The Future on a Round of Brown Toast
SURREALESTATE – Season 3 Episode 7 – SPOILERS ⁓
The ghost of Charles Perkins Strite
Things begin with the haunting of Claire Vendel (Alex Paxton-Beesley) and her husband Tim {Russell Sams). Over a span of three years, they have moved in and out of twenty-two homes, financing the moves with cash transactions made through dummy corporations. After fleeing what looks like violent poltergeist activity at the twenty-third house, they contact the Roman/Ireland Agency for help getting rid of the ‘thing’ that follows them wherever they go. “We’ve tried everything,” Tim says, “witch doctors, exorcists, dream catchers, Lutherans.”
Claire and Tim
Lomax’s nose is a lie detector, and it twitches while the Vendel’s are explaining their problems, so she contacts Tag (Alex Ozerov-Meyer) and has him do a little research. He quickly notices that the dummy corporations they have set up are named Cagney, Gable, Rosebud, and Crawford, all of which are movie references, the most recent being a nod to Joan Crawford, who was portrayed in an unfavourable light by Faye Dunaway in Frank Perry’s 1981 psychological drama Mommie Dearest. Tag investigates further and finds that the first of the Vendel’s hauntings coincided with the death of Claire’s mother, Emma Shields (Kate Trotter). Also, during Claire’s childhood years, she visited the local Emergency Room with disturbing regularity.
Tyler MacNeil (R Austin Ball) calls Luke (Tim Rozon) about his proposed commercial real estate deal (see Death Does a Refi – Episode 3.3). Luke explains that Susan is not comfortable with that sort of thing, and neither is he. Tyler (aka Malech) hangs up and seems to react badly to the rejection.
Augie with his newly modified device with a dual processor that enables ‘the severing of the connection and the atomising of the spirit to happen simultaneously, along with short term storage of the residual consciousness’.
Susan (Sarah Levy) gets a call from Anika Patel (Seema Doad) and her husband Bhavan (Jai Mession) because a toaster that came with the house they recently bought is misbehaving. No matter how they try to rid themselves of it, the toaster somehow returns to their kitchen counter. Worse, the thing predicts the future by burning images related to future events into the toast it makes, and it seems to have a predilection for predicting ill fortune. For the Patels, it predicts nothing dire, only a broken window and a flat tire.
Anika, Bhavan, and the flat tire toast
The case of the clairvoyant toaster is also turned over to Tag, and he discovers that Charles Perkins Strite, inventor of the pop-up toaster, became convinced that he could predict the future by manipulating the melanoidins (chemicals that turn food brown) produced in the toasting process. Strite’s protégé, one Alan MacMasters, decided that Strike was going mad, and stole the experimental toaster to prevent that. MacMasters hid the thing in his house and it remained there when he died. The Patels’ current residence stands on that same spot.
Backed by Tim and Lomax, Claire confronts her mother
Strite did invent the pop-up toaster, but there is no evidence that he ever entertained occult theories about it. Alan MacMasters was a fictional toaster inventor created as a hoax on Wikipedia by a student at the University of Surrey.
Tag tells Susan: “This gig with Roman/Ireland, it’s the first time I’ve been a part of anything resembling a team and I like it. I like it more than I thought I would. But I wouldn’t say it’s like a family because I hate people who
say anything is like a family because the only thing like a family is a family and I say that as someone who’s never had a family myself, so, let’s just say Roman/Ireland feels like home and I like it here.” Susan is so moved by this speech she personally delivers the business cards she had printed for Tag.
The picture of Tyler MacNiel on Tag’s toast ominously changes to a tombstone. Tag’s new business card is shown below.
After Susan leaves Tag’s office, the image on the toast from Strite’s toaster changes from an image of someone Tag does not know to a tombstone that reads ‘Susan Ireland R.I.P.’ After trying to call her, Tag works up the courage to go outside, and follows her to the parking garage where he pushes her out of the way of a speeding car just in time. Susan is all right afterward, but the car hits Tag, and his fate at this point is unknown.
We see that the car is driven by Tyler MacNeil, and the demon possessing him likely has the power to render the closed circuit cameras in the garage inoperable.
Luke hands the toaster to the ghost of Charles Strite (Graham Gauthier), who walks away with it into the afterlife. That would seem to indicate that, contrary to popular belief, you can take it with you, if you know how.
next episode – PERCHANCE TO DREAM