Summary
From returns after a short break in “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” to find the pressure of Season 4’s various mysteries building to near-fatal levels.
Coming back to From after a week off is like re-experiencing a dream you had after eating too much cheese before bed. There’s always some detective work to be done, and a lot of the clues don’t feel real. To jog your memory, we last left Season 4 with Jade having overdosed on magic mushrooms and several of the characters being attacked by giant creepy dolls. By comparison, Episode 6, “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”, is much less outlandish, but its implications are equally serious and almost equally fatal.
Most of the events of this hour are rooted in Boyd’s perspective. It’s an effective showcase of how stressful even de facto leadership can be in Fromville, because how do you make the right decisions when your best-case option is a suicide mission based on a mushroom trip? But after Jade’s vision quest, this is where we are. Jade is adamant that there’s a secret door in the basement of Colony House that leads to a series of tunnels where the bones of the lost children keep their spirits contained. He thinks it’s a reverential practice, and might be the key to saving everyone. But it means venturing down into the tunnels where, you know, the monsters live.
Boyd isn’t inclined to believe anything Jade’s saying, since as far as he was concerned, he never left the room and just had a bad trip in his own, already addled mind. Jade, rather reasonably, suggests that if there really is a door in the basement, as in his vision, then he must be onto something. Given that Jade has never even seen that basement and yet imagined it with eerie accuracy, he has a point.
But, naturally, the door isn’t there. The same pile of furniture and belongings is there, but hides only brick. Or so it seems, anyway, but there are more pressing matters to be dealt with in the meantime, such as the fact that Victor has made his way to the roof and seems on the cusp of throwing himself to his death.
This is Boyd’s second predicament in From Season 4, Episode 6. Victor is still feeling weird about telling Henry that the Man in Yellow ate Miranda, which, when you think about it, was pretty stupid. Luckily, Kenny showed Boyd the drawing moments before this, so Boyd conveniently knows to ask Victor about it. It’s one of those instances where From‘s writing can get a bit too neat for my tastes, but the plot needs a way to prompt Boyd into asking Victor for more information about the Man in Yellow. All he can remember is that he arrived in town alone, in a big brown car. Boyd asks him to draw it so they can locate it, which we see Victor doing later, alongside Ethan, who draws one of the dolls from the lake.
Speaking of which, Donna summons Boyd to the shed to fill him in about that little predicament. Even by Fromville standards, it sounds a bit far-fetched, but Roger’s stitched-together jaw and Patty’s scorched face do a lot of heavy lifting. The working theory about the dolls is that they were a literal manifestation of Tabitha’s childhood nightmares, which tracks with earlier postulations that the nightmares of the residents become part of the forest. Great! Donna is so stressed out about this development that she rushes outside to splash some water on her face and literally has a heart attack. She’s clinically dead for several minutes until Boyd’s non-stop CPR eventually restarts her pulse, but she remains comatose for a while after having been starved of oxygen. Needless to say, Boyd doesn’t take this especially well.
It doesn’t help that Boyd’s closest confidante remains the maybe-ghost of Father Khatri, who continues to appear to him and browbeat him about his leadership skills, eventually compelling him to take a sledgehammer to the basement wall. And, wouldn’t you know it — the door Jade described is lurking behind it. Looks like that suicide mission is a goer after all.
Comparatively, there isn’t a great deal else going on in “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”, but some stuff is worth pointing out. For one thing, Fatima has finished her golem, which looks unintentionally hilarious, but the extent to which it might factor into the wider plot remains mysterious. For now, it’s just a “magical thing” for her to believe in, to give her a sense of normality, which is a sentiment reflected elsewhere by Julie and Sara, who spend the whole episode painting the latter’s house and reminiscing about the things from the real world that they miss the most.
The alarming non-Boyd-related development, though, involves Henry, who is once again getting drunk. Sophia joins him and sweet-talks him into having a few drinks with her. While she’s playing up her inebriation, she pumps Henry for information about his interest in the Man in Yellow, but he doesn’t offer anything of real substance. When Henry isn’t paying attention, Sophia deliberately cuts herself on a broken glass and drips a few drops of blood into his drink. We don’t get to see the outcome of this yet, but one imagines it probably won’t be very good for Henry. Seems like the Man in Yellow is going to have a new thrall.
