Summary
Before continues a trend of becoming more coherent in Episode 6, revealing some connections between Eli, Noah, and Ben Walker.
Well, Before is heating up a little, isn’t it? Episode 6, “Fever Dream”, continues a recent trend of being quite coherent, actually providing some answers to the key questions the show is raising. Don’t get me wrong, I still have no idea what’s really going on. But I at least feel like we’re on the way to finding out.
What I particularly appreciated here was the odd dynamic of Billy Crystal on the cusp of complete delirium getting oddly jealous about his dead wife’s ex-boyfriend, which intertwines with a lot of his other anxieties about their marriage and her death (that, lest we forget, he might have been responsible for.) It’s not just jealousy, since it turns out that Ben Walker is essential to understanding whatever is going on with Noah, but there is a moment where he asks Barbara if she thought Lynn was happy with him.
What Ben is key to understanding is the latest very bizarre development in Noah’s case, which is that Eli slicing open his head and pulling out an imaginary worm cured the mass psychogenic illness he had caused among the hospital’s child patients. This muddies the waters of what should be an open-and-shut tribunal, since it gives Eli a medical justification for hacking a kid to bits, even though he’s still – rightly – undergoing an internal investigation.
In the meantime, Eli becomes more dementedly focused than ever on the case, sabotaging Sue Ann and Lance’s efforts to stage the house for a viewing, paying no attention whatsoever to his plans with Barbara and Sophie to go ice skating, and festooning his office walls with pictures of worms, eyeballs, and other things you generally don’t want to see pinned to the corkboard of an old man’s office.
The key is flashbacks. During his deliberations Eli has a few that shed some real light on what we’ve been seeing. For instance, Before Episode 6 reveals how he and Lynn met – he was the attending doctor when she rushed Walker into hospital with frantic Dutch delusions about worms. As it turns out, Eli has been testing the boundaries of professional ethics for a long time.
Judith Light and Billy Crystal | Image via Apple TV+
Walker was a drug addict and had always suffered from bad dreams, but when he had stopped to take pictures of a seemingly random farmhouse, he had an attack that eventually proved fatal. We still don’t know the connection between the farmhouse and the worms, or between Walker and Noah, but we do know that there is one, which is at least something.
In the meantime, Denise is faced with the possibility of Noah being taken away to a long-term care facility if he doesn’t show any meaningful improvement, so she’s a little frantic in “Fever Dream”. The situation isn’t helped by the fact she ends up with a broken arm thanks to Noah imagining a wasp climbing out of the bath tap and into her ear; his lashing out and later dismissal of her, both verbally and in writing, leaves her at a loss, though I do think he’s trying to protect her from whatever is imperilling him.
Denise tries to turn to Eli for help and reassurance, but when she arrives at his house only Cleo is there. When she sees his collage of horrifying imagery she is understandably alarmed. Perhaps Eli isn’t best-positioned to deal with his case after all.
And Denise might be right. With help from Cleo, Eli tracks down Walker’s next of kin, his estranged brother Lawrence, and goes to see him. The brothers weren’t in contact when Ben died – they had fallen out long before when Ben stole his brother’s baseball card collection to fund his drug habit. But Lawrence is wearing a necklace that Eli recognizes, which triggers another flashback. Ben was wearing it the night he was admitted to hospital; the night he died. Eli saw it when he was performing CPR. And he also saw a birthmark on Ben’s chest – the exact same birthmark that Noah has.
Curiouser and curiouser.
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