FROM Season 4 Episode 5 Delivers a Nightmare-Fueled Turning Point

Critic’s Rating: 4.8 / 5.0

4.8

The thing about FROM is that at any moment you can be lured into a bubble of exposition, only to be jump-scared out of your mind when the sun goes down.

This season has been heavy on characters, and as we’re now officially halfway through, the tides may be turning toward more action.

At some point in every season, the conversations start to run dry, the monsters start to take over, and the town braces for another iteration of hell.

FROM has been building and building all season toward something, and based on what The Man in the Yellow Suit said during FROM Season 4 Episode 1, we’re in the part of the story where everything truly goes downhill.

But we’ve not really seen that yet.

We’re of course continuing to see struggles, that’s the norm in that town, but even Jim’s death, which would have been a huge deal a season or two ago, has mostly been just a footnote this season.

Deaths have been coming fast and furious for a minute now, to the point where it feels like everyone has become completely numb to it in a way they weren’t before.

FROM Season 4 Episode 5 was heavily focused on Jade’s mushroom trip and what was happening out by the lake, and you could just sense that something was going to happen as the hour went by.

Was Jade going to actually have a breakthrough while on his trip around town with his younger self? Or was some big clue going to reveal itself when Donna and crew pulled whatever had floated to the top of the lake out?

Jade’s mushroom trip was one of the more fascinating things this series has done because they had the unique job of not making it feel too cartoonish while staying true to the fact that what we were seeing was indeed a drug-induced hallucination.

It was also a neat way to pair up Jade and Boyd, who are at interesting points in their journeys within the town.

Boyd is at his wits’ end and barely hanging on, while Jade recognizes that he could be on the verge of a major breakthrough, hence his eating the mushrooms in the first place.

Music has always been an essential piece of Jade, so it was poetic for his younger self, armed with a violin, to be the very first thing that Jade encountered out in the forest.

As Maya Angelou said, “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.” And that’s what the whole journey for Jade felt like.

Armed with this belief that nothing he did was really happening, Jade just kept marching forward, and when he saw the men on the porch, all dead and playing the violin, he realized that these men he’d been seeing throughout his time there were past versions of himself.

Even knowing that nothing in that town is random, it still shocked me as much as it seemingly shocked Jade to realize he was staring into the faces of himself.

If you ever wonder about the “plan” for FROM, look to stories like this or Julie’s storywalking, and you’ll understand that there has always been a plan from the start.

Every single scene, each piece of dialogue, has been carefully crafted to get us to an eventual endpoint. Whether you love it or hate it, every single thing on this show serves a purpose.

When Jade looked at these versions of himself, I had almost the same reaction he did. We weren’t seeing Jim or Tian-Chen levels of carnage, but instead men who looked like they were killed in ordinary ways.

So, what does that tell you?

It could tell you that the town turned on him, or maybe there’s something even more sinister that takes place as Jade and past versions get closer and closer to figuring out how to leave that place.

Is this when The Man in the Yellow Suit has to intervene to ensure that the various versions of Jade and Tabitha don’t figure it out? Or maybe it’s something even more terrible than I can fathom.

Something happens to past Jade, and it begs the question: what will be different this time?

By the time Jade made it down into the tunnels and eventually into the place where the children were sacrificed, I was fully freaked out and beginning to wonder how real any of this was.

The monsters have been used sparingly thus far, almost like they’re being held back so that when we see them again, we’re almost reintroduced to their terror.

When they pushed him into that tomb, I genuinely thought it might be real because, even though there were various tells throughout the trip that we were inside Jade’s mind, this show does misdirection so well that I started to doubt myself.

Jade waking up at night and frantically telling Boyd that he knows how to save the children and get home would have been a killer end-of-the-season cliffhanger.

But getting it when we’re only halfway through FROM Season 4 pretty much guarantees whatever Jade thinks he knows will not be cut-and-dried.

Not that anyone who has ever watched the show would think that way, but nothing is ever this easy. And if anything, knowing that it might be his destiny that the townspeople may eventually turn against him, this “reveal” may be following the exact plan that eventually gets him caught up.

Am I making any sense? Does it even matter when it’s this entertaining?

While Jade was on his mission, the group gathering food in the woods had to deal with the thing that floated to the top of the lake. And the way it was built up to only be life-size dolls should have felt anticlimactic, but instead it filled me with dread.

Anything life-sized is creepy, and the fact that these dolls were submerged at the bottom of the lake wasn’t by accident.

Comparing them to scarecrows made sense for obvious reasons, but whereas a scarecrow is a human decoy to scare away birds, these dolls felt like they might have been made as offerings to the lake or something evil, rather than as protectors of it.

Bringing them to the shore was the right thing to do because how could you see that floating out there and just pretend it didn’t exist when you try to go to sleep out there?

But I loved how, once they saw them, there was basically like, ‘hell no,’ and they tried to weigh them back down with rocks and send them right back to the bottom of the lake, as if they didn’t disrupt the very spooky ecosystem they live in.

Every other week, I contemplate who will inevitably be the person who figures everything out, or whose gift or knowledge is the one thing that solves it all. But I also recognize that it’s more likely to be a series of different people coming together (which is why it bothers me every day that people with real information don’t talk in this town!)

But Tabitha’s connection to the place, just like Jade’s, is the clearest roadmap to understanding the town.

Anghkooey, Tabitha!

That scene in the cabin was like a Halloween horror film come to life, and I’m still not entirely sure what happened there. Did pulling the dolls up just essentially bring those nightmares back to life?

The doll busting through the cabin was one of the top five scariest things this show has ever done, and even the lead-up to the reveal with Tabitha explaining her past memories was deeply unsettling.

I just kept thinking that if Patty or the other man in that cabin made it out of the woods alive, this would be the catalyst for the town turning on her because everything she said was not only terrifying, but it also made her sound like she was deeply connected to the town in a way that could eventually be bad.

Yes, she used it for good here, but what if that’s not always the case?

Aside from Tabitha killing the one doll, Ellis may be the MVP of this whole thing because he stepped in to save Patty when she looked like she was for sure dead.

Tabitha, remembering how to hurt the doll, should have been this triumphant moment, and in some ways it was, but it was so hard not to think about the ramifications.

Tabitha can no longer deny her connection to the town, but with Patty not part of the trusted inner circle, there’s no way that information doesn’t spiral out of control, and we’ll start moving toward the town implosion promised to us from the start.

Speaking of Sophia’s proclamation, she continued her terrorizing mission, setting her sights on Marielle this time. And if the whole objective is to mess with people’s minds, then she’s succeeding quite effectively.

What’s most intriguing, though, is the act of targeting someone, like Sarah and now Marielle, but then seeing how those around them react to it.

When Sarah confided in Elgin during FROM Season 4 Episode 4, he was understanding, considering what he had just gone through.

But with Kristi, she’s more looking at Marielle but seeing through her. It’s not so much that she doesn’t believe what Marielle says, but rather that she sees it for what it is: the town’s manipulation.

It makes them opposing forces, which could also be said of Julie and Randall right now.

Randall can be frustrated all he wants, but the way he was talking to Julie was a bit much. He’s frightened for her, but instead of verbally berating her, there are better ways to express that fear.

Especially because by now he should recognize that with or without him, Julie’s moving forward with her quest to see this storywalking thing through until it gets her the result she’s looking for.

She’ll die before she sits still and doesn’t explore every single aspect of this ability.

Is that stupid? Is that heroic? Is it somewhere in between?

That’s a common question you could assign to so many things in that town on a daily basis.

As if this hour wasn’t filled to the brim, there was also the added emotional burden of seeing Henry fall apart under the weight of Victor’s admission about what happened to Miranda.

Henry’s up there in the who-has-it-worst-in-there Olympics, and you may be a little soulless if you weren’t at all devastated watching Henry sing and implore Victor to remember the probably fleeting memories he harbors about a life that’s known more pain than most.

Victor was trying so hard to get his father to stop, but he also refused to leave his side, though it wasn’t in the same way someone can’t look away from a car crash, unable to take his eyes off the scene.

He was just seeing his dad enveloped in the kind of pain that had blanketed him almost his whole life.

Victor knows that pain intimately, and while he never had someone there to help shoulder any of it, he wanted to be there for his father.

When Henry is laid down to rest so he can sleep off the alcohol, and Victor shows Kenny the drawing, his eyes never leave his dad, turning this already heartbreaking story into something even heavier.

Henry and Victor are two men grieving things from almost opposite ends, and they both want to protect the other from a hurt they barely know how to survive themselves.

Loose Ends

• The image of that doll, with its hands on fire, just walking away, was quite the visual.

• I love it when someone says something that sounds really profound and like it means something bigger, but then it turns out to be so literal. “Clear the path to see the way.” And it means Jade and Boyd need to clear some random items so they can get to a door.

• Poor Ethan is once again scarred for life. Now he can add killer dolls to his nightmare list.

• There are two people I am worried about this season: Kenny and Donna. And this is now two episodes in a row foreshadowing Donna’s potential demise, and I HATE it.

• Are Donna and the crew just going to run back to town and pray for the best? Is there anywhere else to stay out there?

People have been less than impressed with the latest hours, and to each their own, but this is FROM at its best.

It’s haunting, atmospheric, and engrossing in all the best ways. The cast is doing such good work here, and the story they’re trying to tell this season has really taken shape.

Let me know what you thought about this one below so we can talk about it!

You can watch FROM on Sundays at 9/8c on MGM+.