From’s Body Count Keeps Rising
Spoilers follow for the third season of From through the finale episode, “Revelations: Chapter Two,” which aired November 24 on MGM+.
Rejoice, From fam! Finally, our collective nightmare is over: Jim Matthews is dead.
This conspiracy theory-peddling, wife-doubting wet blanket of a man probably didn’t deserve to die as brutally as he does in season finale “Revelations: Chapter Two,” with his throat ripped out in front of his teenage daughter, Julie. But also, it’s very in line with Jim’s whole aggrieved-dad-trying-to-prove-his-worth deal that instead of listening to Julie’s urgent pleas and escaping with her, he took a swig at a taunting baddie like an absolute aggro moron and ended up getting murdered for his trouble. Every supernatural series, from Midnight Mass to Yellowjackets, needs a character resistant to the show’s inner eeriness to deliver persistent conflict, and Eion Bailey and his great head of hair played amusement-park engineer Jim with the exact right amount of wearisome square-mindedness. But From loves a cliffhanger and loathes complacency, making Jim’s death the appropriate end to a season that pulled off the double whammy of explaining very little while also bombarding us with new villains of all types.
From, which was recently renewed, has spent its three seasons so far avoiding answers. Instead, the series prefers to regularly introduce additional enigmas into its central town that somehow keeps drawing in new residents despite being a nightmarish place that might be a parallel dimension, a pocket universe, purgatory, or even hell. Season one of the MGM+ series from creator John Griffin established both the smiling monsters that hunt and consume the town’s residents and their guiding rule: Like vampires, the creatures sleep during the day and only come out at night. If the humans stayed inside their homes, military vet and sheriff Boyd Stevens (Harold Perrineau) insisted, then they’d be safe to live another day and try to figure out how to get home. Season two expanded the world, introducing ruins in the forest that housed a blood-borne pathogen, an evil music box that allowed monsters to attack humans in their dreams, and even a way out of the town, with Jim’s wife, Tabitha Matthews (Catalina Sandino Moreno), stepping into a tree trunk and transporting to Maine. Resolution, From fans thought, was just around the corner.
But by the time From’s third season brought Tabitha back to town, it became pretty clear that this show has no real intentions of introducing short-term solutions into its long-term plan. (Griffin and series producer Michael Mahoney have declined to say how many seasons of the show they have in mind, and cast members say they don’t know either.) That kind of wheel-spinning can be infuriating in a genre show; think of how the second season of Yellowjackets eventually became too unwieldy or how certain episodes of Lost (one of From’s clear inspirations) felt inessential. But what From does so well is refuse to look too far forward; there are no split timelines here and no reassurances that everyone will eventually be okay. The series has an exquisite sense of present presence, one that’s guided primarily by how this cast of characters will react to obstacles and aggressions that transform and amplify day by day. And in this year’s ten episodes, From just kept careening forward, giving its ensemble opportunity after opportunity to play the fear, mania, desperation, loyalty, and love that comes out of surviving horrible things together.
To recap this season: The vampirelike monsters learned how to torture. Someone (or something) claiming to be Jim and Tabitha’s dead son started calling them on their landline in a home that has no discernible power or telecommunications sources. There were evil cicadas buzzing around, a sentient instant camera taking pictures on its own, a possibly nefarious ventriloquist dummy, and an evil ghost lady in a kimono. Amid all this, From was also willing to blow up its own established characterization and rules. While making it seem like we’re never going to get full explanations, that approach also feels like a sign of brazen confidence. No one is safe in this world — as the monsters tell Boyd, “You think this place can’t break you? Let’s see” — and From emphasized that theme this season with a series of gutting turns.
Boyd, after being forced by the monsters to watch as they spent hours ripping apart Tien-Chen, one of the community’s most beloved members, turns into a torturer himself, hammering the manipulated-by-monsters Elgin for information about where Boyd’s daughter-in-law, Fatima, is being restrained. Fatima, the always-sunny resident whose positivity was a salve for new arrivals in town, became pregnant with a mysterious entity that in the finale was revealed to be a new monster. It was a goopy mass of flesh that, after being birthed, grew in record time into another version of the smiling redheaded monster that Boyd killed in season two. A tree-trunk portal that seemed to take people out of town instead sent its traveler into the wall of the abandoned pool that sits in the middle of the town, which mysteriously has no accompanying motel; we watched him bleed tears in his final moments of life. “You want hope?” From seemed to sneer at us. “Have a face full of concrete instead.”
It’s all agonizing stuff, but it provides the forward progress From needs to keep us watching. On one level, From is about all its myriad inexplicable things, from the dog that playfully chases Boyd around the forest outside town (who’s feeding it?) to the nocturnal creatures that walk around the cabins where the town grows its food to whatever the hell the word “anghkooey” has to do with the town’s seeming power to reincarnate. These details and threads keep the redditors buzzing! But the reason we care about any of this absurdity is these characters and how acutely they show us the effort that’s required — and the emotional toll it takes — to rebuild a society that is constantly at risk of collapse, to get up each day and keep trying to make sense of the senseless. The series’s horror, fantasy, and sci-fi flourishes are entertaining; yet, they’re always in service of that quest and these relationships. And all of that brings us back to Jim, whose death is a major disruption of the show’s status quo.
When people on From die, they tend to be either unnamed extras or characters on the outer ring of the series’s milieu whose deaths affect those on the inner ring. Waitress Sara becomes an outcast for accidentally killing her brother; priest Father Khatri’s death makes Boyd realize the town’s emotional health isn’t as stable as he thought; Deputy Kenny gets nihilist for a while after both his father and mother are murdered by the monsters — that sort of thing. The Matthews family of Jim, Tabitha, teen daughter Julie, and young son Ethan weren’t just our entry point into the series as the group that arrives in town and experiences all its oddities as we do; they were also plot drivers. Tabitha attracted the ghosts of dead children; Julie got possessed; Ethan became best friends with the town’s longest-tenured resident, Victor; and Jim used his engineering background to build a radio tower and try and find out who’s responsible for the town. As Tabitha’s connection to the town’s ghosts intensified, it felt like Jim’s season-three arc diminished to nagging his wife about the weird shit happening to her — but what was easy to miss is how Jim’s constant questioning was interpreted as a threat by the monsters we haven’t seen yet.
Who mocked Jim through the RV’s radio and on the phone by pretending to be his dead son? Who was keeping tabs on Jim and the Matthewses from afar, and why were they considered so dangerous compared with the town’s other residents? Because these intermittent warnings were so infrequent, they felt secondary to the monsters we knew and saw all the time and easier to categorize as less important. “Revelations: Chapter Two” chastises us for that complacency and for thinking that anyone on From is essential enough to keep on the board.
Killing Jim is a big swing and so is how it’s presented: with an emergent new baddie in a snazzy yellow suit saying meta things like, “Knowledge comes with a cost,” and Julie in a time loop, desperate to undo what’s happened to her family. Will she succeed? We won’t know until the fourth season, which could theoretically expand on Julie’s time-travel shenanigans to provide a conduit for Bailey’s character to return in some form. Recall, though, that Ethan tried to dissuade Julie from her plan by suggesting that altering the past has unique consequences. (“No one can change a story once it’s been told.”) Even if From does somehow bring Jim back from the dead, its willingness to off him in such a grisly and devastating way marks a new boldness from a series that has been consistent in its willingness to make any outcome feel possible.