From is such a weird TV show. There are things about it I love, and many of its mysteries continue to intrigue me, but there are so many ways this show falls short and the longer it runs, the more glaring these problems become.
I enjoyed the start of Season 4 a great deal, and I was thrilled to see that characters were finally communicating with one another, at least more than they ever had before. But as the season wore on, I started to get antsy and more than a little nervous. And while I liked From’s Season 4 finale, I’m left feeling worried about the show overall, and about the ability of its creators to give us a satisfying final season. There are many problems to discuss, but I’ll jam them all into one tidy (though not comprehensive) list.
1. The Pacing Is All Over The Place
My biggest problem with From, not just in Season 4 but across the board after the first season, is the pacing. The show frontloads big episodes at the start of a season and then ends with a bang, leaving us with too many filler episodes between. This same format actually applies to individual episodes as well. Not every episode, of course, but far too many pack all the good stuff into the beginning and the end of an episode, without the kind of natural flow, mounting tension and momentum required to keep viewers invested from start to finish.
The fact is, for many of these episodes you could cut out a lot and have much shorter, more compact and more exciting stories. The show’s format is stuck in an antiquated mode: Ten episodes, each roughly an hour long, but without the content to fill each one up in a satisfying manner. Then you get an episode like the Season 4 finale that actually could have been twenty minutes longer. This show could use flexibility in runtimes to cut out the fluff.
This pacing problem extends to subplots like the Henry-in-a-coma bit. I don’t think this storyline needed to play out over so many episodes. It ends up dragging. Instead, it could be the focus of an episode, with the entire descent into madness taking place over one episode and the confrontation with Victor paying off in the next. We could have gotten an entire episode mostly devoted to Julie story-walking (see below for more on that) instead of just bits and pieces. The show seems afraid to focus, to give us strong A plots, and spreads out everything and this sprawling cast of characters across each episode as evenly as possible. Sometimes it’s okay to zoom in a bit more and resolve certain beats that don’t need to be dragged out over the whole season.
2. The Most Interesting Storylines Had Zero Payoff
Of course, this might have been a moot point if Season 4 actually delivered on its promises. I went into this season thinking we’d get a really cool “story-walking” plotline following Julie through time. Instead, she tried it twice, decided that Randall was right and it was just “seizures” and quit. Seriously?
I’m sure they’ll go back to it in Season 5 (okay maybe not “sure”) but this was such a huge missed opportunity to give this season its own identity. The same applies to the Lake of Tears, which seemed really important when Jim’s ghost showed up to tell Ethan to find it. I even went back to the first episode, where Julie tells Ethan the story of the fairies and the Lake of Tears, and I think that story is the key to understanding this entire show – but then they dropped this storyline also, with Ethan apparently satisfied. There’s no way the doll monsters at the pond were the whole point of the Lake of Tears, right? Right?
This show spends so much time on side characters and groups of characters just standing around talking and shouting, that it forgets all the cool stuff. This applies to more general things like the monsters. We get so little of the monsters being actually scary now. Sure, the finale had some, but that’s pretty much it. Yes, Kenny had his scene with the talisman-spear but that was more frustrating than frightening, given how long he just stood there staring when Boyd told him over and over again “Don’t even look to see if it worked, just run.”
3. The Characters Are Too Unlikable (Mostly) And Dialogue Is Often To Blame
There are actually two problems at play here. First, Season 4 basically just dropped a lot of characters from the central story. We get very little Donna or Sara, for instance, with characters like Patty and Clara getting almost as much focus. Worse, in many ways, the show has so few characters to root for now. Victor, Jade, Ethan at the top. Oddly, Mari became one of my favorites this season. I should have known that she was a goner. Boyd has become almost intolerable at this point. He’s always rushing around and shouting and not listening to people and getting angry when they’re not doing exactly what he wants. Elgin was pretty worthless. Kenny is super likable but kind of just follows Boyd around like a puppy dog. Henry has become one of the worst characters. The extras are universally irksome. I guess this is a character problem and a broader writing problem.
Like House of the Dragon, there’s not enough comic relief, not enough stuff to make us actually care about our heroes. I think one reason we all like Jade so much is the fact that he’s funny in spite of everything. We like Ethan because he’s a true believer who cares deeply and has wisdom beyond his years. We like Victor because he’s vulnerable and we want to protect him. These are characters with more, well, character. Meanwhile, Tabitha and Kristi and plenty of others have just become People Who Argue About Stuff All The Time. And Randall, who I was starting to like, basically sat this one out, his one contribution convincing Julie to stop doing the one thing we all wanted her to do.
And don’t even get me started on Henry. He may be at the top of my list in terms of characters I’ve grown to despise, taking the crown from Acosta who, oddly enough, was almost like a normal person by the end of Season 4. Oh, and Patty. Why is Patty even in this show? Why can’t we just focus on the main characters and kill off all the extras? Or at least have the extras join the “bad” faction that tries to kill Jade.
4. The Show Has Largely Lost Its Fear Factor
The first and second seasons of From were scary. There were so many great moments where we sat on the edge of our seats as our heroes dashed from a vehicle to the safety of a house, monsters casually walking toward them. Where has that gone? I’m trying to decide if it’s just run its course and we’re all used to the scary stuff by now, or if the show has just dropped these kinds of scenes. The one I mentioned above, with Kenny just standing there, ought to have been really terrifying but it wasn’t. A lot of people talk about how we need more answers, but I think the problem is we spend a ton of time on characters talking about finding answers, unveiling new mysteries, talking about those and so on and so forth, and this just soaks up most of the season’s runtime.
When we do encounter monsters or other terrors, there’s rarely much of a consequence. Yes, that changed in the Season 4 finale when we lost Mari, Elgin and potentially Fatima (she turned monster but we don’t know if she’s dead-dead) but it took the whole season to get any major deaths. Worse, there simply weren’t that many really tense moments. Even the big lake doll monsters only really injured and killed extras we don’t care about, and then when Tabitha stabbed one, the other just sort of loped away. Without a sense of dread and horror, From just becomes a kind of supernatural soap opera where everyone is angry at one another all the time.
5. Sophia The Worst
I thought the Sophia twist was really great at the beginning of the season. Suddenly there was a mole. Suddenly, nobody was safe. The Man In Yellow had infiltrated the compound. All bets were off.
I quickly tired of the shtick. Sophia’s actual actions are just sort of random and nonsensical. She gets back in Sara’s head and then does almost nothing with her. She resurrects Roger (who was killed by the lake monsters) and has him rampage at Colony House, but nobody is killed or injured and Elgin makes short work of him with a totem spear. The second big twist is that Clara is one of Sophia’s pawns, but Clara is a nobody as far as we’re concerned, and it’s not a particularly interesting revelation that some tertiary character we hardly know is actually a spy for the Man In Yellow. It would have been huge if it had been a major character like Donna. In the end, Sophia kills Elgin and steals most of the talismans that protect the Fromville citizens from the night walkers. She dumps them into one of the Faraway trees while having a little chat with the Boy in White.
We still don’t know why the Man in Yellow can do whatever he wants while the Boy in White can only speak in riddles. And really nothing Sophia does this season has any rhyme or reason. She doesn’t really turn the town folk against one another. If her big goal was stealing the talismans, she could have done that right away. She’s enormously suspicious the entire time, and while I realize the characters in the show don’t see all her little smirks, it’s kind of frustrating that nobody even bothers to watch her more closely and that the only time anyone gets a whiff of her duplicity, it’s Elgin with the photograph – which he takes directly to her in one of the most profoundly stupid moments I’ve ever seen on a television show.
Ultimately, this season was a misfire and the first season that I’ve genuinely disliked more than liked. Each season has had its weaknesses, but warts and all I’ve liked the show more than disliked it. Season 4 started strong and then devolved into soap opera and repetitiveness. Unscary, plodding, dreary with a cast of characters that isn’t dwindling in terms of body count, but certainly in terms of my enjoyment and respect.
You’ll note that I didn’t list “We didn’t get enough answers” here, which is probably the chief complaint of From fans. That’s because I’m okay waiting until the final season to get answers. The bigger problem is that From has so little momentum. It doesn’t feel like we’re moving toward those answers, and we’re adding new mysteries and questions all the time. The fifth season will have a really hard time wrapping up everything in a satisfactory way at this point. At the very least, the story-walking subplot should have progressed in Season 4. The division of the Fromvillians should also have been set in motion by this point, with two clear factions squaring off. That’s the only way we get to the whole “this is where they tear themselves apart” goal.
On the bright side, the good guys have the bones, whatever good that will do them. Of course, they also tore down the bottle tree, which is bad . . . for reasons we don’t know. Did it cause day to become night? The weird lightning? Was that just the Man In Yellow making magic? We don’t know! And I suppose we have at least a year to wait before we find out. Hopefully the show’s creators and writers will spend at least a little more time in the gap to tighten up the scripts.