In the Season 3 finale of FROM we got some very big answers to at least some of our burning questions about Fromville and its residents and why they’re here, though I’m not sure we’re any closer to actually solving this mystery. Maybe a little bit.
Still, with every new answer there comes a new parade of questions. That’s a good thing! We have at least two more seasons to get through. We don’t want to know everything just yet. Several pretty wild things happened into tonight’s finale. Let’s go over each. Spoilers ahead.
Tabitha and Jade are Miranda and Christopher are . . . .
It’s Jim who finally figures out what the numbers in the bottles mean: Musical notes. For some obscure and puzzling reason, whoever put the messages in the bottles couldn’t just put musical notes, but had to write numbers. I don’t know that I really need an explanation for this, but it did cross my mind. In any case, it’s very clever of Jim and kind of a feather in his cap since Jade is always the smartest guy in the room.
They figure out the melody to the song and head to the Faraway Tree with Jade’s violin. He starts to play and after awhile, the Anghookey kids show up, drawn by the melody to where they’re standing. Only now, both Tabitha and Jade can understand what it means: Remember. I guess this is some kind of spell that they’ve just cast or broken (more points to my fae theory) because they do remember. They remember who they are.
This was something that I felt was conveyed pretty strongly last week when Tabitha was suddenly having Miranda’s memories. Other clues—the bracelet, for instance, her appearing in Camden, her having all the same motives as Miranda—have pointed to something like this for a long time now. Jade being Christopher was a bit more surprising, but as soon as I realized Tabitha had to be Miranda last week, I thought of how Jade is the only other person who has had such similar experiences. Why does he, and he alone, have visions of Jasper? Why does he see the same symbol as Christopher? All signs pointed to Jade being a reincarnation of Christopher.
They have come back to this town across many different lives, apparently, each time trying to save the children. I was also pretty sure that the children had been ritually sacrificed in some dark bargain with the devils / fae / sidhe but I wasn’t sure what that bargain was. Here we get an answer: Parents sacrificed their children so that they could live forever. And live forever they do, as the creatures that stalk the night, tormenting the townsfolk before ripping them to shreds.
But what if they are killed? Well, that’s answered also. The evil beings that struck this bargain keep a useful herd of humans around. They can impregnate the women and grow a new creature inside. This is what happened to Fatima. The baby was, indeed, a monster. Fatima’s rescuers are too late. The Kimono Woman comes up out of the hatch Fatima was trying to open and delivers the “baby”—it looks more like a fleshy egg—and takes it back down. Boyd, always too brave for his own good, goes down after.
He watches as the egg opens, unfolds, and out of its grotesque membrane the creature, Smiley, is reborn amidst his hideous companions. A lot of people theorized this would be the outcome, so this isn’t a huge surprise (and there were leaks, which I avoided, but a lot of people were spoiled). Still, it’s a pretty horrific moment, especially paired with the revelation about child sacrifice. This is the immortality the evil faeries / demons gave to these horrible people. I suppose if you’re willing to kill children for eternal life, you may as well be damned to this gruesome fate—though, to be fair, none of them seem unhappy. They rather seem to like being monsters.
The Torture And Maiming Of Elgin The Fool
Fatima’s rescuers didn’t find her by mistake. Ellis told his father, Boyd, that he suspected Elgin after the two of them searched for Fatima in last week’s episode. He was saying very suspicious comments about Fatima and her baby, and how maybe Fatima is out there doing something to help. Elgin is a fool. He was suckered completely. His treachery may not have caused Smiley’s return, and I’m not sure what anyone could have done to stop the pregnancy from coming to term, but maybe they could have destroyed Smiley’s egg. But then . . . would she just get pregnant again?
In any case, Elgin won’t tell them where Fatima is so Boyd gets some tools and starts torturing him. But even still, even as he’s beaten, Elgin guards his secret, begging for Boyd to stop. It’s hard to watch. Acosta the idiot shows up at one point and throws a tantrum. Even if she has the moral high ground, I still can’t stand her. She’s the worst, and the worst thing about this episode was that no monsters tore her to pieces.
While they talk and Elgin is left bound and beaten upstairs, Sara takes matters into her own hands. They hear Elgin screaming upstairs and when they burst through the door, Sara is standing there. She tells them that she knew they wouldn’t be willing to go far enough. Only she knew just how far they would need to go to break the hold the evil had over him. We see Elgin bloodied, his eye gouged from his skull, Sara holding the blade . . . .
Julie The Time Traveler
Julie and Ethan have an interesting conversation where she picks his brain about here experience in the ruins and he tells her, in so many words, that she’s special and can travel to different parts in the story—and potentially change things.
We see her actually doing this at the end of the episode, when Jim—feeling rather like a third wheel after learning that Jade and his wife are reincarnations of people who have children together, and are reborn over and over again and always ultimately find one another—wanders back to his crashed RV.
Julie shows up, panicked, but she looks different. “Dad!” she screams. “Can you hear me?” Her hair is short. She’s wearing different clothes.There’s She tells him he needs to run. “This is when it happens,” she says, which is confusing at first. Not where it happens, but when it happens. She tells him it’s not safe, he needs to get to town. “I need to change the story,” she says, almost as if we’re in a dark fairy tale.
Jim is certainly not sure what she’s going on about. It’s too late for him, regardless. I’ve been suspecting Jim was going to die all season. They made him such an ass for most of it, and then gave him a nice redemption arc where he starts being cool again, and even cracks a big puzzle. Of course he’s a goner.
As he tries to make sense of what Julie’s saying, a figure appears. “That was a hell of a song,” the man says. It’s the same voice Jim heard on the radio. But this is not one of the creatures. He’s standing in broad daylight, wearing a yellow suit. His face is gaunt, his hair grey. His eyes are pools of black. He smiles ominously as he saunters closer. “That jade sure can play,” he says.
Jim pushes Julie away, telling her to run. She probably should have approached this differently. Rather than running to him and telling him to run, she should have called for help and run away. He would have chased her, no doubt. Maybe she’ll try that next time.
“This didn’t have to happen, you know,” the Man In Yellow says. “Knowledge comes with a cost.” Jim grabs a stick.
“I did try to warn you,” the man says. He knocks the stick away, and lifts Jim up against the overturned RV, batting Julie away. “Your wife shouldn’t have dug that hole, Jim,” he says, and rips Jim’s throat open. Julie screams. The credits roll, playing a different song (or a different version of the song?) than we normally hear, even more mournful than usual.
So who is this Man In Yellow? In my fae theory I discussed last week, I talk about the possibility that there are both evil and good faeries in this place. The Boy In White is a beneficent spirit of some kind, but he’s not nearly as powerful as the evil spirits. The Man In Yellow would be his counterpart, the central evil guiding events in this dark Otherworld. He’s the most sentient of all the beings we’ve encountered, and I wonder if it’s his sorcery that’s infected Sara, that created the evil music box, that sent the Kimono Lady to Elgin and Fatima, that created the cicadas, etc. etc. etc. I wonder if he is doing all this himself, or if he is part of some group of evil beings.
Whatever he is, he’s terrifying. This was a powerful ending to the season, and sets the stage for a really different fourth season, now that Miranda and Jade have their memories back and, presumably, a great deal more knowledge about the town and its mysteries. Given Tabitha’s dreams of being that little girl by the red stones, we can surmise that they’ve been doing this over many lifetimes, possibly for hundreds of years. We also know what motivates Julie to go back to the ruins and become the time-traveler: Her father’s death. I’m really curious how this will play out next season.
The one break we get from this relentlessly grim episode of torture and monstrous evil is a really nice scene between Henry and his son, Victor. Victor takes his father to the gravesite of his mother (Tabitha now has three kids to worry about!) and sister, Eloise. He tells Henry that it’s all his fault they’re dead. “You don’t have to be my dad anymore,” he says, and it’s the saddest line of the entire show. Raise your hand if you want to leap through the screen and give him a big hug. I know I did at this point. Victor needs all the hugs.
Thankfully, Henry is in full dad mode. He grabs Victor before he can leave. “You don’t ever say that again! Do you hear me? I’m your dad. I will never stop being your dad. Your mother did what she did because she loved you. She was trying to protect you. That’s my job now, okay? That’s my job.”
All told, I thought this was a tremendous season finale, though maybe not quite as jaw-dropping as Season 2’s when Tabitha finds herself in the real world again, and Jade finds the stone tablets and the symbol in the roots of the Faraway Tree down in the caves. Still, finally meeting the Man In Yellow is pretty huge. Giving a face to the voice, giving this show its central antagonist at long last. And the revelation about Tabitha and Jade and the children is also huge, though it serves mostly to remind us that they’ve not just been here before time and time again, but they’ve died trying to somehow save the children. They’ve failed every time. Will this time be any different?
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