FROM Season 4 Episode 9 Begs the Question: What If the Townspeople Are Already Too Late?

Critic’s Rating: 4.2 / 5.0

4.2

So, what if The Man in the Yellow Suit is unstoppable on FROM?

What if the town is fighting a losing battle, like the Avengers in Infinity War, but there’s no do-over for them to discover once the man enacts all his plans and ruins the town from the inside out?

It sounds a little crazy, but is it really wrong to start feeling that way?

Okay, that was a lot of questions in a row without any discernible answers, but FROM Season 4 Episode 9 made me wonder, perhaps more than ever, if the town is fighting a losing battle.

After terrifying Tabitha at the end of FROM Season 4 Episode 8, The Man in the Yellow Suit shapeshifted back into Sophia, and it was then revealed that she had a connection to Clara dating back to Clara’s arrival in town.

It’s little revelations like that that make it feel as though everything is being orchestrated so meticulously that it’s hard to see a path forward. And when a story starts making you feel that way, it leaves you wondering whether any victory is even possible.

There’s an expectation that when you’re watching something with a clearly defined good guy and bad guy, the good guy will face challenges and setbacks but will prevail in the end.

Boyd, Tabitha, Jade, Kenny, Sara, and so on don’t even realize that The Man in the Yellow Suit is walking among them, nor the full extent of what he knows or what he’s capable of.

I’m not even sure how they could figure it out, unless someone happens to be walking through the woods the next time they shapeshift, and even then, would it even matter if everything happening has already happened before?

Sophia is arguably scarier in that form because she’s so calm and effortlessly capable of evoking fear.

Clara has always been a background player, so seeing her become the vehicle for such an evil act, rather than a main character, felt a bit like a cop-out on a show that rarely takes those routes.

We’ve seen the nicest of people fall prey to the town’s horrors, after all.

Sophia once again used her blood to do something, and it feels like blood of some sort is the key to whatever she can do. We aren’t dealing with someone who can just snap their fingers and turn someone into a robot.

It would seem that rituals and spells must be performed for things to happen, which is a fascinating insight.

Fatima, the victim of Sophia’s plan, was a surprise to me, though it shouldn’t have been, given that her newfound ability was as much a threat to the town as anything else at this point.

Her ability to control Smiley could be disastrous in the long run, especially if she learned to harness it.

Imagine if she could not only stop his actions but also compel him to stop the other monsters. That would actually be catastrophic for everything the town is built around, fueling fear and squashing any and all moments of hope, so destroying that tether would be important to Sophia in preserving the town’s balance.

But what exactly did that concoction do to Fatima?

There are a lot of theories floating out there about Fatima’s fate this season, and I’m coming around to the idea that she may be turning into one of the monsters. It would make sense considering what she went through, and it would also be the single most devastating thing to happen thus far.

You want to talk about having absolutely no hope whatsoever? How about the knowledge that you could not just die there, but be forced to stay there forever as one of those ghoulish monsters?

That may be a fate worse than death.

While the Clara and Fatima storylines were unfolding, the town was also preparing for the cave mission, and a major talisman reveal kind of got lost in the shuffle.

No one has ever understood how the talisman works, only that it protects you from monsters entering your space. The markings on them have also held no significant meaning that anyone could tell, so those markings representing two people, past Tabitha’s and Jade’s, feel massive.

Their past selves play a big role in the town’s current construction, and with each memory they unlock, you want to believe they’re getting closer and closer to making a difference.

The talisman has never felt like something the town wanted the residents to have, and its importance has been emphasized repeatedly over the last few episodes, which has me wondering if something will happen that concerns them.

Tabitha and Jade used a talisman to keep out the monsters once they were firmly entrenched in the caves and ready to dig up the bones, and their plan had me nervous as hell because it felt like it was built almost entirely on hope and a prayer.

You hope the monsters don’t even wake up, but if they do, you have to hope a tarp and a talisman will keep you from an excruciating death.

Tabitha brought up a really intriguing point that Sophia echoed at one point about the importance of how things happen in that town. You can find a way to get from A to B, but if you don’t do it properly, it will not matter in the end.

It was interesting that the Boy in White appeared to Victor and explicitly told him that the bottle tree could not be destroyed, and I still choose to believe that the Boy in White has Victor’s and Tabitha’s best interests at heart.

So his being so adamant about the tree leads me to believe their plan is rooted in the right things, but the way they’re going about it isn’t. Sending Tabitha and Jade down there may be correct, but the contingency plan to pull up the bottle tree could make it all for naught.

Speaking of Victor, I felt so bad for him when Boyd and Kenny subdued him, even though I could understand why they did. They’d put too much into this plan to abandon it because the ghostly child who appears intermittently to only select people said so.

Much like Henry’s plea to Miranda and Eloise during FROM Season 4 Episode 8, Victor’s just looking for some kind of sign in his life about what to do because he’s lost. He’s gotten his father back, a piece of home, a childhood he long ago believed was lost, but he can sense that he’s losing him.

And he is losing him thanks to that blood water.

Henry’s forays into that other world are not only messing with his head, but becoming increasingly real each time he travels there.

Hearing names like Boyd and Donna would only reinforce the idea that the nightmare is actually the real world, not the place where his family is alive, well, happy, and wants him to free himself from the prison he’s chained to.

You can’t even blame Henry for being so confused and conflicted, especially while under the influence, because what’s being said to him in this make-believe land sounds more believable than being trapped in hell.

I knew the anchor would be Victor to this “dream world”, and I’m fully expecting the finale to show Henry preparing to kill him as a means of escaping and getting back to the life he thinks he’s living.

It’s incredibly dark and disturbing to think we could be heading into a finale that will have Henry attempt to kill his son, or maybe even himself. Tabitha and Jade will seemingly be up against the cave monsters, and Fatima may be slowly turning into one.

Oh! And Sophia revealed herself to Elgin, so he’s likely a goner, or at the very least, he’ll be turned into another vehicle for her to inflict anguish upon the town.

Do you understand why I’m now terrified that the town may already be too late?

Loose Ends

• Julie’s storywalking failures have really turned her into everything that the town wants these people to become. Cynicism mixed with deep-seated jadedness is what they want because it means you’ll be less likely to fight back.

• Boyd’s trajectory this season has been truly fascinating: he started broken, and now he’s putting so much into this plan that I’m actually really worried about what will happen when something goes wrong, because something inevitably will.

• There are so many characters we haven’t checked in with in a while, like Randall and Acosta. They’re there, helping, but they’re not really central to any plots. Will they get moments to shine in the finale?

The bones reveal was simultaneously anticlimactic and miserable. I love that everyone is at least acknowledging they don’t know what actually happens after the bones are retrieved. What the hell, sure!

Alright, folks, we made it to the end of the season, and the town could be on the cusp of something major. Or it could come crumbling down yet again.

Share your thoughts and predictions below, and be sure to check out our exclusive interview with the series’s executive producers as they reflect on crafting another spellbinding season of one of television’s best horror shows.

You can watch FROM on Sundays at 9/8c on MGM+.