From it’s such a weird tv show. There are things about it that I like, and many of its mysteries continue to intrigue me, but there are so many ways in which this show falls short, and the longer it goes on, the more pronounced those problems become.
I thoroughly enjoyed the start of Season 4 and was thrilled to see the characters finally communicating with each other, at least more than ever. But as the season wore on, I started to smell more than a little nervous. And while I liked it FromIn the season 4 finale, I worry about the show as a whole and its creators’ ability to give us a satisfying final season. There are many problems to discuss, but I will compile them all into a neat (though not comprehensive) list.
1. The Pacing Is All Over The Place
My biggest problem with From, not just in Season 4 but in general after Season 1, is the pacing. The show loads up long episodes at the beginning of a season and then ends with a bang, leaving us with too many packed episodes in between. This same format applies to individual episodes as well. Not every episode, of course, but too many pack all the good stuff into the beginning and end of an episode, without the kind of natural flow, building tension, and momentum needed to keep viewers invested from start to finish.
The fact is that 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 about an hour long, but without the content filling each in a satisfying way. Then you get an episode like the season 4 finale that actually could have been twenty minutes longer. This show could use flexibility in running times to cut the fluff.
This pacing problem extends to subplots like the Henry-in-a-coma bit. I don’t think this story needed to take place over so many episodes. He ends up crawling. Instead, it could be the focus of an episode, with the entire descent into madness taking place in one episode and the showdown with Victor coming to fruition in the next. We could have gotten an entire episode devoted mainly to walking Julie’s story (see below for more on that) instead of just bits and pieces. The show seems afraid to focus, give us strong A-plots, and spreads everything and this vast cast of characters out in each episode as evenly as possible. Sometimes it’s okay to zoom in a little more and work out some beats that you don’t need to delay all season.
2. The most interesting stories had zero returns
Of course, this could have been a moot point if Season 4 actually lived up to its promises. I went into this season thinking we were going to get a really nice storyline that would follow Julie through time. Instead, he tried it twice, decided Randall was right and it was just “convulsions” and gave up. Seriously;
I’m sure they’ll get back to it in Season 5 (okay, maybe not “sure”), but this was a huge missed opportunity to give this season its own identity. The same goes for the lake of tears, which seemed very important when Jim’s ghost appeared 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 the whole show – but then they abandoned that storyline as well, with Ethan seemingly satisfied. There’s no way the monster dolls in the lake were the whole point of the lake of tears, right? Right;
This show spends so much time on secondary characters and groups of characters just standing around talking and yelling that it forgets all the cool stuff. This applies to more general things like monsters. We understand so little of the monsters that are truly terrifying now. Sure, the finale had some, but that’s pretty much it. Yes, Kenny had his talisman-spear scene, but that was more disappointing than scary given how long he stood there and watched when Boyd told him over and over “Don’t even look to see if it worked, just run.”
3. The characters are very obnoxious (mostly) and the dialogue is often at fault
There are actually two problems here. First, Season 4 essentially cut many characters out of the main story. We get very little Donna or Sara, for example, with characters like Patty and Clara getting almost as much focus. Worse, in many ways, the show has so few characters to root for at the moment. Victor, Jade, Ethan at the top. Mari surprisingly became one of my favorites this season. I should have known he was a fan. Boyd has become almost unbearable at this point. He’s always rushing and yelling and doesn’t listen to people and gets angry when they don’t do exactly what he wants. Elgin was pretty useless. Kenny is very nice, but he just follows Boyd around like a puppy dog. Henry has become one of the worst characters. Add-ons are generally annoying. I guess this is a character problem and a broader writing problem.
Like House of the Dragonthere’s not enough comic relief, not enough material to make us really care about our heroes. I think one reason we all like Jade so much is the fact that he’s funny through it all. We like Ethan because he is a true believer who cares deeply and has wisdom beyond his years. We like Victor because he is vulnerable and we want to protect him. These are characters with more character. Meanwhile, Tabitha and Kristi and many others have just become people who argue about things all the time. And Randall, who I’ve grown to like, was basically left out, his only contribution to convincing Julie to stop doing the one thing we all wanted her to do.
And don’t even get me started on Henry. He might be at the top of my list of characters I’ve come to despise, taking the crown from Acosta, who surprisingly was almost like a normal person by the end of season 4. Oh, and Patty. Why is Patty still on 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 “evil” faction trying to kill Judd.
4. The show has largely lost its fear factor
Its first and second seasons From they were terrifying. There were so many great moments where we sat on the edge of our seats as our heroes ran from a vehicle to the safety of a house, monsters casually walking towards them. Where did that go? I’m trying to decide if it’s just over and we’re all used to the scary stuff by now, or if the show just dropped these kinds of scenes. What I mentioned above, with Kenny standing there, should have been really scary, but it wasn’t. A lot of people talk about how we need more answers, but I think the problem is that we spend so much time on characters talking about finding answers, uncovering new mysteries, talking about them and so on and so forth, and it eats up most of the length of the season.
When we encounter monsters or other horrors, there is rarely much consequence. Yes, that changed in the Season 4 finale when we lost Mari, Elgin, and possibly Fatima (she became a monster, but we don’t know if she’s dead-dead), but it took the whole season to get any major deaths. Worse, there just weren’t that many really tense moments. Even the big lake doll monsters injured and killed real extras we don’t care about, and then when Tabitha stabbed one, the other kind of went away. Without a sense of dread and horror, From it just becomes a kind of supernatural soap opera where everyone is mad at each other all the time.
5. Sophia The Worst
I thought Sophia’s twist at the beginning of the season was really great. Suddenly a mole appeared. Suddenly, no one was safe. The Man in Yellow had infiltrated the compound. All bets were off.
I quickly got tired of the beating. Sophia’s actual actions are just random and illogical. He gets back into Sarah’s head and then does almost nothing with her. He resurrects Roger (who was killed by the lake monsters) and has him break out at Colony House, but no one 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 nobody as far as we’re concerned, and it’s not a particularly interesting revelation that some third-party character we hardly know is actually a spy for the Man In Yellow. It would be huge if she was a major character like Donna. In the end, Sophia kills Elgin and steals most of the talismans that protect the citizens of Fromville from the night walkers. He throws them into one of the distant trees while chatting 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 Sofia does this season rhymes or makes sense. It doesn’t really turn the townspeople against each other. If her big goal was to steal the amulets, she could have done it right away. She’s terribly suspicious all the time, and while I realize that the characters on the show don’t see all of her smiles, it’s disappointing that no one bothers to watch her more closely, and that the only time anyone realizes her duplicity is Elgin with the photo – which he looks at more deeply in a TV show.
Ultimately, this season was a failure and the first season that I honestly didn’t like more than I liked. Every season had its weaknesses, but warts and all I liked the show more than I disliked it. Season 4 started off strong and then devolved into soap opera and repetitiveness. Fearless, painful, sad with a cast of characters that doesn’t diminish 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 replies” here, which is probably the main complaint of From fans. That’s because I’m fine waiting until the final season to get answers. The biggest problem is that From has so little momentum. We don’t seem to be making any progress towards those answers and are constantly adding new mysteries and questions. Season five is going to have a hard time wrapping everything up in a satisfying way at this point. At the very least, the story subplot should have progressed in season 4. The division of the Fromvillians should also have been launched from this point, with two pure factions squaring off. That’s the only way we get to the whole “here they dissolve” goal.
On the plus side, good guys have the bones, whatever will do them good. Of course, they also took down the bottle tree, which is bad. . . for reasons we do not know. Did he turn day into night? The strange lightning? Was it just the Man in Yellow doing magic? We don’t know! And I guess 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.
