Summary
Before continues to be thoroughly confounding in Episode 3, and the questions are mounting up to such an extent that it’s difficult to keep track.
Episode 3 of Before is titled “The Liar”, and you have to wonder who it’s referring to. The obvious choice would be Eli, but that seems too obvious. Would a show give away something as significant as the protagonist murdering his own wife as early as this if it were true? Maybe.
But the truth is a rather nebulous concept to this show. Nobody seems to be saying what they really mean, and everyone seems to be hiding something, not least the seemingly supernatural connection between Eli and Noah, and how that relates to whatever happened with Lynn. Consider an early scene in “The Liar”, between Eli and Jackson.
Following that creepy bit at the end of the previous episode when Noah started speaking in Eli’s voice, Eli has been relistening to the recording of the session, becoming even more determined to parse whatever is going on between the two of them. Jackson thinks this is a roundabout way for Eli to understand Lynn’s suicide. He then mentions that Lynn used to say Eli’s biggest strength and weakness was the blinders he wore, which winds Eli up a bit. What’s the implication here? Why was Jackson having private conversations with Lynn that seem to make Eli a bit paranoid and hostile? Is that an implication?
It might just be me, but Eli’s conversations with Jackson feel like conversations with himself. His conversations with his therapist are a bit like that too. I wonder if one or perhaps both of them are a figment of Eli’s imagination, a part of his psyche that he has tamped down to avoid dealing with Lynn’s death. There doesn’t seem to be much logic to his grieving process otherwise. That bathroom that Eli couldn’t enter in the first two episodes he enters early in this one, but I don’t feel like he has made enough personal progress to be truly working through his issues. What’s the trigger?
I’m just spitballing, obviously, but it’s worth considering all possibilities, because the dream-within-a-dream structuring of Before – which we see here in Episode 3 when Eli dreams of Noah stabbing him in the neck again, wakes up, and then finds himself still dreaming of peeling off his skin – doesn’t create much trust in the audience. Nobody’s telling the truth, and everything we’re seeing could be a dream. It’s like Grotesquerie all over again.
Billy Crystal in Before | Image via Apple TV+
Noah has a thing about stabbing people in the neck, by the way. He also has a thing about cracking ice and freezing temperatures, and Eli, evidently as frustrated as we are, isn’t interested in handling him with kid gloves. Instead, he deliberately puts Noah on edge through a kind of hypnosis and has him draw whatever images he sees during his meltdown – he frantically sketches the kid at school who he stabbed in the neck with a pen.
Some side notes here: What’s the deal with the ice? What’s the significance of the kid who got stabbed? What’s with the picture of the farmhouse, and what do the initials BW on the back of the picture mean? Remember, Eli had a picture of that farmhouse in his home, and yet he still seems as perplexed as anyone about what it might mean. He’s hiding something, right? Must be.
But he still clearly doesn’t understand what Noah’s seeing, and why it has such a physical presence, reducing his body temperature and, later, inexplicably filling his lungs with water. When Eli briefly visits his daughter Barbara and granddaughter Sophie, the latter mentions that Noah’s sketch depicts him trying to stab not the kid but an “evil thing” wrapped around his neck. We know Noah sees evil things; tentacles and other fun stuff. Is he trying to fight off some kind of monster or demon? What does that have to do with Eli?
Billy Crystal and Jacobi Jupe in Before | Image via Apple TV+
According to Noah, who asks Eli whether or not someone has “hurt him”, Eli himself has wounded Noah in some way that we don’t yet understand. But… how? Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever asked so many speculative questions in a single recap. This show is maddening.
Either way, Before Episode 3 ends with its strongest suggestion yet. Eli relates his final day with his wife to his therapist, describing how she was unusually upbeat, and him leaving her alone for a few hours to visit a public swimming pool – the one we’ve seen in multiple flashbacks – and pick up Chinese food. When he got back, he claims, Lynn had slit her wrists and was dead. But the snippets we see show Eli strangling her to death in the bath.
Is this the revelation that Eli killed Lynn, or a manifestation of his grief, believing that him leaving her alone for a few hours made him culpable? But why leave her alone? Why stare at some woman at the swimming pool, and hold on to images of that pool after? Why, if he did kill Lynn, bother? She was dying anyway. Readers, I simply don’t know.
If you’ve got any ideas, let me know in the comments.
