Dreams Never Die, Just the Dreamer
SURREALESTATE – Season 3 Episode 8 – (speculative recap) ⁓
Luke meets Dorothy
Susan (Sarah Levy) has a dream in which she literally drives Tag (Alex Ozerov-Meyer) to his grave. Before Tag leaves the car he warns Susan to be careful because the woman in the back seat is very angry, and hands her a keychain with the Liberian flag on it. After he leaves, the angry woman appears in the front seat and begins to strangle Susan, who wakes with bruises on her neck.
Augie takes a call.
It is the day after Tag’s death, and Augie (Maurice Dean Wint) quotes from Macbeth (Act V Scene 5), saying: “Out, out, brief candle.”, and Clytemnestra Lomax (Elena Juatco), relates Tag’s last wishes. There are to be no funeral services, and Tag specified that his cremated remains should be transported to the South American Antiplano along with a few hundred thousand pesos to compensate an indigenous Chilean huaso for spreading his ashes so that they might mingle among the ‘scat of the proud alpaca in the land of their birth’.
Luke and Lomax
Dorothy Kamara (Patrice Goodman) died in her sleep and her house was repossessed by the bank. When Susan arrives to sort the place, the key left in the mailbox has a Liberian flag on it, just like the keychain in her dream. Lomax takes over so Susan can focus on finalizing the sale of their fixer-upper. The manner of Dorothy’s death disturbs Lomax. “This is my worst nightmare,” she tells Susan. “One day you’re fine. You’re living life, making plans, then suddenly – bammo – you’re dead. You’re out of the game. All the stuff you were gonna do, forget it. All the secrets you were gonna hide, too late. Any business you were gonna finish, sorry Charlie.” This might be a freudian slip and, if so, exactly what secrets might Lomax be carrying?
Susan with peonies
The house Clytemnestra and Susan have been working on has been sold to a mother and daughter named Devjani and Prijanka, whom we have not met.
Crash Newberg (Stephen Huszar) stops by the place to offer Susan sympathy and flowers. Shortly after he leaves, disembodied screams fill the house. Susan opens the folder Tag prepared on the brick she gave him to analyze, and discovers the bricks (see “A Family Thing” (episode 3.4) were once part of an institution for the criminally insane. Susan says that her first thought when she heard the screams was that it was her late mother, telling her not to sell the place. It wasn’t.
Susan and Clytemnestra
When consulted, Augie suggests that severe emotional trauma and despair could leech into the walls and floor of such a place, especially into a porous material like brick. Viktor (Nigel Hamer), the guy who sold them the bricks, at first refuses to refund their money, but later offers a full refund and re-installation at no charge. It turns out that someone had a word with him, suggesting a past illegality might be exposed if he didn’t do the right thing, and whoever it was left Tag’s business card behind.
Then Clytemnestra dreams of watching her own dead body sliced open and a bloody handful of gold coins being pulled from her abdomen. The surgeon in the dream is Dorothy, and it turns out that Dorothy was also the angry woman in Susan’s dream. (It is not mentioned, but the coins fished out of Lomax’s abdomen in her dream are similar to the Peruvian gold-cob, which would fit nicely with Tag’s instructions for disposal of his ashes, because part of the Antiplano is in Peru. This could indicate that Tag is still doing his job, providing his former co-workers with useful information through dreams, though the only dream in which he actually appeared was Susan’s.)
Patrice Goodman as Dorothy — Goodman also stars as Susan Davrow in Roxanne Boisvert‘s thriller MY MOTHER STOLE MY LIFE.
Augie joins Lomax at the Kamara property and his equipment gets “dual readings”, which might indicate two spirits in the area. When he naps later at the office he has a dream in which he gets a phone call from a woman on an old rotary phone. “Can you dig it?” the voice on the phone asks. Augie says he can, and finds himself in Dorothy’s front yard with shovel in hand. Ms. Kamara herself approaches with a pickaxe and begins to dig at a spot marked with a fluorescent ‘x’, and Augie digs with her.
When Luke and Augie actually dig up that yard, they find a crate full of gold.
Dorothy Kamara was a senior software engineer making a six-figure salary. She lived frugally, but when she died had nothing in the bank. Luke notices a photo of Dorothy from 2023 with a child named Lydia (Destiny Heidi-Ke Stewart).
Destiny Heidi-Ke Stewart in her TV debut as Lydia
That night, Luke meets Lydia in his dreams. She is from Kakata, some 70 kilometers east of Monrovia, Liberia. “Dotty found me,” Lydia tells Luke. “These people, Americans, they took my picture. They sent it to thousands of people. It turns out they were raising money. But it reached Dotty. She searched and she found me. Our hearts connected. I told her my greatest wish was to go to school – to be educated. She said she would help me and other girls like me. She promised and I believe her.”
Luke returns to the Kamara house, conjures Dorothy’s ghost, and assures her that her gold will be used to help educate children in Liberia. That night, Luke dreams a conversation with Elvis the Elephant, and when he wakes, realizes that Elvis and Tyler are one and the same.