SURREALESTATE – Season 3 Episode 6 (speculative recap) ⁓

On his way to a client’s cottage, Luke (Tim Rozon) becomes inexplicably lost. He stops at a small shack on a narrow wooded lane, and his is car keys disappear. Harry (Stuart Hughes) answers the door when Luke knocks and reluctantly lets him in. The shack is bigger on the inside and lined with bookshelves. Luke quickly realizes that Harry and his dog, Erasmus, died some time ago.

The story of how Harry met his dog is parable-like. “I was kinda lost,” Harry tells Luke, “and then, this fella came along, just a puppy running around the parking lot at Food King. Hopped in my car. Never gave me a choice. Never judged me, never told me what to do. Only loved me. Me, who had been led to believe was unlovable.” Harry displays considerable power when he pours wine for his guest, because, along with the wine, he pours a glass to contain it.

The dog’s name might be a reference to the Dutch theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam. (This post’s title is a quote from him.)

Harry gives Luke a message from ‘management’. “Not every soul needs to move forward,” he explains. “Not every immortal spirit needs a kick in the ass. Some of us just want to go back to that moment in life we were the happiest and just be…You’re a really lucky guy. You do what you do long enough, you start thinking you know what’s best. Luke, they want me to tell you, you don’t. Not always. So listen.” Luke agrees to do that, and gets his car keys back.

First, Susan gets a visit from her previous employer Bob Livingston (Jefferson Brown) who wants to merge his real estate operation with Roman/Ireland. He must know she’ll eventually reject this idea, so one wonders what he might actually be up to. Next, ghostly soldiers do battle in a home Susan is trying to sell. The owners are Dwight (Michael Chan) and Peter (Colin Andrew Nimblett) Campbell, neither of whom had served in the military.

From Susan’s descriptions, Tag (Alex Ozerov-Meyer) identifies one soldier’s helmet as an M1 steel bucket, used by the American army from 1941 through 1986. Tag also isolates two bird calls from sounds Augie recorded at the Campbell house. the Asian Green Bee-eater (Merops orientalis and the Black Drongo (Dicrurus macrocercu, both of which are native to Vietnam, and it turns out that Robbie Vincennes (Sam Ashe Arnold), a casualty of that war, is haunting the former home of his high school girlfriend Lynette (Anne Shepherd). The arrival of Robbie’s spirit coincides with the repatriation of the remains of several American soldiers. Once he is reunited with Lynette and they say proper goodbyes, Robbie is able to move on.

Augie (Maurice Dean Wint) gets a visit from Rochelle Decker (Joy Tanner), who brings him the lunch he forgot at home. (They are still living together.) Later, he gets a visit from Vonda Banks (Jessika Mathurin) who used to cohabit with Tyler MacNeil, but left him after he ‘changed’. Vonda tells Augie about Tyler’s obsession with Luke and also about the business deal Tyler proposed to Luke in “A Family Thing“.

A change seems to come over Susan, possibly because of her encounter with Bob Livingston. Even Tag notices something is different, and asks her if she’s ‘all right’. Susan calls Bob and says that no, she will not bring his offer to Luke’s attention. Speaking to Bob makes her so angry she sets her own drapes on fire. (Susan is pyrokenetic.) When firefighter Charles Newburg (Stephen Huszar) chats her up, she agrees to have dinner with him.

When Susan learns about Tyler and his proposed business deal, she reads Luke the riot act. “We are a residential brokerage,” she tells him. “We help families find homes. We do not help big corporations buy houses to rent to families at a confiscatory profit.”

Luke agrees and reassures Susan that he has made no such deal with Tyler. After she leaves, he takes Elvis the Elephant from the bottom drawer of his desk. “Yep,” he says, “somebody needs a hug.”

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Miscellaneous Info

Robbie’s last name is Vincennes. The city of Vincennes, France is home to the Service Historique de la Défense, which holds the archival records of the French Armed Forces. French occupation of Vietnam eventually led to the division of that country at the 17th parallel in the 1950s.

The wine Harry pours is Russian River Valley Pinot Noir, probably the ‘Flowers 2022’ Pinot Noir which Wine Enthusiast says “shows a brilliant ruby hue in the glass, with loads of dusty wild cherry on the nose.”

next episode – A SLICE OF THE AFTERLIFE

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All episodes of SURREALESTATE can be streamed on HULU in the US, and on CTV Sci-Fi Channel in Canada.