Summary
It somehow sustains a very palpable atmosphere, but Before has long since gone off the rails, and Episode 8 is the worst of the bunch.
Before hasn’t exactly been riveting throughout, but Episode 8 is a collection of its very worst qualities. Running under 25 minutes, delivering no new information, indulging in fancy-pants formal flourishes constantly, and disappearing resolutely up its own backside, “When We Dead Awaken” is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that this is a four-episode limited series needlessly stretched into ten meandering chapters for the benefit of nobody.
The pattern is so clear as to have become completely tedious now. Eli has an idea, which usually runs parallel to one of Noah’s episodes, and then the two of them just get increasingly nuts as things go on and flashbacks/hallucinations – it’s still a little unclear which is which – give us hints about the plot. Invariably, someone collapses.
I feel silly for assuming that things were ever going to get better. I praised Episode 5, where the plot started to cohere, and Episode 6, which gave some more concrete answers. But Episode 7, where the show completely lost the plot, should have been the indicator that we were circling the drain. Whatever the eventual payoff to all this turns out to be, it can’t have been worth the effort to get here.
As usual, Episode 8 of Before starts with Noah in the hospital, acting weird. Through a jumbled montage set to the tedious on-off click of a switch, we see that Eli is acting similarly weird. Noah wonders where Eli is; Eli gets the photos developed. Back, forth. Noah is drugged, Eli is ranting. On, off. In most shows, this would be a tolerable gimmick to lay the foundations of the episode. Here, it’s about half of the chapter.
The commonality is the farmhouse, which isn’t new information. Eli feels an indescribable pull to it, and a sense of déjà vu that he can’t articulate or make sense of. Jackson reveals Lynn felt the same. The word of the day is “fernweh”, a German expression meaning longing for faraway places. Lynn thought the farmhouse might have been her fernweh. It might be Eli’s too. Maybe Noah’s.
Billy Crystal and Ava Lalezarzadeh in Before | Image via Apple TV+
The unreliable protagonist isn’t new, especially in the horror-adjacent mystery genre, though admittedly, it’s usually a woman who’s being gaslit into believing that she’s bonkers because she recently had a baby or a car crash or a near-miss with a predator or whatever. Eli isn’t being gaslit, as far as I can tell, he’s just a garden-variety nutcase whose guilt has – I think! – sent him postal. Whatever secrets the farmhouse holds, I don’t see how the revelations can be anything other than some variation of this.
The one highlight of Before Episode 8 is that it does, finally, take us to the farmhouse itself, which is located in Orange County and was surprisingly easy for Cleo to find given how much fuss has been made of it thus far. Visiting the building sends Eli spiraling ever further. The property gives him terrifying visions, most of which we’ve already seen glimpses of before – empty pools, wriggling worms, his dead wife in a bathtub. Predictably, he collapses.
The reason I know Before is dumb is that it ends “When We Dead Awaken” with a “twist” that was already heavily implied way back in Episode 1. Eli has been hospitalized after trying to dig the worms out of his hand with a pen, and his manic eyes fix on Cleo for just long enough to reveal that – dun, dun, dun – he killed Lynn. But… we knew this already. We’ve known it since the beginning.
I expect the final couple of episodes to reveal the precise circumstances of how this happened – whether Eli murdered her, or she died as a result of some kind of mistake he made – and how it connects to Noah, but I can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that it won’t make any sense at all.
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