It seems that my parents and I are the only people in the whole world who are watching this show, and I am completely baffled as to why. Realistically, the answer is probably a combination of a weird, unmemorable title that doesn’t fit organically into any sentence (it actually might be the worst title of all time. I’m still not even sure what it means), inaccessibility (what is MGM+?), and an utter lack of star power (which I actually think is a plus). Nonetheless, I cannot hype this show up enough. It’s worth the stilted conversations where no one knows what I’m talking about, paying for it on Prime or navigating its maze to find my way to this mysterious MGM+, and falling into the plot without the distraction or bias of any familiar faces.
After aggressively watching Lost a year ago- and dragging everyone in my life down this rabbit hole with me- my mom sent an article adamantly declaring that this show called From that I’ve never once heard of is even better. I’m the first to come to Lost’s defense, but even I have to agree. On paper, the two shows are so similar that I was skeptical that a rip-off was getting such high praise. It even stars Lost alum Harold Perrineau, the only remotely recognizable cast member, though calling him famous seems like a stretch.
Since I haven’t yet encountered anyone who’s seen it, I’ll start from the beginning. The pilot finds the Matthews family RV road trip impeded by a massive fallen tree in the middle of a wooded street. It’s too big to move, so they reluctantly turn around. With no clear landmarks to get their bearings and a creepy burst of flight from a nearby flock of crows, dad Jim, mom Tabitha, teen daughter Julie, and little (but wise) Ethan slowly roll along. Everyone is relieved when a town comes into view. It’s bleak, shabby, and not much to speak of (think Schitt’s Creek but half the size and even more desolate), but it’s civilization, nonetheless.
Us in the audience are wary of this town after being treated to a cold open in which a little girl, despite adamant town-wide warnings from Sheriff Boyd Stevens, opens her second story bedroom window for a very frightening old lady eerily tapping on the glass and pleading to be let in. When morning comes, the little girl and her mother (the only people in the house at the time) are discovered, rib cages split open, insides hollowed out, blood absolutely everywhere. Smash cut to opening credits (a spooky rendition of “Que Sera, Sera”- I like it).
The handful of townsfolk (a few dozen, maybe) are gathered for the girls’ funeral when the Matthews’ RV comes into view. We learn from snatches of conversation that these flesh-eating monsters tapping on windows after nightfall is an understood, nightly occurrence. The poor deceased family’s absent, drunkard of a husband/father was unacceptably careless in leaving his vulnerable family alone after dark, windows not nailed shut. Yet when everyone catches sight of not only the RV, but another car coming along the road behind it, their reaction makes things even weirder.
Amongst murmurs that there hasn’t been “two cars in one day” in a “long time”, Sheriff Stevens tells everyone to finish paying their respects and then return to their lives- he’ll “handle it”. With the help of his young adult son Ellis and deputy Kenny, he kindly tells the Matthews that if they keep going straight, they’ll find their way back to the highway. But in an aside to Ellis and Kenny, he says he’ll let them “do a few laps” to “prepare them for what’s coming”, and in the meantime, they should get out the tire strips.
The Matthews indeed do a few laps: without ever making a turn, they drive through this same sad little town one, two, three, four more times. Panic rising, they eventually collide with the other car that’s doing the same thing. It’s dusk, little Ethan is severely injured, the driver of the other car soon succumbs to his injury (his surviving passenger Jade, however, will become a key player). It’s all a very high stakes and heart pounding way to learn the laws of the land: when you encounter the fallen tree in the road and the creepy crows, it’s already too late. You’re in town, and you can’t leave. And when the sun goes down, little stone talismans hung on walls behind closed doors are the only thing keeping out the scary human-like monsters that will sprout fangs and eat your guts if you succumb to their pleas and crack a window or open a door.
Throughout the three seasons we have of From so far, the more the eccentrically endearing cast of characters have tried to crack the mysteries of the town and find their way home, the more weirdness has sprouted up. It’s all very Lost- these wayward, quirky people are just trying to survive, but the weirder things get, the more these poor people seem to be fated to be here, carefully chosen by some unknown force for a specific, but as yet undetermined reason. I’ll often compare stories to puzzles, but every episode of From in particular feels like putting just enough pieces into place that you realize the overarching picture is bigger than you ever imagined.
My dad, who felt betrayed by Lost’s chaotic and confusing meandering, sat down almost nervously as we crammed all 10 episodes of season 3 into a 7-day free trial of MGM+. “I hope they don’t ruin it” he kept saying. I didn’t disagree- shows like this that are mysteriously building to a big something can all turn out to feel like a waste of time if the big something isn’t emotionally satisfying and narratively sound. I chose this most recent season finale to cover (I’m getting to it I promise) because this episode put more puzzle pieces into place than ever before. Show creators and writers have referred to it as the “end of the beginning”. To keep the puzzle analogy going, it feels like we have all the edge pieces in place, a border complete. And most exciting of all, I’m incredibly compelled by the image that’s beginning to come together.
If I’ve perhaps just convinced you to give From a chance, stop reading here and come on back once you’ve caught up. It’s time to unpack what I consider to be an incredible season finale.
The second half of this two-parter picks up with Elgin holding a now very pregnant Fatima prisoner in the creepy storm cellar, following the orders of the creepy lady talking to him through his polaroid camera. The whole town is still actively searching for her, but Ellis bursts into the Sheriff’s station, telling Boyd and Donna that he thinks Elgin knows something. They promptly isolate Elgin in Colony House, and Boyd brings Sara in to try to talk some sense into him.
It’s really helpful and compelling that the show drew this comparison between Elgin and Sara; Sara’s experience in season 1 is neither a one-off nor forgotten: it was a precedent for an even bigger event still to come. With now two incidents to consider- along with Tabitha, Jade, and Victor’s simultaneous work on the bottle tree- it seems clear that there are both Good and Bad forces at play in town and the forest beyond. Discretion is key. Fate is an undeniable theme of the series, and the forces of the town certainly nudge characters this way and that, but there is a time to follow and a time to resist. Elgin should have resisted. And this sequence of events only opens the floor for more Bad decisions.
The bottle tree, Victor’s family, Julie’s visions, and the weird little “Anghkooey” children feel very different. There is a very distinct separate-ness between the Elgin/Fatima/pregnancy plotline and the Matthews/Jade/Victor/bottle tree plot line that underscores the town’s division of Good and Bad. Throughout this season I felt increasingly sure that Jade’s obsession with the bottle tree and its numbers was productive, that Julie and Victor needed to face their fears and follow the paths in front of them, while Elgin was making a huge mistake. But not only that, following these forces of Good and Bad made the parties involved better and worse people respectively.
Of course, Elgin was succumbing to false promises just as Sara once made a fatal mistake, but this is only the beginning of Bad-ness surrounding the Fatima situation. Boyd, riddled with reminders of his own wife’s death, doubles down on his determination to preserve his family. Blind with this, he wastes no time filling a tool bag with what he clearly intends to be torture devices. He ignores his visions of Father Khatri (another supernatural source of Good, if you ask me), and actually goes through with it, hammering Elgin’s hand and revealing bone. The whole thing made me feel icky and sad. I couldn’t believe he did it, but really, Boyd’s judgement has been slipping ever since he found out about Fatima. He kept everyone else downstairs while he did it to preserve their innocence, but they’re all bystanders as far as I’m concerned.
Meanwhile, Jim Matthews has been working on himself in a kind of shockingly impressive way. It started with Jade, who actually did heed the ghostly advice of the town’s dead bartender. He slowed down on the drinking and gave Victor’s dad, Henry, the space and wise words to open his mind to Victor and his eccentricity. Henry then paid the unsolicited advice forward to Jim, who at long last stopped yelling at anyone who dared to speak to his family. He actually joined in on Tabitha, Jade, and Ethan’s quest to decode the hidden meaning behind the numbers, held space for the inexplicable, and turned out to be the missing piece of cracking the whole thing.
Things built to a climax (or should I say crescendo) as the group realizes that the numbers correspond to music notes. Things click into place seamlessly from there, the song suddenly coming to Jade as if he’s known it all along. Jim is hesitant to play it- a valid concern to be wary of things at this point, but I agree with everyone else, they have to play it. They just have to. They decide to head into the woods with Victor’s violin and play it at the bottle tree.
At the same time, Sara finally gets Elgin to admit where Fatima is- by cutting out his eye. I’ve been slow to forgive Sara, but this actually felt like a big moment of growth and understanding. She recognizes her mistake in trusting the voices she heard back in season 1, and also recognizes that the experience has already broken her. She actually protects everyone else by slipping upstairs without their knowledge and getting the whole thing done before anyone can intervene. The team races to the storm cellar, where Fatima is in labor and the ghostly woman is pulling a nasty something (definitively not a baby) out of her vagina.
The group bursts in to find an exhausted, childless, and belly-less Fatima pointing at the open trap door on the floor. Boyd doesn’t hesitate to follow the woman down it. What he sees is crazy. It’s the tunnels where the monsters live, and they’re all gathered around the ghostly mother and the lump Fatima just birthed. The lump grows and stretches. A human figure encased in a bloody, gooey film. Finally, out comes the one big-mouthed, smiling monster that Boyd had managed to kill with his skin worms a few episodes ago.
Upstairs, Fatima breathlessly says to Ellis, “Those things that come out at night, I saw what they are. They sacrificed their children because It promised them that they would live forever”.
A lot to unpack here, but it’s given some context by the wave of understanding that washes over Jade and Tabitha. The song seems to call the ghostly children out of hiding, who suddenly now seem pitiable rather than scary. The song also unlocks a crushing recognition for the two of them. “Anghkooey” means ‘remember’ and finally, they do. Tabitha is bowled over by this realization and can barely handle it. Jim, truly being his best self in this moment, pleads with her to explain. He doesn’t understand, but he wants to, he’s listening, he’s ready to hear it.
In broken sentences, Tabitha tries: “I know why I see those children. Why Jade can see them. It’s why there’s more than one bracelet. I kept making them. Somewhere, deep down, I remember. It’s because we’ve been here before, me and Jade. The reason I felt what Miranda felt… is because I was Miranda. And Jade… Jade was Christopher. We’ve come back over and over because we failed the first time. Jade and I were here at the beginning. We tried and failed to set them free because one of them was ours. She was our daughter.”
In Jim’s defense, I also don’t really have any idea what the fuck that means. Her and Jim’s daughter? Her and Jade’s daughter? Are they both incarnations of something even more ancient? And what is this ‘It’ that Fatima said promised the monsters immortality? But it’s a season finale, not a series finale, and these are massive steps in understanding the wider mechanisms of the town. It’s been hinted at for awhile that there are things out there “worse than the monsters”, and it’s satisfying to take a step towards bringing that blurry picture into focus. The way Tabitha said it also suggests to me a clear conclusion that this whole thing is heading towards. It didn’t make sense, but it was specifc. It does mean something, and in time we’ll find out what.
I’ve also come to think that whatever this force of the town is rewards the townsfolks for being on the wrong path and punishes them for being on the right one. The monsters changed their tactics this season, playing mental games as well as physical ones, deliberately shaking Boyd and the town’s trust in him. This moment was such a big win in their quest to understand, to get home, that it brought out the thing even more powerful than them. A piece of the bigger picture- the mysterious shadow that’s been out in the woods, shaking tents and playing by rules we haven’t yet learned.
While all of this was happening, Julie told Ethan that she felt she needed to go back to the ruins, to return to the place she goes when her body goes comatose. It seems that in that place, she’s able to travel non-linearly through time. She had big ideas about preventing some of the tragedies that have already occurred, but Ethan warned her that even if she can see moments in time, she can’t change them. As usual, I agreed with Ethan (like they say on Lost, whatever happened, happened). But it seems she saw something new that made her feel like she had to try. Right after Jade and Tabitha’s emotional revelation, Julie comes tearing through the woods screaming for Jim. Terror on her face, she pleads with him to run, to get away, to get to town right now because “I think this is when it happens! I need to change the story!”.
Tragically, Ethan was right. A man walks casually towards them out of the trees. He nonchalantly warns that “knowledge comes with a cost”, ignoring Jim’s now-appropriate insistence that this man back away from him and his family. Before fatally slashing Jim’s throat, the man says the last line of the season: “Your wife shouldn’t have dug that hole, Jim”. Since Jim is the only one who heard it the first time, this last revelation is more for us than any of the characters. This is the source of the voice on the radio that Jim painstakingly had the town build- the one that preceded the punishment of a massive storm and ruining of crops. All he got out of that radio was a haunting “your wife shouldn’t be digging that hole, Jim”, and a realization that this town doesn’t play by Earthly rules. And that someone is watching.
Season 4 isn’t coming until 2026 which is frankly super upsetting, but I know I’ll be just as eager for it then as I am now. Everything about season 3 suggests a painstaking master plan, a conclusion that will have everything click into place that we got just a little taste of in this episode. And in this regard, I think a lack of popularity may just be a good thing- Lost’s fatal flaw was a network’s insistence that it overstay its welcome due to its massive popularity and profit. With no threat of that, I think From should be able to end on its own terms.
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