Summary
Before continues to beat around the bush in Episode 4, and the experience is becoming highly frustrating by this point.
I must admit I’m getting a bit bored of this now. Before is a classic mystery show in that it thrives on asking questions without providing any answers, but as I’ve already cautioned, you can only do that for so long. Episode 4, “Symbols and Signs”, is another cavalcade of weirdness that reiterates the connection between Eli and Noah through symbolism and other means, but still refuses to reveal anything meaningful about it.
I don’t expect all the answers right away, of course, but you’ve got to give us something, and we do seem to be circling the same drain at the moment. An emerging theme seems to be the personification of toys – Noah has a little figure that Eli thinks resembles him; Eli’s granddaughter Sophie later claims that Lynn’s spirit is in her stuffed lizard, etc. – but I’m not sure it’s going anywhere. The rest, from Noah’s drawings to a wild fascination with writing implements and tentacles, is business as usual.
Eli isn’t a very good therapist, either. After getting Noah to once again draw his feelings, which ends up producing something that looks a little bit like Medusa, Eli gets all flustered and somehow manages to lose both Noah and the pen. It’s silly really. Denise is in this sequence too for basically no reason at all, and Eli even gets a bit snappy with the staff about it, like it’s their fault.
I don’t particularly like Eli, which doesn’t help. There’s something off about him. Having said this, though, I’m also starting to think he might just be a vessel for Lynn. That farmhouse that Noah has been sketching is from a picture in her office. Eli’s bathtub – the one Lynn died in – gets clogged with a matted clump of her hair. We’ve already had all that business with Noah pushing Eli on the subject of Lynn’s death, and those flashes of him strangling her. Noah seems to have more of a connection with Lynn than he does with Eli.
Another annoying thing about Eli is that he’s a terrible grandfather. He has Sophie for the day in Before Episode 4, and he takes her to the church where Noah was abandoned by his biological parents. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s something amiss with Sophie too. There’s that whole thing about her believing Lynn is alive in the toy lizard, and she also somehow knows about Lynn “clogging the bathtub”, asking Eli if he’s annoyed about it. Eli’s extremely hostile with Father Dennis and unnecessarily harsh with Sophie when she says stuff about Lynn being in the lizard. This guy’s a child psychologist – he should recognize a grieving process when he sees one. As Barbara reminds him later, Lynn dying didn’t only happen to him, and everyone is dealing with it in their own way.
Billy Crystal and Rosie Perez in Before | Image via Apple TV+
Eli is a pragmatist. He believes in logic and science rather than religion and mumbo-jumbo, which is his right, but he seems to have made it his core personality trait to an alarming extent. He later, while clearing out Lynn’s things, discovers private email exchanges between Lynn and their friend Jackson that imply Lynn was hiding things from him. As it turns out, she was asking Jackson for advice and comfort about her impending demise – and the end of a book she was writing – but she was arriving at conclusions that seemingly existed beyond the bounds of science, and she knew that Eli would unfeelingly reject them.
At the very tame jazz party Jackson is hosting, an odd woman is present who Eli kept making eye contact with on the subway, and another woman chokes on her food. Eli saves her life with an emergency tracheotomy using the pen we’ve spent the entire episode believing Noah was still in possession of. This means that Eli’s outbursts about it were totally unwarranted, but it also means that Noah is carrying around a different object. It turns out to be the little Eli figurine.
In a final little reveal, Before Episode 4 reveals that Lynn was sketching things from her dreams to try and interpret what she thought was the ending of her book coming to her. The drawing looks like Noah’s, further cementing the connection between them without, frustratingly, even beginning to explain it.
Maybe next week.
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