Luke and the Elephant, Lomax and the Brick
SURREALESTATE – Season 3 Episode 4 – (limited spoilers) ⁓
Zooey L’enfant
Malech (R Austin Ball), in the guise of Tyler MacNeil, tries to possess Luke (Tim Rozon) twice. First, he tires Luke out by making him jog for two hours, and when that doesn’t work, he meets the realtor at ‘The Tell-Tale Heart‘ and gets him drunk. Neither approach works, but the last one gets Lloyd (James Allodi) to speak for the first time. “I’ve ordered Mr. Roman an Uber,” he says.
Luke and Zooey
Malech/Tyler suggests that Luke join him in a business venture to buy residential properties and rent them out at whatever the market will bear, and Luke says he has heard of corporations doing that. He might have read “Wall Street has Spent Billions Buying Homes” in the Wall Street Journal last year.
Malech is gelotophobic (has a fear of being ridiculed), and Vonda Banks (Jessika Mathurin), Tyler’s significant other, is leaving him because of it. One wonders where Tyler’s spirit is, while Malech is possessing his body.
Zooey (Savannah Basley) drops by the Roman/Ireland offices and brings coffee from a ‘cute cafe’ with which she negotiated a discount that only applies on Tuesdays from 8:08 to 10:22am. The name of the firm where she works has not been mentioned. We do learn that she began work there before finishing the bar after completing her law degree in only three years.
The Enos – Arlo, Sheri, and Barry
Zooey attends the funeral of Lisbeth Eno (Helene Lohan Cameron), and presides over the reading of her will. Beneficiaries Sheri (Katisha Shaw), Barry (Matthew Gorman), and Arno Eno (Jarred Bronstein) squabble constantly, and their mother’s will requires that they jointly agree, within a specified period of time, on how to dispose of the family home.
When alone, each of the young Enos talks to something that seems to be their own alter ego, and each of these conversations works to generate hostility toward the other two siblings. Rachel (Debra Hale) who has lived down the road from the Enos for a long time, shows up and makes Barry, Sheri and Arlo realize that their memories have been distorted. They begin to suspect that a haunting might be responsible, and it happens that Zooey knows a guy who deals with that sort of thing. After Luke arrives, he tells Augie: “When it comes to somebody losing their mother, there’s only one solution.” The exact meaning of that remains mysterious, but things are resolved soon after.
The cause of the Enos’ troubles was the subject of “Ghost Child” (Episode 1.5).
Katisha Shaw as Shari Eno
Susan (Sarah Levy) and Lomax (Elena Juatco) continue to work on their ‘flipping house’. Lomax has purchased bricks from “some ruin outside of town” for interior use on an accent wall, and Susan notes that at least one of the bricks has a caduceus inscribed on one side. When consulted about this, Tag (Alex Ozerov-Meyer) informs that it is a medical symbol but is also the staff of Mercury, patron of thieves and outlaws, and that it might indicate that the bricks’ were originally used to construct some sort of institution.
In Greek and Roman myth, Mercury (aka Hermes) was also the messenger of the gods, and guided souls to the underworld. The caduceus is often mistakenly substituted for the Rod of Asclepius. the predominant symbol for medicine and health care.
Susan and Clytemnestra in Augie’s laboratory
Incorporating some of his former employer ASDRA’s tech, Augie (Maurice Dean Wint) has created the ‘Gopher’ a device that can detect ‘Temporarily Resident Edifices’ (buildings that once stood but have been torn down). He also added a monocle to those spirit-viewing goggles of his that sorts apparitions by type, and has given the ‘PKT device’ the ability to ‘carbon-date energy fields’ so it can measure ‘how long an entity has been extant’.
Luke with Elvis the Elephant
Augie is clearly suspicious of Tyler MacNeil, though he doesn’t know precisely why, and suggests that “Luke is being distracted by a walking, shiny object.” As a precaution, Augie is installing an Agency breach alarm.
In a package with no return address, Luke finds Elvis the Elephant (see previous episode) inside. He is briefly mesmerized by the plushie, but recovers when Susan asks what it is. Luke does not remember his childhood attachment to the thing, or that he and his father put it in a tackle box and dropped it into a local lake thirty-five years ago.
Miscellaneous Info
Debra Hale as the Enos’ neighbour Rachel. — Hale is Marissa Davis in Roxanne Boisvert‘s soon-to-be-released thriller RELATIVE DANGER.
Eva MacCharles makes her TV debut in this episode as Summer Eno.
SurrealEstate’s Set Decorator for Season Three is Madison Ziebarth. Among her other credits are the Netflix series GEEK GIRL, and Hallmark’s PAGING MR. DARCY.
Jessika Mathurin (Vonda Banks) is also Keri in Michael Angelo Covino‘s relationship comedy SPLITSVILLE, scheduled to premiere at Festival de Cannes 2025.