And A Time To Every Purpose
FROM – Episode 402 – Fray – (speculative recap) ⁓
Ethan and Julie
A cloth sack with blood dripping from it is discovered hanging from the Motel sign. Fearing that Jim’s body is inside, Tabitha (Catalina Sandino Moreno) sends Julie (Hannah Cheramy) and Ethan (Simon Webster) to the barn to check on the animals. Boyd (Harold Perrineau) and Jade (David Alpay) lower the sack and find it filled with the remains of a ram (which may or may not be a reference to Genesis 22:13).
When Julie and Ethan open the barn door, they find their father’s body hanging upside down from a rafter. On the wall behind him is written: “Knowledge comes with a cost”. Jade says the message proves that what he and Tabitha remembered at the end of Season Three was real, and Tabitha gets so angry her Spanish accent becomes much more noticeable.
Jade’s timeline suggests the town was established early in the 19th century, and the original bottle tree was made in the 1950s.
Left in charge of Tabitha’s children, Donna (Elizabeth Saunders) seems mainly concerned with cleaning up the house. She protests briefly when Julie goes out, but doesn’t even check on Ethan, who is supposed to be sleeping upstairs but sneaks out the back door.
Julie locates Randall (A J Simmons) and persuades him to come to the ruins with her. Ethan goes for a walk in the direction of the RV.
At the ruins, Julie makes Randall walk in first and when the structure, which looks a bit like a machine covered in rock, has no effect on him, she enters and is taken to a night described in “Once Upon A Time…” (episode 210).
Julie and Randall at the ruins.
She arrives after the part when Randall took Donna captive believing she was part of the evil force controlling the town, and she doesn’t hear the musical nursery rhyme featured in that episode or the cicadas that came with it. Julie arrives at that night just as Donna and Jim flee the RV (which is surrounded by night creatures) while Boyd lays down covering fire. One of the night creatures, The Waitress (Terri Smith-Frasier), tackles Julie, and pins her to the ground. Julie escapes when Randall pulls her from the ruins.
Had she been able to remain at the RV, Julie might have seen Randall being attacked by cicadas in the woods nearby.
Ethan and his father.
When Ethan gets to the RV (in the present, not the past), Jim (Eion Bailey) appears to him. Ethan hugs his father with enthusiasm, so Jim seems quite corporeal, and reminds Ethan of what he said the last time they were in this place: “When bad things happen we have to look after each other and always do our best.” This sounds similar to what Jim was quoted as saying (by Julie) in the previous episode. Wile speaking with his son, Jim looks around a few times as if to make sure no one was coming their way.
JIM: “I need you to do something very important. The night we arrived here, when we crashed the RV and we were trapped inside, you had a dream. Do you remember what you dreamt about?”
ETHAN: “Lake of Tears?”
JIM: “That’s right…It’s here and I need you to find it.”
Just before Tabitha arrives at the RV, Jim vanishes.
Wearing her new glasses, Sophia is fascinated by the ballerina figurine.
Sarah Myers (Avery Konrad) takes Sofia (Julia Doyle) to the diner to find her some spare glasses. While sifting through stuff in the backroom, Sophia seems particularly fascinated by the statuette of a ballerina. The figure of a ballerina was on the top of the music box that played the nursery rhyme tune mentioned earlier.
In “Ball of Magic Fire” (episode 209), Sarah talked about her late brother, and advanced a theory about the cicada invasion and similar phenomena. “Nathan was always terrified of cicadas,” she explained. “When we were kids, our stepfather would take us on these week-long camping trips. And all night long, the cicadas would buzz outside our tent. Nathan would cry the whole night. He thought they were monsters. What if the people who die here…What if their fears become part of the forest?”
Kristi leans on Mari and aims an angry glare at Boyd when he manhandles the captured Acosta.
Meanwhile, Dani Acosta (Samantha Brown) decides she trusts no one, and steals the ambulance, intending to drive it back home. Kristi (Chloe Van Landschoot) catches her doing that and hops in, so Acosta drives off with Kristi in the passenger seat. They travel in circles, repeatedly passing through town until Boyd stops them. On their third lap they pass Ethan who is walking along the road toward the RV. Acosta refuses to stop. Trying to make Acosta see reason, Kristi tells her that everyone who tries to escape the town dies. That is manifestly not true. Tabitha tried to leave, succeeded, and did not die.