Summary
Before was always going to have a silly ending, but Episode 10 is bad even by this show’s low standards and is far too pleased with itself to even have a campy charm.
Surprising absolutely nobody, the ending of Before is nonsense. We were expecting this, obviously, but Episode 10 is oddly impressive in its self-satisfaction. It’d be one thing if it was just daft and smug, but it’s daft and smug while also giving us information that we largely already knew. The entire finale proceeds as if several prior episodes never happened. And as much as we might wish that were true, I wrote about them at the time!
But let’s try and get to the bottom of this together, for fun if nothing else. As obvious as so much of it is, the show also bows out with some lingering questions still unanswered, but that strikes me as ineptitude rather than genuine ambiguity. Either way, here’s what happened.
Eli is taking Noah for “radical exposure therapy”, since how else are you going to prove the existence of shared trauma that unites two souls across multiple reincarnations? I think the worst part is that Eli is really quite smug about this when Jane calls him to beg for the return of his kidnapped patient, as though he’s the guy with all the answers and not the guy about to get his medical license revoked for countless extraordinary breaches of professional ethics.
It’s annoyingly obvious that the ending of Before is going to prove Eli right, so Noah immediately recognizes the farmhouse and that something bad happened there when he was a little girl. Past life confirmed I guess. But credit where it’s due — the farmhouse is a pretty effective practical set. You can totally buy into the idea that it’s slithering with Eldrich horrors, though to be fair the moving shadows and handprints kind of give that away.
Because Eli is useless he loses Noah virtually immediately, so he is led through the labyrinthine farmhouse by the ominous dripping of nearby water until he finds a locked room. When he tries to barge it open, he trips and falls into a past-life flashback. It’s clearly set a good long while ago and has a distinct wintry vibe as Young Girl Noah leads Young Boy Eli to meet Young Girl Lynn. The kids find a beehive nearby, and when they mess with it the bees go mad, which is typical, and as they’re all running away Young Boy Eli accidentally pushes Young Girl Noah over. She cracks her head on the surface of a frozen lake and sinks beneath the surface. Instead of trying to help, Young Boy Eli runs away, useless even then.
Eli finds Noah in a hollowed-out tree trunk, but he’s still comatose. It becomes clear that the only way for Eli to “save” Noah is to fix the mistake of his past by jumping into the lake, which he does with Noah in his arms. Doing so prompts another flashback, this one to earlier in his current life, when Lynn, still dying of cancer, told Eli that she didn’t want to go on anymore. Rather than deal with the situation he did what he has already recounted doing — went out, creepily stared at people in a local pool, returned home to find Lynn having attempted and failed suicide, and then strangled her to death at her request.
Jacobi Jupe in Before | Image via Apple TV+
This scene should be emotional and impactful, and to be fair it’s quite well acted, but it isn’t exactly revelatory, is it? To be clear here, Eli is atoning for an accident in a past life by coming to terms with something he not only did at someone else’s request but has already confessed to having done in the present day. He has already come to terms with this! He came to terms with it when he opened up to Barbara about it and described the event in detail. He unveiled the secret he had kept since his wife’s death. That’s progress!
Before Episode 10 proceeds like this never took place. You can really tell it expects us to be aghast by everything that’s happening here, but we already knew about it. Of course, this allows Eli to drag Noah from the lake and perform CPR which ultimately saves him, mostly so the scenes can be deliberately juxtaposed with him dragging Lynn from the bathtub and laying down next to her corpse. The only truly curious note here is that it’s Eli giving Noah CPR which seems to have caused the scarring on his chest that Lynn’s ex-boyfriend Ben also had, implying, I think, that Eli isn’t really changing an outcome but just going through the motions of a cyclical story. If Ben and Noah already had the chest marks, then it stands to reason that Eli had already saved Noah in some parallel future. It was all going through the motions.
Noah’s fine, either way. The ending scenes of Before are set a few months later, with Noah having recovered completely and suffered no adverse effects whatsoever as a result of his experiences. Eli has been therapized for a few months but also released, albeit with a court order mandating he keep his distance from Noah (Eli happily ignores this and creepily watches him in a playground from only a slight distance away.) We learn all this in a personal report that Eli is writing about the whole affair and reading aloud, in which he suggests that he basically implied that his delusions stemmed from grief over his wife’s suicide rather than any genuine belief in past lives and such.
But privately, Eli maintains that if whatever occurred is science, then it’s a variety of science we have yet to understand and that a belief in the afterlife should necessarily justify a belief in a “before”. To make matters even weirder, Eli sees a worm crawling under the skin of his forehead and is just about to hack it out with a razor when he’s interrupted by his creepy granddaughter, who now seems to be openly communicating with Lynn’s ghost.
And they all lived happily ever after. Isn’t that stupid?
