Some Serious Season 2 Problems Are Emerging

One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard—and shared, if we’re being honest—about MGM’s From is that it’s following a little too closely in the footsteps of its biggest inspiration, Lost, and not in a good way. As much as I love this show, sometimes it feels like the writers are withholding information as a gimmick in order to drag out he mystery. A steady diet of bread crumbs that lead nowhere fast.

This is true and frustrating, but we did get some important information out of this episode—an episode that was otherwise not great.

I’ll start with what worked. Victor finds Jade in the bar recreating the symbol he’s been seeing out of bottles. He tells him that he’ll answer Jade’s questions if Jade does him a favor—something Jade originally doesn’t agree to but quickly backtracks. They go to a car graveyard, and Victor takes him to his mom’s car and sits up on the roof. He asks Jade to play him Twinkle Twinkle Little Star on the violin, which is a song his mother would sing to him when he was a boy to help soothe him. This was after they’d already arrived in the hellish nightmare town, so he needed as much soothing as he could get.

When Jade learns about this, he puts everything he’s got into that song. You think at first he’s going to scoff at Victor’s choice, but instead he plays with feeling. It’s honestly a really sweet moment. I’m also happy these two are finally talking. Victor even apologizes for being rude to Jade. Two of my favorite characters together! Now all we need is Ethan to join up and we’d have a real adventuring party on a quest.

Victor tells Jade about the man who had the book and drew the symbols. He was apparently a really nice guy, always made everyone laugh, but that started changing when he started seeing the signs. It’s hard to parse exactly what happened, but one night Victor’s mom told him to hide somewhere else, somewhere secret from this man. That night, everyone else was killed. Only Victor survived. It sounds like seeing the symbols could be the first stage in losing your mind, and now Jade is even more worried than he was before.

But we got a bit more information on what happened and what might happen and the stakes have been raised considerably. Like Boyd, with the worms under his skin (or whatever that is) Jade is now potentially a ticking timebomb.

What didn’t work for me was the brief exchange between Jim and Boyd where Jim reveals the voice on the radio and presents his theory that they’re being watched and studied. Jim says, quite clearly and sensibly, “We need to work together” and Boyd replies “I don’t have time for this right now” and walks away.

Seriously? I think it’s past time for Boyd to tell someone about what he saw and experienced in the forest. They all need to put their heads together. I realize that Boyd is distracted over the Sarah stuff, but then somebody else could take the lead. Jim, for instance.

A simple town meeting would be helpful. Ask everyone if they’ve experienced anything strange. Several characters have seen or experienced various phenomena including:

• The boy in white.
• The Faraway Trees.
• Visions (of children, symbols, the ventriloquist doll, etc.)
• Sarah has heard voices and had visions.
• Boyd saw the man in the dungeon and the lighthouse and the man there who told him the town is just the tip of the spear. Both Boyd and Sarah saw the spiders. Even if he conceals his infection (which I understand) he can talk about the rest of it!
• Victor and Tabitha saw the catacombs and could share useful information (potentially even a plan to kill them while they slept).

Not only could this help them devise strategies for survival and possible escape, it might help everyone chill out about Sarah, who was obviously under the influence of whatever or whoever is controlling this place.

I am bummed out for her. She lost her brother and then they gave her house to two very rude extras! Kenny practically assaults her in the street! Only Edgin is nice to her and he doesn’t know the whole story. I was most surprised by Jim’s reaction when he takes Ethan to talk with her. He tells Body later that he doesn’t see a killer or a monster in her. Just a shook up kid. I want someone to help her—and not just because she might be “useful” as Boyd puts it.

Speaking of Ethan and Sarah, this is the second instance of information sharing that should have occurred and didn’t. I was hoping that when he accused her of being a monster because she survived a night in the forest that she would tell him a little boy in white showed her the Faraway Trees. But no.

Ethan did say something interesting, however. He said that if you stand up to monsters and aren’t afraid of them, that takes away their power. This mirrors Randall’s scene in the bus, which actually made me start liking Randall a bit more. When the monsters come, he shouts at them. He tells them their little creepy schtick isn’t scary. When they start walking away he shouts more. “Don’t you walk away from me!” But since they’re not making him afraid . . . they go away. Later he hoists a bus seat on to the top of the bus and starts carving something. Perhaps a stake? Randall seems like the type of guy who gets things done. Brash, perhaps, but a man of action. I hope he kills one of the monsters.

Another curious moment: The old lady, Tillie, pops in and interrupts Kristi and her fiancé, Maryelle, and gives Kristi her liquid morphine, which we later see Maryelle taking. Tillie had seen Maryelle in the medicine cabinet before and it seems she did this very purposefully either to catch Maryelle or for some more insidious purpose. Something feels off about Tillie. Could she be one of the bad guys? Not a monster, but a part of whatever’s going on?

Unfortunately, this episode was mostly just an excuse for people to be extremely unpleasant to Sarah and for her to just . . . take it. It got super repetitive and grating and just didn’t work for me at all. Loved the bits with Victor and Jade and the ghost kids in the forest with Tabitha were terrifying. But overall this episode was a miss and this show really needs to stop dragging stuff out. I’m not quite as bothered by From’s second season as I am by Yellowjackets, simply because the first two episodes were really great, but this drip-feed strategy is getting old fast, and the characters are all devolving into soap opera territory. I hope things pick up soon.

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