In Season 4, From’s writers introduced what was essentially bait for media literates. By allowing us a glimpse of the specific illusions that Henry was being presented with after being spiked with the Man in Yellow’s blood, the show introduced an alarming “it’s all a dream” theory. Instead of presenting it as a potential solution to Fromville’s myriad problems, though, it became an engine to drive the plot and a more personal echo of Abby’s Season 1 arc. The showrunners have already made clear in interviews that a cheap explanation isn’t going to be the ending of the show in the already confirmed Season 5. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be foreshadowing for something else.
I’m willing to give the writers the benefit of the doubt and assume that Henry’s dream arc is much smarter – and potentially more worrying – than the surface-level cop-out it initially appears to be. I’ll even go a bit further and suggest that it’s more than just a psychological trap and is instead giving us a clue about what the ultimate solution to escaping Fromville might be.
The Setup
Back in Episode 7, the Man in Yellow, disguised as Sophia, slipped a few drops of his tainted blood into Henry’s drink. Immediately after, he began experiencing extremely lifelike dreams of “waking up” in a real-world hospital room, accompanied by a much more well-adjusted version of Victor. Even Eloise is alive.
The denizens of this dream world began convincing Henry that Fromville itself was the dream, and that the only way to escape from it was to sever his anchor to it. In other words, this meant killing Victor, which he tried to do in the Season 4 finale, but was unsuccessful thanks to Ethan.
But it’s a common trick. The Man in Yellow wages war by convincing the people he’s able to get his hooks into that Fromville itself isn’t real and that it is merely a construct of a damaged mind.
The Abby Example
Thanks to Abby’s experiences, we know that none of this is real. She underwent the exact same process and became convinced that the town was a dream, and the only way to wake up was to kill everyone. Of course, Abby’s killing spree didn’t wake everyone up, so Henry’s is a non-starter in the audience’s mind.
This is fulfilling a number of different objectives, storytelling-wise. It’s showing us how the Man in Yellow operates by weaponizing internal anxieties and issues, such as Henry’s grief and loneliness (while also establishing that the Man in Yellow needs a physical connection to a victim, like blood; he can’t just take control telepathically). It’s also using what happened with Abby to build tension around what might happen with Henry and Victor.
That’s Bait
Ultimately, it was obvious from the very beginning that Henry’s dreams were bait for an audience who were paying attention. The Abby parallels were obvious, and reassurances that “it was all a dream” wouldn’t be the solution to any of the problems meant that nobody believed Henry killing Victor would save everyone. But they did believe that he might kill Victor all the same.
But this all makes me think that Henry’s dream plot, especially given that he ultimately didn’t kill Victor in Season 4, might be a hint-within-a-hint, a way to foreshadow a darker turn with the same outcome, just a different method of achieving it. In other words, I think that the dream may be telling us that Victor needs to die, just not in this particular way.
Victor’s Self-Sacrifice Could Be the Ultimate Twist
Victor is the longest-tenured resident of Fromville. He has been there long enough that he considers it home, and he’s the one character that I worry about in the event of the residents finally managing to escape. Truthfully, will the outside world really offer anything for Victor?
Since I can’t imagine Victor outside of Fromville, I’m compelled to imagine that he won’t leave. And that leads me to think that he’s not supposed to leave. He’s a child of the place, at this point, privy to information that none of the others are, even if he can’t recall it, and it’s him that the Boy in White always seems to interact with.
We also know through the Man in Yellow himself that Fromville is a place built on ritual sacrifice. The engine driving most of Season 4’s plot was recovering the bones of the Anghkooey children. Victor himself has suggested to Ethan that everyone will die except him and that he will be left alone, repeating Victor’s experiences.
I think that the ultimate hinge point of the story will be Victor sacrificing himself to allow Ethan to escape the cycle. It’ll take a ritualistic form of some kind, which means it’ll be amenable to the town’s internal logic, and Victor will be okay with it because he’ll know intuitively that he can’t survive outside of the Township. In this sense, I think Henry’s dreams were right about one thing. Victor is the anchor, and his death will ultimately free everyone. It just won’t come about in the way that Henry – or anyone else – necessarily thought.
