If you know one thing about From, you know it’s going to be miserable for everyone. Season 4 has been largely biding its time, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that most of the real answers are going to come in Season 5. But the setup that’s occurring in the meantime doesn’t bode well, especially for Victor and Henry, not to mention Fatima, who may be undergoing a chilling transformation. Even though it’s unlikely to really settle anything, Episode 9 looks like it’s going to be replete with truly awful circumstances for several characters.
Here are the biggest questions as we move into the final two episodes of the season.
Is Henry Going to Kill Victor?
Ever since he ingested Sophia’s blood during a binge-drinking session, Henry has been experiencing incredibly lifelike visions of himself waking up in a long-term care facility, greeted by a much different Victor and his son, Sebastien. In the latest episode, Henry was told that he had been comatose for years on account of a bad acid trip, leading him to believe that his being “trapped” in Fromville is a manifestation of psychosis. He thinks he’s in a dream.
More problematically, he’s told pretty explicitly that the only way to leave the dream and live his best life is to forcibly sever his connection to it. I theorised that this might have been driving him to suicide, but I totally forgot that this is From we’re talking about. Whenever the Man in Yellow gets his hooks in someone, it typically leads to one thing — mass murder.
Thanks to the deaths of Miranda and Eloise, Victor is Henry’s anchor to Fromville. So, if he’s going to sever that connection, he’s probably going to do so by killing Victor. And that won’t be easy; people, even those like Tabitha, who is feeling a little motherly towards him, will intervene. Henry may have to target them all to get to Victor, echoing Abby’s plight in Season 1.
Is Abby Trying to Warn Boyd What’s Happening?
As he gets closer to formulating an inevitably risky plan to retrieve the children’s bones from the chamber, which will doubtlessly imperil most of the residents, Boyd’s visions are rapidly worsening. It seems stress-induced, as though every time Jade presents him with an ill-thought-out plan, he sees Father Khatri more vividly. But the bulk of Boyd’s visions revolve around Abby. Given how she went out, and what Henry is currently going through, a popular idea is that Abby is trying to warn Boyd of what’s happening so that he can intervene.
Over on the Reddit thread discussing this episode, user u/EgoFlyer had this to say:
Comment
by
u/Zeroskattle from discussionin
FromSeries
Given the parallels, this makes perfect sense. In a way, through Henry, From is allowing us a glimpse of the kind of thing that compelled Abby to massacre half the town; it’s showing us how the Man in Yellow manipulates people’s minds in order to compel them to do his bidding. Notably, there’s not a great deal of specificity to this plan, since it’s just broadly about driving people mad until they do something heinous. This feeds into another theory that the Man in Yellow may not be as in control of all this as it has initially seemed.
Is the Man in Yellow Just A Bystander?
It’s inarguable that the Man in Yellow has much more knowledge of events than any of the other characters, and also that he has powers that the others don’t. But the evidence is mounting up that he isn’t in control in quite the way as we thought. Is there a chance that he’s not quite the Big Bad, and is actually answerable to someone — or something — else?
While masquerading as Sophia, the MIY has clearly been fishing for information. Of particular note is that he had to ask outright if the totems killed the Creatures, and she seemed visibly relieved when Boyd revealed that they didn’t. She has asked similar questions about the plan to retrieve the bones.
When the MIY confronted Tabitha, there was further ambiguity about the bones. He implied pretty clearly that he didn’t know what would happen if the bones were moved, and also seemed to push Tabitha to intervene in the plan based on her own fear of a potentially worse outcome. If there are things that the MIY clearly doesn’t know, then he may not be as powerful as we’ve been assuming.
Is Fatima Turning Into the Kimono Woman?
After psychologically connecting to Smiley to prevent him from killing Kenny, Fatima has been experiencing some uncomfortable side effects. There are vivid varicose veins across her stomach, and according to Kristi, her blood pressure and heart rate are so low that she should, theoretically, be dead already. There’s clearly a transformation afoot here, and despite Mari’s claims that it might be advantageous to the group, the likelihood is that it’s quite the opposite.
A popular theory seems to be that Fatima is turning into the Kimono Lady who showed up repeatedly to harangue her throughout the second and third seasons. This would make more sense than Fatima turning into a garden-variety Creature, and it would play up her connection to the birth — rebirth, technically — of Smiley.
More to the point, it would also reiterate the show’s ongoing themes of rebirth and reincarnation. If Tabitha and Jade are reincarnations of previous Fromville residents from prior cycles, then on some level so is everyone else. Fatima might be the latest version of the Kimono Woman, and turning into her would seal the theory that every cycle precludes the next.
