FROM Season 3 Episode 8 Review: Thresholds
Critic’s Rating: 3.9 / 5.0
3.9
We are officially 28 episodes into FROM, and this show has become even more confusing.
You’d think as time rolled along, we’d be a little further along in piecing things together, but that’s not the case.
We’re learning things, sure, but do they make any sense? Are we any closer to connecting the dots? These are questions definitely worth asking yourself as we head into the final two hours.
If anything, FROM Season 3 Episode 8 reminded me of the slogan you’d hear at the beginning of MTV’s Diary series from the 2000s: you think you know…you have no idea.
Whenever you have an idea of what’s happening, something else comes along to crush the thought, and you must start all over. That’s how this Fatima story is starting to feel because it’s not going in a way I could have ever predicted.
And I don’t say all this to suggest that crafting a completely unpredictable series is a bad thing. That’s precisely what you want from a mystery, but sometimes you do reach a point where your head is a jumbled mess of confusion, and it’s not quite as fun as it used to be to make sense of things.
As I reiterated before, we are 28 episodes in. After Tabitha’s miraculous escape during FROM Season 2 Episode 10, does anyone feel like we’re any closer to figuring out the town and getting everyone home?
It feels like we’re almost further away than ever in many ways.
But let’s talk about Fatima, shall we? She was naturally spiraling in the aftermath of killing Tillie, and Boyd was in his covering-up murder era.
Just call him one of the Keating 5!
It was surprising and not surprising how quickly Boyd was willing to cover things up for Fatima because we’ve seen that internal struggle within Boyd play out from FROM Season 1 Episode 1 to now.
He’s the number one guy in town. He’s the sheriff. He’s the flight attendant on the rocky plane everyone looks at to judge how calm they should remain in the face of uncertainty.
But as the town has morphed and gotten increasingly more volatile, Boyd has changed in numerous ways. He’s still actively looking to protect people, but he’s also doing things out of his own self-interest.
Taking it upon himself to basically absolve Sara after what she did and not following through with her exile in the way he was supposed to was the first sign that Boyd wasn’t above doing whatever he saw fit, even if it went against the majority.
So, him hiding Fatima out in the woods and essentially daring the town to find a scapegoat wasn’t shocking on the surface, but it was still jarring in a way.
It’s not as if I expected Boyd to march his daughter-in-law down the streets to the box, but this storyline shows how much the past has changed Boyd and his own code of ethics and conduct.
Ellis was more inclined to tell the truth than Boyd, but that was Ellis being more naïve than anything else. He was sorely mistaken if he thought for a minute that the town would take pity upon Fatima after the past few days.
Boyd may not have been ready to march Fatima to her death, but he also wasn’t prepared to send Ellis off into the forest to live with her alone, knowing that something was wrong. You could see it on his face while Fatima was recounting what happened, and he was at a loss as to what was happening to her.
There’s no plausible explanation, especially knowing that she’s not with child, and Boyd wasn’t exactly jumping at the idea of sending his son out into the woods with Fatima in her current state.
Donna has been the voice of reason much more this season, and it’s almost like she and Boyd have switched places in some ways because she’s the one putting town above one much more than Boyd.
And I hate to say that’s easier for Donna because nothing about anything they’re doing is easy. Still, Boyd has the emotional weight of his son being affected in this scenario.
It’s impossible to separate that emotion, even if he thinks he can.
What’s the correct answer here? Or better yet, what would you do?
Boyd had to know that telling Donna took the decision out of his hands and put it directly into hers. And Donna doesn’t say things to say them or threaten just to threaten.
Donna telling Boyd that the people don’t believe in him anymore was a tough pill for Boyd to swallow, but there’s also no way he hasn’t felt that. Everyone’s exhausted, and that peaceful lull they’d found themselves in hasn’t existed since the Matthews arrived.
There hasn’t been a moment of peace since then, and it’s not like Boyd’s leadership has suddenly made the town worse. Almost all of it has been out of his hands, but people need some to blame. And that person will always be the one in charge.
Boyd and Ellis shuffling out into the woods so that Ellis and Fatima could exist out there for however long was a nice moment for them to talk about Abby because of how similar the situations were, but when pressed, Boyd couldn’t even muster up a response to Ellis’s question.
There’s a before Abby died Boyd and an after Abby died Boyd, and Boyd may try to grasp at those before moments, but that man has been gone for a long time.
Of course, Boyd and Ellis couldn’t find Fatima because Elgin took her to the bunker. Let’s talk about this for a minute because what the hell?
Elgin has been haunted by the kimono-wearing woman all season, and for no real reason, he went from being petrified of her to following her and the pictures around without confiding in anyone and operating almost blindly.
We’ve seen this happen before: an entity, ghost, whatever you want to call them, gets one of the townspeople to trust them enough to do their bidding.
The pictures and the lady had Elgin basically kidnapping Fatima to get her into that room so the baby could come. But whose baby? Is it the lady’s baby? Will the arrival of life in that town help offset the apparent sacrifice that may have happened there?
We learn about the apparent sacrifice from Victor’s memories, but before jumping ahead, Elgin dragging Fatima against her will into that room was quite the image to end the hour. And maybe we did get a sort of answer about what’s happening with Fatima, but we also had a ton more questions.
This was truly the hour of questions and answers, though, with Julie perhaps providing one of the biggest answers and opening up an even bigger can of worms.
Julie’s pull to that spot in the forest took her down to the cave and put her face-to-face with herself, Randall, and Marielle, where they were chained up and screaming, as well as Martin.
And Martin was the one who told her to throw the rope down to Boyd, who was stuck in a tight space reminiscent of a chimney. That’s one of those questions that’s never been super high on anyone’s priority list, but finding out now that Julie was the one who threw it down adds a whole other wrinkle to things.
Excuse me while I dust off my Avengers knowledge, but are they living in some quantum realm? Are there time vortexes they can jump into to change outcomes?
I’m utterly perplexed by this whole thing, and if Julie doesn’t relay exactly what happened to her to Boyd, I will lose my mind.
I know a lot is happening, but there are too many pivotal things to keep to yourself. Julie needs to tell whoever will listen what she experienced because the ability to jump back in time may be an even bigger reveal than the faraway trees.
Another big reveal came when Victor finally remembered what he’d seen between Christopher and Jasper.
The bond between Victor and Tabitha is very sweet, and she understands him in a way that not many others do. Sara tried her best with Victor, but Tabitha has a bit of that patient charm that allows Victor to take a beat.
Once he took a beat, with Sara’s help as well, he was finally able to pull some long-buried and repressed memories back to the surface. Those memories, which were not of Jasper but the boy in white, shed light on the young children that Tabitha has been seeing around.
If those children were sacrificed in that town by their parents, are they now haunting the town until they’re saved?
“The answers to the end are in the beginning.”
So, who will give these people a history lesson about the town because that’s what we’re missing here? And I say that as if it’ll be easy to uncover the library in that hellhole with the town archives.
But if that’s not an option, and it’s not, what do they do? Where can you even begin to look for that information?
Acosta may be the worst, but her do-something attitude is something everyone needs to adopt right now because they’re somehow gathering clues and getting further away from sense.
And if they don’t start making some inroads, that town may collapse in on itself without another monster ever showing its face.
Loose Ends
- Jim and Jade’s fight was funny if only for Henry piping up when it was over to tell Jim he needed to shut up and listen every once in a while. Jim can be scared all he wants, but he’s handling it in a way that’s pushing the people he loves away from him.
- Where are the monsters? I know we go long stretches without seeing them, but sometimes the show loses some of its spooky energy when we go too long without that genuine threat.
- In the string of information that Victor rattled off from his memory, one thing that stood out the most was his saying the children were murdered in the dark. That has to be connected to why the monsters come out at night and begs the question, how do they ultimately find the light there?
- I already talked about this ad nauseum up above, but Boyd was really ready to let ANYONE, sans Sara, potentially take the fall for Tillie’s murder. That’s objectively insane.
There are two episodes left until we wrap this season up, and while I’m confident we’ll get to see a FROM Season 4, as of right now, we don’t have it. So, I will need them to explain a lot in the final hours to quiet my nerves!
Let me know in the comments how you’re feeling after this one!
You can watch FROM on Sundays at 9/8c on MGM+.
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