FROM Season 4, Episode 1

Credit: MGM+

Ladies and gentlemen, we’re back. MGM’s hit horror series, FROM, returns today with its Season 4 premiere. The fourth season will air weekly on Sundays with nine more episodes to go. Sunday might be a little loose: The Season 4 premiere was available on Saturday evening. Spoilers ahead.

Much of tonight’s episode was devoted to our heroes taking stock of the crazy stuff that happened at the end of Season 3. Some of our heroes are being smarter and more communicative about this than others. More on that in a second.

We also have some bubbling tension after Boyd and Sara tortured Elgin last season in order to find Fatima, though the only character who seems really upset is the cop, Acosta, who has now been wearing the same exact police uniform for how many days? Weeks? She must stink. She certainly stinks as a character, and I’m hoping she gets monstered this season because she’s pretty much unbearable.

The big twist this episode is that the Man In Yellow is taking on a more active role in the fate of the Fromvillians. The episode picks up with him killing Jim and then turning to Julie and saying “We really have to stop meeting like this. When are you from this time?”

When are you FROM this time? Eh? He said the thing!

In any case, we’re not really sure what’s going on with Julie other than she must be “story-walking” aka time-traveling, trying to change the story despite both the Man In Yellow and Ethan telling her it’s not possible. There are some interesting and somewhat spooky parallels between Ethan and the Man In Yellow, though I don’t think they’re one and the same person (this is a show with time travel and multiple dimensions so yes, I think it would be possible for the MIY to be Ethan, but I don’t think he is. I still think the Man In Yellow is some kind of evil faerie or old demon or wicked god).

The Man In Yellow goes and digs up a suitcase but we don’t see what’s inside it yet. We see a car pull up to the fallen tree on the road and a man step out. A priest or pastor of some kind. He gets back in and drives away and later the same car crashes into the police station. The man is unconcious and a girl in the passenger seat is screaming. Boyd and the others go to the rescue, and soon extract the girl, who very nearly had some sharp metal go through her throat. Randall helps get the driver’s side door off by suggesting a winch instead of just crowbarring the thing open, and they eventually extract the father.

Only, we learn at the end of the episode that he is not her father. The Man In Yellow transformed himself into the girl, a gruesome metamorphosis that we see play out in the forest. She then hitch-hiked and the pastor picked her up. She caused the crash and everything else as a ruse. She reveals all of this when she wakes the pastor up and tells him it’s a shame he won’t be here for the next part. It’s her favorite part. Do you want to know why? she asks. This is when they tear themselves apart . . . .

Spooky. Great twist that I really should have seen coming but didn’t, probably because the girl, Sophia, seemed so genuinely scared for her father in the crash. I have to say, this is one of the strongest casting choices since the start of the show. Julia Doyle manages to play naive, innocent church girl and terrifying, sadistic demon-thing both perfectly. Bravo to our newcomer!

The Man In Yellow is playing a game. It’s one where he makes the rules and happily breaks them. We suspect that he was involved in the bargain with the older town residents and their children, bartering their lives for their parent’s eternal life, and we know that this was a trick. Those hideous people who sacrificed their children for eternal life deserve their horrific fate, but I doubt it’s what they thought they were getting at the time.

The game is still unclear, but the Man In Yellow is making this power play because Tabitha and Jade have gotten too close to important truths. “Your wife shouldn’t have dug up that hole,” the MIY tells Jim, but not right after she digs, but after they discover the Bottle Tree song and realize that the word the children are saying – Anghkooey – means “remember.” Tabitha and Jade realize that they were once Miranda and Christopher, and before that they were other people, always reincarnated to try to go here, to Fromville, to save their children.

Of course, when Jade suggests that they tell other people about this, Tabitha says no, they’ll think we’re crazy, we need to just sit with this for awhile. What if it’s what the evil entity wants us to believe? This is so frustrating to me, because it genuinely makes no sense. They worked so hard to figure out the Bottle Tree riddle. Tabitha even traveled back to the real world and saw Miranda’s paintings. She has those memories in her own head. If nothing else, she and Jade need to go tell Boyd.

Boyd, on the other hand, shares the intel from his trip into the tunnels. He learned that Fatima’s “baby” turned out to be Smiley and fortunately, Kenny also sees Smiley down there, confirming it wasn’t just Boyd losing his mind. Boyd tells others about this. He tells Fatima and Donna and Kristi and Ellis and even though it freaks Fatima out – and upsets her because she knew something was wrong with her pregnancy and nobody would listen – it was the right thing to do. Fatima had said she saw glimpses of the bargain they made with the kids, and if Tabitha and Jade were to go talk with them about it, they could start piecing these parts of the puzzle together.

Let’s hope they do before too long.

Beyond this, we have some odd happenings occuring in town. Some we’ve seen before like the jukebox playing in the diner. But some are new, like the cupboards flapping open and books tossed into the air by ghosts, apparently, in the Matthews house. Perhaps this is the town messing with them, or it’s some leftover current of Julie time-traveling, or it’s the ghost of Jim, throwing a tantrum.

The one kind of nice, wholesome moment was when Donna hears a racket down the hall and finds Victor moving a bed into his room. It turns out that his dad, Henry, is going to be moving into Victor’s room. “We’re going to be roommates!” Awww. I wonder what will happen when Tabitha finally accepts that she’s the reincarnation of Miranda. Will Victor accept this? Henry? Her own kids?

We have all season to learn what’s going on, and then just one more season after that before this show wraps up. I’m glad that they’ve set a date for this series to end rather than drag it out indefinitely. I’m also very happy this hasn’t been cancelled. All too often a good show like this either completely loses the thread after a strong first season (Yellowjackets), gets cancelled prematurely (Mindhunter) or came up with far too many storylines and mystery boxes to wrap things up in a satisfying way (Lost). I’m very hopeful that FROM will buck these trends. Season 4 is off to a strong start, at the very least. Let’s hope it holds momentum.

What did you think of the Season 4 premiere? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.