Season 3 of FROM is on track to be its best yet, with some big improvements over the past two including fewer F-bombs, some trajectory toward answers to all our big questions, and slightly improved communication between the town’s primary residents. Before I go into all the good stuff in Episode 4, I will briefly discuss what’s still bugging me about this show—a show I’m completely hooked on, problems notwithstanding.
- Problem #1: Communication between important characters is still lacking. Some very basic stuff needs to be talked about, and they have plenty of time on their hands to chat. Jim not telling Boyd about the phone call, for instance, is just weird.
- Problem #2: The extras—the bit parts in Fromville—are almost universally annoying. They’re catty, brash, rude, often stupid, pointless and frustrating. I know that people can be like this in real life. I’m on Twitter. But I’m not sure it’s a great storytelling choice to have so many deeply unlikeable bit parts.
- Problem #3: More specific to this episode, I’m genuinely baffled by the reaction to the cop—Acosta—who accidentally shoots perhaps the most annoying of these extras—Nicki. The cop, who just arrived in town and was viciously ambushed and watched the ambulance medics die horrifically, is understandably shooting at the monsters who are trying to kill her and a stray bullet goes into the house and hits said extra in the stomach. If ever there was an understandable accident, this is it—and besides, did anybody like that chick to begin with? I’m glad she’s a goner. This gets to an issue I have with a lot of shows. The writers have characters act so strange sometimes. Boyd, of all people, ought to be empathetic to Acosta’s panic, terror and plight—not yell at her and almost attack her. I don’t buy it, even though I know he’s under a lot of pressure and just went through an incredibly frightening ordeal.
Okay, onto the episode!
An Ambush In Fromville
The biggest, craziest part of this episode was Tabitha’s return to Fromville aboard an ambulance with Victor’s dad, Henry, two medics and a policewoman. Her return was prophesied, in a sense, by the voice on the Matthews family telephone. When that rings again, Ethan picks up. “Thomas” tells him that his mother is coming home aboard an ambulance. When Jim grabs the phone he tells the voice to leave his children alone. “Oh but they’re not your children anymore,” the boy’s voice replies in a deeply sinister tone.
Not long after, Ethan spots the ambulance. So does Boyd, who’s been chatting with Randall on the bus. The two run outside and Boyd manages to grab Ethan as he runs out of the house. They make their way to the ambulance.
Tabitha is pleading with her captors to stop and get to safety when they spot a woman splayed out on the road ahead. “That’s not a person!” Tabitha screams, and Acosta tells her to calm down. She’s had just about enough of these outbursts. In one of the most agonizing moments so far in this show, she cuffs Tabitha to the ambulance and then follows the medics outside. They’re already dead by the time she gets their, slashed to death by the monster. This pretense—like the episode with the monsters letting out the animals—shows a whole new level of cunning on the monsters’ part.
What follows is a mad scramble to free Tabitha and survive. Jim and Boyd try to free Tabitha, but Boyd doesn’t have his handcuffs or key on him, so they have to improvise. Randall runs to the bus for a toolkit, which he retrieves and tosses to Boyd. Unfortunately for Randall, he’s cut off from the others and tries to escape, when the locusts descend upon him. While Jim tries to save Tabitha, Boyd gets to the driver’s seat to drive to safety. Alas, the keys are missing.
“You looking for these?” one of the monsters tells him, holding up the keys. Boyd turns in terror. “Take them,” she says. “We get to keep Randall, though. You can’t save them all.” So Boyd grabs the keys and drives off. “Don’t leave me, Boyd!” Randall calls after them. But Boyd doesn’t have a choice, and Randall is taken.
At the very end of the episode, the monsters give him back. Outside the big house, his body is left on the windshield of the ambulance. As Boyd looks on in horror, Randall—clearly mutilated—wakes up, coughing blood.
Victor and Sara Build A Fort
Last week, Victor showed up at Sara’s and told her that since she’s the scariest person in town, she’s the perfect one to build a fort with him. This week, they do just that. They build a fort out of blankets in the basement and sit inside it like kids, and Victor goes over the contents of the suitcase he dug up—all items from the people who died when his mother and sister were killed. He took and buried these items because the Boy In White told him to (and his mention of the boy is yet another step closer to each of our principal characters sharing the things they’ve seen with one another).
Victor is so great, I can’t get enough of him. If there’s one character I’m rooting for the most, it’s poor Victor who spent his entire life in this nightmare. He’s adorable, tragic, heroic and, at times, quite funny. At one point he tells Sara about his sister and mother dying. “Just like Nathan,” he says, referring to Sara’s brother. Then, after an awkward pause. “Except I didn’t murder them.”
Victor realizes that in order to save everyone, he needs to remember what happened when he was a boy. Somewhere, there’s a clue. But he doesn’t want to remember, which is why he needs Scary Sara by his side. You can see why he’d rather forget. His memories are terrifying. Corpses ripped apart, strewn about the street. Chests ripped open. Blood and gore everywhere, and poor young Vincent all alone.
The one item he realizes is missing is the ventriloquist dummy who belonged to Christopher. “He was nice but then he started seeing the symbol and then he started getting scary,” Victor tells Sara. The memory of Christopher is enough to send Victor into a full panic attack. “You don’t have to be afraid,” Sara tells him. “I’m the scariest person in town, remember?”
“His name was Jasper,” Victor tells her when he calms down, and we get some very creepy flashbacks of Christopher and the dummy. Christopher changed, Victor says, after he saw the symbol and started spending more and more time alone. “He didn’t make us laugh anymore.” We see young Victor walk into a room where Christopher is sitting across from Jasper, and the doll is moving and talking all on his own. I swear, the dummy has been the freakiest thing in this entire show. In Victor’s memory, the doll shrieks at Christopher as they apparently argue—a shriek that sounds eerily like the monsters. And now Victor wants to go and find Jasper in order to get the answers he seeks—though I’m not sure Jasper is in the information-sharing business.
I’m also pretty worried about Jade at this point. Just like Christopher, he’s the one seeing the symbol—and hallucinations of Jasper. So far, he hasn’t really changed except to become more likeable and friendly with his fellow townsfolk. But what happens if he starts to go evil?
Speaking of Jade, we get a nice moment with him, Kenny and Kristi as the three of them hide out in the homestead, reminiscing about Kenny’s mom. “She really liked you, you know?” Kenny tells Jade. “She only frowned at people she liked.” I enjoy these moments of sweetness and camaraderie, stuck between all these gruesome and horrific calamities. It’s interrupted by strange bumping in the night—though whether this is from the town’s monsters or something else remains to be seen.
Tabitha tells Jim about the house and the paintings and the boy in the tower, but I can’t help but wish we had the same scene with Boyd and Donna present. They have their own touching scene, when Donna drags Boyd away from the poor police woman and—instead of chewing him out—breaks down in tears. He holds her, his anger melted in the face of this unexpected meltdown. They’re both rocks of the community, but even rocks break.
Elgin continues to have his visions of the undead woman, and Tillie continues to be oddly creepy though I’m not sure there’s anything to that. The creepiest moment—by far—in the episode comes at the very end, as Fatima sits next to Nicki’s body in an upstairs room. She pulls the bandage back, and apparently the smell of the wound gets the saliva flowing. She reaches her fingers into the wound, pulls the bloody digits to her mouth, and licks hungrily.
All told, another exciting, scary, crazy episode of TV’s most underrated series. I keep wishing this was on Prime Video instead of hidden away on MGM+ so that more people would get a chance to watch it. Oh well. I really like where all of this is headed regardless. We may not have answers, but we have momentum. Tabitha got out, even if the Town pulled her back in. We know there’s a way to leave, though I doubt it will be so simple as “jump in the Faraway Tree”. There are some crazy parallels to the real world now, with Miranda’s paintings and the two bottle trees. Jade will undoubtedly be excited to learn everything Miranda knows.
I also like that Victor has a clear quest now, adding yet more momentum and purpose to the story, though the last time we saw Jasper was down in the tunnels where all the monsters sleep and where Jade found the children on their stone tablets. Going back there is a perilous quest, indeed. Hopefully by the end of this season we are a bit closer to understanding the nature of this hell, and our heroes are a bit closer to uncovering a way to defeat it. Then again, I’m still worried that even solid answers and explanations won’t be satisfying. It’s tricky when the mystery itself—and the nature of not knowing—is so much fun. Even a far better ending than we got with Lost could ultimately be a letdown.
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Past FROM Season 3 Reviews:
Check out my latest streaming guide here—there are a couple shows on the list that should appeal to fans of this one.
