Summary
In Season 4, From begins to tie its various mysteries into a more coherent whole, and with Boyd already beginning to give up in “The Arrival”, the crushing inevitability of an inescapable nightmare feels more oppressive than ever.
The recurring thematic motif of MGM+’s From is that you can’t change a story that has already been told. It isn’t so much about what might happen next as it is about how whatever is already happening has been happening in precisely the expected way since the very beginning. Expected by whom, you might ask? Well, therein lies the rub, and part of the big dramatic question that Season 4 seems interested in answering. Between the Man in Yellow, Ethan, Julie, and Victor, Episode 1 of this latest season, “The Arrival”, begins to shine new light on the mysteries of From’s circuitous setting by filtering it through those who exist outside of the storybook logic that holds the place together.
In other words, it’s about time that the people trying to figure all this out started to turn to those who have, on some level, had an idea all along. It’s a transition of power from the adults in the room – the Boyds, the Tabithas, et al – to the young and the eccentric; it’s real-world logic surrendering itself to the fluidity and impossibility of pure storytelling. A story already told can’t be changed, true, but it can be observed and understood in endless, often unexpected ways.
This is the Man in Yellow in a nutshell. The Season 4 premiere picks up right where the Season 3 finale left off, to the second, but the Man in Yellow ripping out Jim’s throat isn’t a harbinger of things to come so much as a confirmation of things that have already been and gone. The show is totally unsubtle about the Man’s foreknowledge of things to come. We’re approaching his “favourite part” (and no, he doesn’t mean Season 5, though if he did, he’d be getting his wish). He recognises Julie from some previous version of the same events, like a new actor playing the same character. Everything that is happening has happened before, and will happen again, and in its unavoidably cyclical nature, it’ll break even those trying most ardently to free themselves from it.
Those like Boyd. Throughout “The Arrival”, Boyd becomes increasingly distraught and hopeless after realising that Fatima’s delivery of an embryonic Smiley is proof that there’s no way to fight back. The only monster they were able to kill came straight back as good as new, just as happy as before, as though nothing had happened. The callousness with which Fatima was used as a vessel for that, and how heinous several of the attending events were, is enough to break Boyd, or at least begin that process. If the survivors are willing to become monsters in order to escape their circumstances, but their circumstances are unavoidable, how do they justify becoming monsters? Or, alternatively, if they always become monsters, no matter what happens, then were they already monsters to begin with?
These are big, interesting questions, and they don’t have easy answers, which is why From remains so compelling in Season 4. It’s a Lost-style mystery box of a narrative, but the real intrigue isn’t the twists and turns in isolation, but what their inevitability says about the story itself. It’s burning hope for fuel, and prior to this season, it was Boyd who had the deepest reserve. His becoming undone is less a character arc than a symbolic turning point, proof that we’re entering truly uncharted territory.
It’s very impressive how all this is coming together, for the most part, but it also requires not only a suspension of disbelief but also, a bit more damagingly, characters to be stupid or uncommunicative or passive in ways that don’t always ring true. I think you can see this most predominantly in the Sophia twist, which can only happen since she and her priest “father” aren’t given the necessary suspicion and scrutiny that, at this point, any new arrivals really deserve.
Sophia is the Man in Yellow. It’s a neatly handled reveal that only becomes clear in the final moments, but it isn’t hard to guess given the nature of shape-changing entities, which isn’t a new concept for the show. I can’t help but feel as if people should be a bit more interrogative at this stage, given everything. Of course, you could make the argument that the Man in Yellow already knows they won’t be, but that’s a case of the tail wagging the dog. If his foresight makes his own infiltration of the group too easy, it also makes the group look too stupid, and the broader argument the show is making about the inevitability of pre-determined outcomes doesn’t ring as true. It feels like supplication.
You can see a version of the same idea in, say, Tabitha refusing to talk about very important theories with Ethan and Julie, even though Ethan and Julie seem to have significantly more connection to the goings-on than anyone else. Ethan has been cryptically foreshadowing events since the very beginning, and Julie’s “story-walking” seems to be a pretty obvious form of time-travel, or at least an ability to move between versions of the same story, which would be why the Man in Yellow recognises her. Characters keeping needlessly quiet about details in a story where every detail matters is a deliberate delaying tactic that is really obvious to the audience, and more importantly, isn’t much fun.
But if nothing else, From Season 4, Episode 1 proves that the show is, as Boyd describes the town, several steps ahead. It doesn’t have that worrying scattershot quality of stories that have written themselves into a corner and started throwing outlandish stuff at the wall to see what sticks. Instead, it’s gradually revealing itself to be smarter and more considered than anyone actually realised, tying all of its clues and mysteries into a more coherent, almost biblical whole. Boyd is simply the first to realise, and I mean truly realise, that the story is happening to its characters, and that they’re barrelling towards an ending that, no matter what they do, they might not be able to change.
