SURREALESTATE – Season 2 Episode 7 – SPOILERS

Zooey (Savannah Basley) is concerned about Susan (Sarah Levy), who, after quitting, has dropped completely out of sight. “I went by her new place and it is like nobody even lives there,” she worries. “I mean, the drapes are closed in the middle of the day. I call her and her voicemail’s full…I text, I get nothing, or something that I can’t even imagine Susan would say.”

Luke (Tim Rozon) points out that it was Susan’s decision to quit, and they should respect that. This is another example of Luke’s detachment this season. He’s upset about Susan’s departure, but he does not seem concerned about Susan.

Luke addresses the problem of Susan’s replacement. “I need an experienced pro,” he explains. “I need a rainmaker and a closer both in the same body. And it would be nice if they wouldn’t run screaming into the night at the sight of our target demographic.”

He has someone in mind for the job, an old business acquaintance named Clytemnestra Lomax (Elena Juatco). Luke finds her working at Briar Meadow Funeral Home, and she is surprisingly easy to hire. “I currently sew dead people’s lips shut and scoop out their guts like a Halloween pumpkin,” she says, “so whatever kind of weird you got is a lateral move at best.” Lomax prefers to be called by her last name and can tell when people are lying because it makes her nose itch. Her first assignment is to persuade one Elsa Amaranth (Brenda Bazinet) to accept a developer’s offer and vacate her current place of residence.

Elsa is reluctant to admit visitors, so Lomax talks to her (through the door at first) and that scene is very similar to the earlier one with Zooey trying (without success) to talk to Susan through a locked front door. Once Lomax does get inside, Elsa explains that she is more than five hundred years old, and has spent perhaps the last hundred of them in this particular apartment. The last time she was outside, the war had just ended. “People were celebrating in the streets,” she tells Lomax. “A man grabbed me and kissed me and I was so frightened that I went inside and I haven’t been out since.” Agoraphobia seems a more likely reason than longevity for her refusal to leave. She seems to like Lomax, and later has a look at the brochures Lomax left behind.

Back at the office, Phil (Adam Korson) hands Luke an envelope containing his mother’s current name and where she can be found. Luke sets the envelope aside, and changes the subject.

We first see Luke’s client Morris Truby (James Collins) in a flashback to 1972. He is seven years old, and is being tucked into bed by his mother Eleanor (Kimberley Drake), and Morris seems afraid of something. She reassures him several times, and when she leaves the room, he asks her to leave the door ajar. Once he is alone, a voice comes from under the bed: “Morris, I am so hungry,” it squeaks. “Eventually you’ll fall asleep. Yes, you’ll fall asleep. And your little hand will fall out of the bed just a little – a little – and that’s when I’m gonna grab it and then I’m going to eat your fingers like weenies.”

Fifty-eight-year-old Morris is trying to sell the house his mother left him a year ago and, after some prodding, he explains that he and his mother barely got away from his dad alive, and had to start over, and about the voice from under the bed.

Lomax was named after Agamemnon’s wife, leading one to the notion that Eleanor Truby’s first name could be a reference to Eleanor of Aquitane, who was imprisoned for helping her son try to overthrow her husband the King. (Clytemnestra‘s story involves similar royal intrigue.)

Augie (Maurice Dean Wint) notices that Morris has prison tattoos and is carrying a gun, and it reminds him of his late brother. “He was smart in all the ways I was not,” Augie tells Luke. “He was stopped at the wrong intersection by the wrong police officer with the wrong companion. It was only two years. 24 months. But he came out of jail with the hard look of someone I didn’t know. And lots of ink, just like Mister Truby. He died a quiet death 12 weeks later.”

At the end of things, Augie is studying Truby’s prison tattoos; Luke is opening that envelope with his mother’s information; and there is still no sign of Susan. Phil and Anthony (Paul Ewan Wilson) get the baby.

next episode Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

---

SURREALESTATE can be be streamed on HULU in the US, and on Apple TV in Canada.
Season 1 is available on DVD (zone 2) from Amazon UK.