekends! The sampler nearly needlepoints itself.”
Clive and Riva
Luke’s mother (Jennifer Dale) has her house up for sale, and the sign in front reads Victoria Woodhouse Real Estate. This suggests that she is a realtor, and that Woodhouse is her maiden name. If she was a realtor thirty-five years ago, it could explain Luke’s career choice, and also Victoria’s connection with the Donovan House (see episode 1.10). Their first conversation does not go well, but she meets Luke later at his hotel and they have a much more involved and relaxed talk. She asks him about the voices. When he says they have mostly gone away, she touches his hand, the table shakes, and the voices temporarily return. (The implications of this are unclear.) Victoria promises to phone Luke on Sunday mornings.
The Malachi family are distracted from their lunch by the sound of Lomax’s phone.
The address on Luke’s business card is 168 Bayview Ave, 10th floor. This contradicts the address on the envelope that Susan’s house sent to The Roman Agency, which was 139 Bayview Ave, 10th floor.
Back at the office, Lomax (Elena Juatco) is closing a sale with Clive and Riva Malachi (Justin Nurse and Paula Morgan). Lomax describes the Malachis and their two children, Hayden (Gage Graham-Arbuthnot) and Katherine (Riley Coombes Lush) as “aggressively nice…chewing on tin foil nice” and she’s not wrong.
After a post-closing visit to have a roofing rider signed, Lomax suspects the lot of them to be werewolves. Her suspicions intensify after Phil discovers that the property was once a pet cemetery and suggests a statue of St. Francis of Assisi (patron saint of animals) might calm the restless spirits of deceased pets. This works. When the moonlight strikes the statue, the Malachis lose their canine behaviours, indicating that, although they were possessed, they were not lycanthropes.
Kat licks her paw.
The moon is full, but that might be merely coincidental. The Malachi’s became dog-like in broad daylight, and only in the vicinity of the property they just purchased. Clive, Riva, and Hayden were taken over by dogs, but Katherine displays feline behaviour. The family says grace before lunch, but do not refer to any specific deity, and one wishes Lomax would ask Phil about the theological implications of that.
Before Phil and Lomax have their werewolf talk one of Felicity’s toys, a red ball, rolls out of Phil’s bag and into Lomax’s purse. When she has lunch with the Malachis, that ball is the distraction that gives her time to escape with nothing more than a nasty bite on the right calf from Riva. The serendipity of the red chew toy might somehow be important.
Zooey breaks in.
Zooey is still looking for direction career-wise and wants advice from Susan, but when she knocks at Susan’s door and gets no response, she decides to break in. (Her true vocation might be cat burglar.) The house (voiced by Patrick Kwok-Choon) then makes the episode’s second Star Trek reference, saying “Intruder Alert“ repeatedly. (Lomax earlier referred to Augie as the firm’s Science Officer.)
Inside Susan’s house, things become surreal. The house suggests she use a meat cleaver (handily displayed in the kitchen) to end her “miserable life”. Then, in the hallway mirror (the second hallway mirror in the episode) Zooey sees Susan’s reflection holding an identical cleaver, but there is no one else in the room. “Help me,” Susan’s reflection pleads. Zooey goes upstairs; the walls close in; and she dives through a doorway into a bright light. She wakes on the front lawn, bleeding, and is just alert enough to avoid a flying meat cleaver.
Anthony is neither seen nor referred to in the entire episode.
Season 1 is available on DVD (zone 2) from Amazon UK.