FROM’s David Alpay Breaks Down Jade’s Shocking Season 4 Revelation

We’re halfway through FROM Season 4, and we’re learning something new every week.

As the season unfolds, answers remain frustratingly scarce, and Jade has reached a point where he’s willing to do whatever it takes to recover his memories and uncover the truth.

If that means taking a chance on some potentially magical mushrooms, so be it.

Jade’s journey since FROM Season 1 has involved hitting rock bottom, but also coming out the other side and committing himself to searching for a way home.

After the revelation that he and Tabitha are reincarnations of Miranda and Christopher, and thus likely have memories tied to the town, Jade has been working to uncover more information.

FROM Season 4 Episode 5 finds him confronting his past after munching on those mushrooms, and what follows is a trip down memory lane that he’s just beginning to understand.

We spoke with David Alpay about Jade’s experience, what the vision quest reveals, and what viewers can expect from the remainder of FROM Season 4.

The place we’re currently sitting in Jade’s storyline has been percolating throughout the entire series in different ways, but we didn’t know about it as an audience.

How aware were you of how Jade’s story was building over the years toward the one that he’s currently in?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I had no concrete proof of where this revelation was going.

I think you’re referring to the four guys we see in the visions he’s been having. That was a surprise to me. I got a hint of it at the end of last season with the Anghkooey stuff.

I knew that it meant that he’d been there many times, but the fact that he had been these people was kind of not super clear. John Griffin, our writer, did mention it. All he said to me at one point last summer was, “You do know who the Civil War soldier is, right?”

It was that, and it felt like the feeling I had when I read it in the script, and I hope the audience feels it too.

By the way, it’s such a credit to the director, Jack Bender, who figured out a way to show the audience and make the audience feel what I’m feeling when you see these guys all playing that song on the violin. What a great way to connect Jade to these other people.

That’s brilliant. That is experience level 100. That is so cool. And I was very happy with how they did that and how they shot it.

Now that he realizes that these are other reincarnations of him, past Jades, how do you think he’s internally processing the revelation? Has he had time to process it?

Right after that revelation, they go their separate ways. Tabitha runs off, Jade runs off, and Jim meets his end. They don’t know about Jim. And when Jade sees Tabitha at the car crash, he’s already been wandering through the forest.

It’s almost continuous. It picks up right where we left off. So he’s had that walk to sort of process what’s going on and to really come to terms with that realization, so he’s internalized it. He’s a quick thinker, I feel like. Jade processes pretty quickly.

And by the time he sees Tabitha again, he’s seeing her not as Tabitha, the woman we’ve been sort of following for four seasons. He sees her as the latest iteration of the love of his life, like his soulmate. He isn’t the same person anymore because he’s re-experienced all these lives.

If we understood it correctly, it’s that he relived all those moments. All of a sudden, in the snap of a finger, he lived a thousand years over again.

One of my favorite shows is Star Trek: The Next Generation.

There’s a Picard episode where he encounters an alien entity, goes back, and experiences life on another planet.

He experiences the entire sort of ecological collapse of that civilization. And all he has to show for it is that he knows how to play this flute from that planet, like this instrument.

He’s left with the culture of that planet in the form of a flute. And when I read the script for that last episode of Season 3, and then when I started reading the scripts for Episode 4, I’m like, “Oh my God, I’ve been here before. I’ve seen this before. I’ve felt this before. I know exactly what this is.”

So, in a way, Star Trek helped me figure out Jade for this season’s arc.

What I wanted to do was be really careful to play any moments that I had with Tabitha with that knowledge in Jade, and knowing that Tabitha also has it, but she’s a lot better at pushing him away than Jade is, but that Jade would have to. He would have to.

If he loved her so many times and remembered that he loved her so many times, he’d be patient and give her space to deal with the loss of Jim, and acknowledge and love her all the way through.

Even if that means that she loved somebody else, he still loves her, and he has to give her time and space to resolve that.

And I think later on in this season, we see how that plays out.

Jade’s trip around the town and following his younger self was pretty terrifying at various turns. How do you think what he experienced that day is going to propel him forward through the rest of the season?

Well, okay. So, the most important thing for us when we were filming it was to make sure that we weren’t leaning into the comedy too much.

We wanted to make sure this sequence of mushroom tripping felt real and sincere, grounded in reality, and not sort of clownish buffoonery. This needed to be as genuine as possible.

A, it helps with the payoff at the end of the episode. B, it makes the audience believe Jade when he says, “This is real. What I saw is real. What I learned is very important and real.” And so, the only way to do it was to play it as down-to-earth as possible.

To that end, many of the effects were in-camera, meaning very little CGI. The camera distortions were in-camera. We were using bits of glass, plastic, and other stuff in front of the lens to distort the visual spectrum.

One of the few examples of CGI I remember from that sequence was the skull. The blood was stuff that I actually ingested. It was absolutely disgusting. But the stuff in the skull where you see spiders kind of coming out of it, when we shot it, it was maggots.

We actually had jellybeans that were melted just a little bit to get the shell off, and then carved to look like little worms, and it was full of those, and some of them got down my throat. That was the only CGI where they turned those into spiders somehow.

But that was really important, to keep it as grounded as possible so that later, what happens and what Jade decides to do is foundational, and the audience kind of comes along with it wholeheartedly, without any skepticism. That was the crucial thing.

Jade, to me, is currently one of the more proactive people in the town, which is a stark departure from the Jade we met at the beginning. What do you think about the growth of Jade as the story has unfolded?

What do you mean when you say proactive? I kind of feel like he was always trying to get out of there.

Yes, I do too, but I feel like there are certain people in the town who are kind of more content to just be there every day. And then there are other people who, every single day, wake up trying to figure out how to get home. That’s Jade.

So, right, which is funny because Jade at the beginning doesn’t accept the reality of the situation, and then he sees the evidence, and then he doesn’t accept the reality of being stuck there. He’s always kind of in denial in an interesting way, but you’re right, he’s definitely motivated to get out.

I think, however, the motivation changes slightly from Season 1, where he’s motivated for personal reasons, to now, he’s motivated for more global, holistic reasons. I think he’s found moments when he bonds with people, whether it’s Boyd or Bakta.

But with all these different people and elements in the town, he realizes that he’s not just doing this for himself. He’s doing this so that they can all get out of there.

And I think the greatest sort of expression of that is where he takes the mushrooms.

Donna says to him, “You realize if you do this, you might not come back.” And he looks at her square in the face, and he says, “Yeah, I get that. That’s why I’m doing it.”

And that is a level of sacrifice that he wouldn’t, I don’t think, have been capable of in Season 1. I think that speaks to his arc. I think it speaks to really cool storytelling, and I’m very excited to see how audiences respond to Season 4 and where Season 5 ultimately goes.

What can you tell us about what fans can expect through the end of Season 4?

It starts to accelerate. We said Season 3 was the end of the beginning. Season 4 is the beginning of the end.

This is where things start to accelerate and ramp up, and we move toward that conclusion. The really special thing about our show is that the end has been plotted from the beginning. Even though we don’t know what it is, the writers certainly have that crafted.

They’ve been really careful not to spoil it for anyone. I’m curious to see how all these loose ends tie up, because if anything is true, it’s that I’ve learned and I’ve realized from the show that it’s not all on the page.

A lot of it is visual. There’s stuff happening in the scenes with how they position things and put in props and other elements that aren’t necessarily written, so we don’t even realize it until we watch it.

And then we take a part of Season 1 Episode 7 or whatever, and add it to Season 3 Episode whatever, and realize, “Oh, my God, there’s a connection there that we didn’t see because it wasn’t explicitly told.” That’s the great thing about our show. It rewards people who watch it carefully.

So, watch carefully, and I think you’ll be very, very happy with how this season goes. I’m excited to find out how Season 5 goes.

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