FROM

Credit: MGM+

So far, the fourth season of MGM+ hit TV show, From, has given us an incredible first half. This may be the strongest this series has been since Season 1. We’re still a long ways off from understanding the full picture of what exactly is going on in Fromville, but the show is giving us enough clues to start piecing together working theories.

The primary characters – Jade, Tabitha, Boyd, Donna, etc. – are also doing a pretty outstanding job of actually talking to one another, telling each other what they know and working together to figure out what to do. That alone is a huge improvement over previous seasons. They’re also listening to characters like Ethan and Victor and taking what they have to say seriously. Spoilers ahead.

The Lake In The Woods

When Donna, Tabitha, Ellis, Ethan and two of the townsfolk (Patty and Roger) pull the corpses in from the lake, it turns out they’re not corpses at all, but rather life-sized dolls that look a lot like scarecrows. My initial thought was that they were actually scarecrows, used to fend off the menacing birds that visited the funeral earlier this season.

Donna thinks maybe they were put in the lake to keep something from coming out, used as a sort of ward against a submerged evil. So they load them with (obviously fake) rocks and dump them back in. Too bad Donna didn’t see the Season 4 trailer for this show, which clearly revealed some kind of scarecrow monster at the settlement. Too bad Tabitha’s memories don’t come to her sooner also. She remembers being a young girl playing dolls that looked similar, if far smaller, to the ones they tossed back into the lake. A man who was frightened of dolls took them from her and threw them into the lake and later, after he died, they became nightmare monsters.

At some point, we have to assume they were tied up and sunk by former residents of the lake settlement, imprisoned under the placid surface of the lake. Now they’re free, and that night they break into the cabin and one kills Roger in a genuinely horrific way while another tries to kill Donna and a third goes after Patty, pressing her face into the embers of their fire. Ellis saves her, knocking the creature into the fire and setting him aflame.

Tabitha grabs one of the weird, spooky totem things and drives it through the chest of the scarecrow monster attacking Donna, killing it – or at least incapacitating it – and the scarecrows retreat. I think it’s very unlikely that the totem actually killed the monster. If it were that easy, the previous settlers could have killed the monsters for good rather than banishing them to the lake. I suspect that once the totem is removed, the creature can come back to “life.”

In any case, they head home after this (other than Roger and half of Patty’s face) and can add another terror to the list.

The Children Under The Stairs

Elsewhere, Jade eats mushrooms and had Boyd accompany him as a trip-sitter. They head off into the woods to find answers. Jade’s first hallucination is of spiders, which I can’t think is a coincidence given the webs Boyd and Sara encountered a couple seasons back.

Then he hears violin and sees a 12-year-old version of himself. He also sees the man with the spike through his eye that he encountered before, and tells Boyd that he wants him to drink the blood from the skull he carries around. “It’s not real blood,” Boyd reminds him. “Don’t do it,” his 12-year-old self says. Jade drinks the blood and when it’s all gone, the inside of the skull is covered in spiders. He wretches, but it seems to work. He follows the boy all the way to Colony House where he sees Christopher, spike-eye and a black man in a Union uniform all playing violin on the porch.

It turns out that these (and many others) are each a past life Jade lived. He determines that these versions of himself were murdered by people, not the monsters, and we learn that in every past version of this story, the townsfolk have come to blame Jade and Tabitha, leading to their deaths – aka the Man in Yellow’s favorite part, when the townsfolk “tear each other to pieces.”

My guess is that some kind of factions form, with some townsfolk taking Jade/Tabitha’s side and some opposing.

In any case, this whole segment was great. Jade is very funny and even when this stuff is creepy or revelatory it’s always entertaining thanks to that underlying humor, which is also a nice balance to Boyd’s seriousness.

When Jade reaches the room with the slabs, the monsters come and put him in what appears to be a kind of grave in the center of the room. They push the central stone slab over him and as he looks up, he sees one of the dead children and it says “Angkhooey” and he screams. I thought this would be the end of the episode, but we get just a bit more: Jade wakes up in the chair in the sheriff’s station with Boyd and shouts “How did we get here?” Boyd reveals that they never left: The entire sequence was a dream/hallucination including Boyd and his “safe word”: Capricorn. I’m not sure if the zodiac sign is important in a bigger sense. It is the sign of the goat, and we did have some dead goats earlier this season.

Madness And Mayhem

While the lake monsters and Jade’s vision quest formed the bulk of this episode, we had three other important stories take place as well.

In the first, Mari and Kristi are at the clinic and Sophia shows up. Mari goes out to the ambulance and while she’s in there, something clinks around her wrist and then her other wrist: Manacles, just like the ones that held her when she was in the endless dream, trapped in the tower.

For reasons unclear, she doesn’t tell Kristi what happened and the two argue. Sophia hears them arguing and waits for Mari to storm out. She grabs her wrist as she passes and Mari is once again manacled, this time to the wall. When Kristi comes out, the manacles are gone and it looks like Mari is just having a fit.

The three sit down later and Mari explains what happened.

“All I could feel was the suffering of every single person who’s ever died here. When the radio came on all that pain and horror just shot through me again.”

“You’re a prophet," Sophia interjects, creepily. I’m still a little surprised nobody has caught on to how creepy she is. "Maybe God has chosen you to hear their suffering.”

This rightfully annoys Mari and she gets up to leave. When Kristi tells her this place messes with your mind, Mari tells her this is different. Then she says something quite important: “There is something old here. Something ancient. And it’s feeding off our suffering and it doesn’t stop. Even after we die we are still trapped here. And we never get to leave.”

I think she’s just diagnosed their situation quite succinctly. The ancient thing – the Man In Yellow – is feeding off their fear and suffering. Perhaps that’s this creature’s only purpose. He eats their physical bodies, too, but it’s their suffering that salts the meat.

Randall and Julie are also overheard by Sophia, who is always listening in on these characters without being noticed. Randall tells Julie she’s acting like a moron, that this whole time-traveling thing won’t help and she could end up having a seizure that doesn’t end. They argue while Sophia smiles her evil grin. Is she smiling because they’re arguing or because she’s happy that Randall is trying to get Julie to stop story-walking? Both?

Henry and Victor get this episode’s saddest segment. After Victor revealed to his father last week that the Man In Yellow ate Miranda, Henry started to lose his mind. It was bound to happen at some point, but it’s still kind of frustrating to see him collapse like this. Victor has been here alone for close to 40 years, and Henry has been so supportive and kind and compassionate up to this point. “It’s my turn to take care of you,” he’s said, in so many words, and they even became roommates. All very lovely stuff.

But now, Henry is off the rails. He gets drunk and starts getting in everyone’s faces at Colony House, asking for cards, trying to find something fun to do. That’s an understandable impulse, but his behavior is embarrassing and Victor keeps trying to get him to stop. Henry finds the keyboard and starts singing “Leaving On A Jet Plane" and asking Victor over and over if he remembers them playing this. Eventually, Kenny has to intervene and Henry gets downright hostile. He starts shouting at Victor to show them the picture of the Man In Yellow, show them “what he did to my wife” (which, frankly, could be misinterpreted by people as what Victor did to his wife). Victor just looks overwhelmed and sad.

I’m trying to have empathy for Henry at this point, but when you do something to hurt Victor you set off my own paternal instincts. It’s even worse because this is Victor’s dad, the person who is supposed to be setting aside these selfish feelings. He wasn’t stuck in hell for 40 years. Sure, it must have been pretty awful to lose your family like that, but he wasn’t actually stuck in a place with monsters. He didn’t have to see the Man In Yellow eat his wife the way Victor watched his mother die. I have a bad feeling about this.

Time Is A Flat Circle

All of this reinforces our understanding of Fromsville and its residents as part of an endless cycle that plays out in stages. The monsters are “the tip of the spear” as Martin told Boyd long ago. The other stuff, from the ballerina to the locusts to the music box and the dreams to the geisha and now the lake monsters, that’s the second phase. But soon, very soon, comes the “tearing each other apart” phase, and that’s when this cycle either ends, if Jade and Tabitha and Boyd and Ethan can figure out how to stop it, to save the children and defeat the Man In Yellow, or begins again after the townsfolk kill one another. How Julie story-walking plays into this remains a mystery, but we know she doesn’t stop because we see her show up when Jim is killed by the Man In Yellow.

I also think that maybe Jade is missing a clue from his visions: Everyone he meets, from his own 12-year-old self to his past selves, is playing the violin. Surely this means something beyond the Season 3 finale when that song brought the children out and restored some (though far from all) of his and Tabitha’s memories of past lives.

Did you pick up on anything else this episode? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.