The Season 4 finale of FROM was mostly quite good, though I have a few quibbles and one larger issue to address before we pour over the details.
I suppose my quibbles and my larger issue can be wrapped up into one: I’m frustrated that the last few episodes have been so weak, only to get everything piled into the finale and then it’s all over and we have to wait another year or more before the fifth and final season comes out.
My annoyance spilled over after watching last week’s genuinely lousy episode, but it had been building. This is not a new trend with this show. They have 10-episode seasons but only enough genuinely good, worthwhile content for maybe six episodes. Maybe not even that. These are long episodes, too, and maybe ten would be justified if the episodes just cut away all the filler and annoying dialogue and followed the example set by Widow’s Bay: Shorter, to-the-point episodes that each have something unique to offer. Ten episodes, 23 minutes long per.
I’m not that bothered by a lack of answers. Nor am I upset that things escalated here so drastically, creating new questions (what made the day turn to night? what’s up with the red lightning? etc). I’m okay leaving the big answers and reveals for the final season. What bothers me is the foot-dragging, the spinning in circles, the slow degradation of these characters into annoying stereotypes.
Still, all that aside, there were many great moments in the Season 4 finale. Many moments of terror and tension to keep us on the edge of our seats.
Jade and Tabitha were trapped below in the bone cave at the end of last week’s episode. This week, they gather the bones as the monsters wait patiently in the tunnel outside. Boyd and his crew pull the bottle tree out and send the rope ladder down, unaware that Sophia / the Man in Yellow has tampered with it. As Tabitha climbs, the rope frays and breaks and she falls back down. There was a moment of respite before this when we learned that the monsters can’t walk into the light, but that’s when the sky darkens and things start to go very badly.
Tabitha and Jade flee into the tunnels after an earthquake temporarily stuns the monsters, and Jade and his crew race to their vehicles to outrun the monsters that have come to the surface under the cover of this false night.
Meanwhile, back in town, the earthquake has dislodged one of the talismans. As Marielle and Fatima argue about what to do, Fatima senses Smiley approaching. This is when they realize the talisman is missing. Now, personally I think this would have been a good time to introduce Sophia’s theft of the talismans, but it was simply dislodged in the earthquake. Smiley gets in and they don’t have time to hang the talisman in a second room (they should probably have backup plans for this kind of thing). Smiley slashes Mari across the belly and Fatima lets out a monstrous shriek. “Interesting,” Smiley says with a smile and then walks off. Kristi and the others arrive to find Mari in a massive pool of blood.
She’s not the only death this episode. Elgin, poor simple Elgin, stupidly showed Sophia the photo last week and this week she tries to win him over to her cause. He turns to prayer instead and she kills him by holding his hands in a particularly evil fashion. We also lose Fatima, in the end, when she transforms into a monster to keep the other monsters at bay (at least, I think she’s dead at this point). It’s a pity Patty didn’t get killed. She’s become even more annoying than Acosta, who hasn’t actually been all that bad since her ambulance outburst. Clara, too. What a weird turn of events to make her so awful. I’d have preferred a more central character to be the mole, but oh well. She needed something to do, I suppose.
We also got Henry finding bullets and a gun to use to kill his son, Victor, in order to “end the dream” he has convinced himself of in just a couple short days. I’ll give him some slack because he was clearly enchanted by the MiY, but only some. It was his own self-pity that opened that floodgate. I was absolutely on the edge of my seat here, because I might have quit the show had Henry actually killed Victor. And then when Ethan came in and he swung the revolver toward the boy . . . I think I gasped, held my breath. Victor sprung into action, knocking the gun away and tackling his father. I was so happy to see him angry. “Why!?” he shouted at his pathetic father, pinning him down. “Why did you do this!?” What a horrific betrayal. I take it back, I have no empathy for Henry. He was weak and cowardly and selfish. Had he been stronger and more selfless, Sophia’s blood would not have done such a number on him.
In the end, Sophia manages to go from building to building in Fromville and, like the Grinch, sneak in unseen and unhindered. Not even Cindy Lou Who stops her to ask, “Why, Sophia, why?” She takes the talismans to a Faraway Tree, where the Boy in White and she chat for a spell. It seems obvious at this point that the two are indeed opposed, not working together, and the Boy in White seems optimistic for some reason, even though the townsfolk just made a mess of everything. This is giving me Lost final season vibes with the Man in Black and Jacob, and that makes sense given how squarely this fits into the Lost lineage.
I genuinely enjoyed this episode. It was scary like Seasons 1 and 2. It was the biggest bloodbath we’ve had in ages. But it also raises some questions about the season as a whole, beyond what I grumbled about up above. For instance:
- Why did we get a grand total of like five minutes of Julie story-traveling when the Season 3 finale’s final moments promised this as a pretty big narrative thrust going forward? I feel robbed.
- Why did we get such a poignant moment with the ghost of Jim asking Ethan to find the Lake of Tears and then just either A) drop that entirely or B) apparently wrap that up with the scary monster-dolls? Both of these are deeply unsatisfying.
- Sophia as the mole was kind of cool at first, but the Man in Yellow is so much more frightening and compelling and by the end of the season I just found Sophia somewhat obnoxious rather than frightening.
- The more I think about it, the more I think about how much more interesting it would have been if, say, an established character from Season 1 or 2 had been the MiY the whole time, and when he went and transformed he became Marielle or Donna or something. Okay, maybe not Donna, but you get the point. If we could look back and say “Oh crap, that all makes sense now!” that would be better than just introducing Sophia in Season 4. Same for the Clara “twist.”
- I was really impressed earlier this season with Julie’s story-walking when it led me back to earlier episodes and we saw the number 47 on the radio and Jim hanging in Tabitha’s vision and so forth, but then the season just dropped all this stuff entirely. A cool reveal, callbacks to earlier seasons, these only work when there’s payoff. You can’t just show us something and then forget about it and expect us to be happy.
- You also can’t spin in circles like this. A solid 80% of dialogue breaks down into some form of “this isn’t going to work; I don’t believe this is real; I’m not going to send you into danger; are you okay?; f-bomb this, f-bomb that,” and various other repeats of the same dialogue we’ve heard a hundred times before. The problem with just repeating the same thing over and over is it kills momentum, and you can’t create momentum by finally getting some good stuff in the finale. I’m sorry, did I already say this in my review? Probably.
- There’s also the problem with redundancy. I jest! I jest!
- The music sure is good when they choose to unleash it; I wish they’d put as much time into the script and cinematography.
- Hey, at least Fatima’s golem came into play in the end. That was a cool subplot that really paid off in the finale. Glad they put so much screentime into her making it and getting Elgin to help her. Really powerful stuff!
Fundamentally, a good season finale does not a good season make. Season 4 started out strong and then fell to pieces – only falling to pieces would be more exciting than the slow pace this show settled into for the second half of the season. Saving it all for the finale is a poor choice, a failure of imagination and writing that this show’s producers and writers ought to understand by now. Dropping just about every interesting plot, and basically ignoring most of the characters in favor of a gimmicky Sophia storyline, is also not doing this show any favors. I’m still in it for the long haul, but I have a lot of concerns about where this show is going and why it had to take so long to get us there. And honestly? If next season wasn’t the last, I think I’d probably just drop From at this point. What a shame.
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