‘From’ Season 4, Episode 5 Recap – Creepy Dolls, A Vision Quest, And Violins

Any minor complaints about the pacing of From Season 4 must surely be put to bed by Episode 5, “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been”, which is packed to the gills with nastiness, mystery, and mushrooms. Granted, I can’t say I know any more of substance now than when the episode started, but I can say with a degree of confidence that there are a few bits in this I won’t soon forget, and the show is definitely going somewhere, even if it isn’t necessarily anywhere without giant creepy dolls and ghostly violinists.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Outside of a few brief scenes checking in on different characters, for the most part the hour is divided into two relatively clean and focused narrative tracts. In one, Boyd accompanies Jade on a mushroom-induced vision quest, and in the other, the lake gang find out what was lurking in the middle of the water and hunker down to spend the night in the woods. The tighter structure really helps things along, allowing both threads to develop tension across the entire episode before they both result in relatively shocking payoffs.

We might as well start with the lake, since that’s where we left things. The first order of business is figuring out what’s in the middle of the water, but since it’s attached to a rope, that isn’t too hard to determine. It looks like three corpses, but turns out instead to be three extremely creepy-looking dolls. There’s nothing in them but stuffing, but the bigger question of who’d put something so hideous in the middle of a lake remains unanswered, so the dolls remain a pretty threatening proposition.

Donna reckons the dolls look like scarecrows, and thus probably have a similar function. In other words, they’re in the water to stop whatever monstrosity is lurking in there from coming out. With a bit of haste, the dolls are floated back out into the water, and the gang sets about getting ready to spend the night in a nearby cabin, since they’ll never make it back to town before nightfall.

Notably, the dolls are familiar to Tabitha. During the night in the cabin, after hearing some distant singing, she recalls why. They used to be hers. She would play with them as a child, but an angry man took them from her, claiming they gave him nightmares. When that man died, his nightmares emerged from the lake. Cue the giant dolls bursting through the cabin. One of them brutally kills Roger by stuffing its hand in his mouth and pulling his lower jaw off; the other barbecues one side of Patty’s face by holding it against the remnants of the campfire. Donna almost bites the bullet too, but she’s saved by Tabitha, who recalls that the dolls can be hurt with a harpoon-looking thing.

Elsewhere in From Season 4, Episode 5, Jade’s mushrooms have kicked in, so he has started seeing spiders crawling everywhere. Before he goes fully under, he agrees a safe word with Boyd – it’s Capricorn – so that if things get too carried away, he can be brought back from the hallucinations. And so begins a vision quest that leads Jade to a 12-year-old version of himself playing the violin in the woods.

Jade recognises this as the day his grandmother died; she asked him to play, and he didn’t stop until long after she had passed. It was easier than facing the reality of her death. The dude who was nailed to a tree and wants Jade to drink a skull full of blood is also here, repeating “Anghkooey”, aka “Remember”. Jade does as he’s told, drinking the spider-filled blood, at which point he’s immediately reprimanded by his young self, who tells him he’s now going to see things he didn’t want to.

Young Jade leads the present-day version to the Colony House, where a bunch of dead folk from his visions are all lingering outside with violins. With some prompting, Jade realises that all of these people are versions of himself from previous lives he has lived in Fromville. He also notices that none of them were torn apart by the monsters. They were all murdered by the townsfolk. Young Jade explains that it always happens the same way. They learn it was him whom the children were calling for, then they hate him, and then they eventually kill him.

Young Jade then leads Jade to a hidden basement door, through the tunnels, and to the spot where the children were sacrificed, which looks a bit like Stonehenge on its side. Boyd tries to get Jade to turn back by deploying the safe word, but it doesn’t work. Instead, he progresses and is ultimately dragged screaming into a coffin by the monsters. Inside, a little boy whispers “Anghkooey” as the lid is pulled shut.

Jade wakes up screaming back in the office, which Boyd informs him he never left. It was all a dream! But, obviously, not really, since the vision quest has provided enough illumination that Jade suddenly knows how they can save the children.

There isn’t a great deal going on elsewhere in “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been”, but for the sake of thoroughness, here it is. Sophia’s arm has to be reset, and immediately after, Mari has a vision in the ambulance of being shackled against the wall while the radio plays what she later describes as the suffering of every person who ever died there. Not the most ideal station! She has another of these visions when she accidentally bumps into Sophia a bit later, but it’s only really pushing the idea that Sophia is causing the visions deliberately, for her own amusement. Mari, rattled, tells Kristi that there’s something ancient in Fromville feeding from their suffering. It’s as good a theory as any.

Briefly, Sophia overhears Julie and Randall arguing about story-walking, but we don’t see anything of them otherwise. We also only get one scene with Fatima, who’s still building her golem, when Kenny apologises for not backing her up. Elsewhere, Henry is not taking having seen that drawing of Miranda being eaten by the Man in Yellow especially well, perhaps understandably.

Things are heating up, though, right?