Another brutal episode of FROM this week. The MGM series is not pulling any punches this season, and I’m pleasantly surprised at the pacing, especially when it comes to big reveals. People are also communicating with one another, which is a terrific change.
We’ll go through the episode and then discuss how this episode ties back to a couple previous episodes in pretty huge and, I suspect, important ways. Spoilers ahead.
What’s In The Bag?
It’s hard to pin down just one big moment in “Fray” because there were so many. The episode opens to a horrifying image. A burlap sack hangs next to the Matthews home. It’s bloody. Blood drips from it and Boyd (Harold Perrineau) rushes to the scene as a crowd begins to gather. Jade (David Alpay) shows up just before Tabitha (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and the kids.
Everyone suspects the same thing: Jim (Eion Bailey) didn’t show up the night before. It must be his body – though to my eyes it looked like too large a parcel for a single human corpse. Tabitha tells Julie (Hanna Cheramy) and Ethan (Simon Webster) to walk to the barn, which in hindsight was not a great idea. When the bag is brought down, dead goats are its only cargo. They hear a scream.
Julie and Ethan opened the barn door and found a horrifying sight: Jim, hanging from the rafters, his chest and throat ripped out, his eyes vacant. The words “Knowledge Comes At A Cost” written on the wall (in paint, at least, not in blood).
Knowledge Comes At A Cost
Jade, much to his credit, realizes what this means immediately and when he and the others talk about it later, he reveals what he and Tabitha and Jim learned at the Bottle Tree: That he and Tabitha are reincarnated versions of past residents of this haunted town. “How do you save the children?” Boyd wants to know. “How do you save people who are already dead?”
“I’m working on it,” Jade tells him. “Work faster,” Boyd snaps back. Boyd is very snappy lately, though I can hardly blame him.
They also talk about Sarah’s (Avery Konrad) brother who theorized that the more they learned about Fromville, the more they dug into its secrets, the more dangerous it became. It’s a strong theory, and backed up pretty handily with the words in the barn, but obviously the townsfolk have no choice but to dig, even if they’re digging their own graves.
Jade tries to talk with Tabitha, telling her that this confirms everything they learned is true, but she’s angry. She takes it out on Jade, telling him cruelly that it should have been him, not Jim, hanging from the rafters. Cruel words, but she’s understandably grieving. She will, at some point, have to work with Jade on this.
Acosta Must Be Stopped
I’m still not sure what the point of the Acosta (Samantha Brown) storyline is, but she continues to be the worst character on the show. After she expresses her anger with Boyd and Sarah and basically everyone, she absconds with the ambulance. Kristi (Chloe Van Landschoot) manages to get into the passenger seat and off they go.
Acosta is trying to escape – unlike, in her rather stupid opinion, everyone else. While they just sit around doing absolutely nothing, she’s going to find a way out, you see. By driving in circles. It mirrors, to some degree, the arrival of the Matthews in the very first episode of the show, and I half-expected them to crash into another car just arriving. Instead, Acosta blusters and rants about how she’s a good person, apparently the only good person in this whole rotten town, and she doesn’t deserve to be here.
It’s incredibly infuriating to watch, and it gets worse. They pass by Ethan walking by himself down the road with his backpack and Kristi tells Acosta to pull over. She refuses. He’ll be fine, she says. Kristi (like us) is flabbergasted. He’s a kid who just lost his dad wandering alone through a monster-infested forest.
The only way to stop the ambulance is to put out the spike strip, which is also a callback to the first episode, and this does the trick. Boyd and everyone else is furious at Acosta, and with good reason. I said this last week, and I’ll say it again: The sooner she gets monstered the better.
We Have To Change The Story
While all this is going on, Julie tracks down Randall (A.J. Simmons) and they head to the arches where Julie first learned about time traveling. She’s a Story Walker, according to Ethan, who also warned her that you can’t change a story. She’s determined to try, however, and she wants Randall to help her.
The plan is pretty solid: Since Randall can’t pass through the arches, he’ll wait for her while she goes in and travels. He’s there to pull her out, since her physical body remains in the present (she must have two physical bodies, since we know from last season that she does appear in physical form and can interact with actual people in the past).
She goes in and the forest turns to night, and once again she finds herself by the RV. It’s the wrong time, however. She’s found herself in Season 2, Episode 9, “Magic Ball Of Fire.” We’ll talk about that episode down below and why it’s pretty significant.
She sees her dad, Boyd, Randall and Donna (Elizabeth Saunders) in the RV and watches as several of the human-shaped monsters appear in the woods. She calls for her father but nobody hears her. She watches as they leave the RV and run for safety. Boyd takes shots at the monsters, one barely missing her.
Then a monster finds her and grapples her to the ground, its face transforming into the hideous thing it is beneath the surface. She starts screaming for Randall and as her body arches and spasms on the ground in the present time, he watches – waiting because she told him to wait, even if it looks bad – and then drags her from the arches.
The Lake Of Tears
It’s all for the best that Acosta is a selfish you-know-what. Ethan makes his way to the RV and loads up the broken radio into his bag. When he leaves the RV, however, he sees his father sitting on a fallen log.
Jim looks confused. Lost. But he’s happy to see Ethan and they embrace. “What are you doing out here?” he asks. Ethan tells him he’s fetched the radio in order to try to contact his dead twin, Thomas. The real Thomas, not the evil version that they spoke to in the past. The radio is broken, Jim tells him.
Jim has another message for Ethan.
“The night we arrived here and we crashed the RV and we were trapped inside, you had a dream,” Jim says. “Do you remember what you dreamt about?”
“The Lake of Tears?” Ethan replies.
“Do you know why?” Jim asks. Ethan shakes his head.
“It’s here, and I need you to find it.”
“Why can’t we find it together?” Ethan asks, and then hears someone calling his name in the distance. When he turns back, his father is gone.
The Number 47, The Radio & The Ballerina
The three episodes that “Fray” calls back to the most, that I’m aware of at least, are the series premiere, the second episode of Season 1 and Season 2, Episode 9 “Magic Ball of Fire.”
Not only does Acosta’s drive mirror the first episode, Jim talks directly with Ethan about their first night in town. I went back and rewatched the series premiere, “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” after watching this week’s episode, and the very first time we encounter the Matthews family is in the RV.
Julie has two of the finger-monsters on her pointer fingers, one red and one yellow.
“Norman, you’re going to be okay,” she has the red monster tell the yellow monster. “The secret fairies are on their way back from the Lake of Tears. They’re gonna fix you.”
“No,” Norman says. “The monsters claws went too deep. Tell my friends I’ll miss them. Tell my parents I said . . . goodbye.”
“Norman? No, Norman, please, you’re my best friend!”
Norman dies and Ethan is not happy about it.
Now, this strikes me as hugely important in ways none of us really noticed at the time. Obviously, monsters and specifically monsters with claws who kill poor Norman is an obvious parallel with the town and its horrors. Foreshadowing in a very direct way.
The fairies on the way back from the Lake of Tears, on the other hand, now holds new meaning. I’ve discussed at length my theory on the fairies, and that this is somehow a war between two sects of fae (good fairies, perhaps the Boy in White, and evil faeries/monsters led by the Man In Yellow). The opening credits song is sung by The Pixies, for goodness sakes. Fairies are part of this and it’s confirmed right in very beginning of the show.
The Lake of Tears is what Ethan then dreams about and tells Jim about in the second episode of Season 1. When he wakes, after Kristi, Boyd and Jim save him, he tells Jim “I saw it. I saw the Lake of Tears. It was a drawing on the wall. There were so many drawings on the wall. Like when I used to draw with crayons and you’d put it on the fridge. And we were all there in the drawings. You and me and mom and Julie. But somebody screamed because the spider came down from the ceiling.”
There have been many references to spiders and webs in this series. In many ways, our heroes are caught in a kind of hellish spider’s web.
As Ethan talks about his dream, Victor sits in his room drawing with crayons. Crayon pictures cover the walls of his room at the Colony House.
Ethan’s retrieval of the radio is also important. In Season 2, Episode 9 we get the scene that Julie finds herself in after going through the arches. Jim, Boyd, Randall and Donna are in the RV at night and the monsters have arrived and are just standing there outside not moving. Then, suddenly, the sound of the ballerina music box begins to play.
After a bit, the lights all flicker and the radio buzzes and the numbers on the radio flicker. And what numbers are these? 47 – the same number that Kenny (Ricky He) told Boyd was the current population of the town. Clearly this number means something. Perhaps it’s crucial to the story, or a meta-reference to something big happening in Season 4, Episode 7. I have no idea.
It is curious that we should find ourselves drawn back to the terror of the ballerina. When Sophia (Julia Doyle), the Man In Yellow disguised, is rifling through the leftover goods in storage with Sarah, she comes to a statue of a white ballerina and catches her breath, perhaps in surprise or perhaps just because she delights to see it. Creepy.
So we have some big questions, once again, though it’s nice to see this story coming full circle to some degree. It reassures me that it’s not all just new mysteries but rather steps toward solving deeper ones. What is the Lake of Tears? Some reference to the underworld? I thought perhaps it was where the children were killed, but I’m pretty sure they were sacrificed on those alters in the caves. Much to ponder. Much to look forward to next Sunday!
All told, a terrific episode that has me very optimistic for the rest of Season 4 (and 5, which will be the final season). You can read my review of Season 4, Episode 1 right here. What did you think? Anything I missed? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
Scattered Thoughts:
- The brief exchange with Victor and his dad was very sweet, but it simply heightens my fear that Henry (Robert Joy) is next in line for the culling. For whatever reason, the monsters leave Victor alone but they never let his loved ones live. I hope I’m wrong because it would be beyond heartbreaking for Victor to find his dad after all these years and then lose him again. I worry.
- When they move Jim’s body from the barn, they wrap him in a yellow blanket. That’s not an accident.
- Ethan is also wearing a yellow shirt, which I still don’t think means he’s the Man In Yellow, but which I think they’ve done on purpose to encourage fan theories. It’s a red herring, or a yellow herring as the case may be.
- Jim is not the only character to appear as a kind of ghost or remnant. Father Khatri often appears to talk with Boyd. Boyd’s wife appeared, though more as a haunting than as a friendly ghost. Tom, the bartender, has appeared to Jade. I may be missing some.