Randall and Julie, Sara and Sophia
FROM – Episode 404 – Of Myths and Monsters – speculative recap ⁓
Julie
Jade (David Alpay) and Tabitha (Catalina Sandino Moreno) explain to Donna (Elizabeth Saunders) and Henry (Robert Joy) what happened at The Brundles. They want to know why Victor (Scott McCord) was so frightened of that discarded yellow suit, and Henry agrees to speak to Victor. On his way out the door, Henry tells the others: “The young boy, the one dressed in white, he said to us that we’re running out of time. For 40 years, that boy was nothing but a painting in my basement. That suit, this place, all just paintings in the basement.”
Victor’s drawing of the Man in Yellow eating Miranda’s corpse.
Donna, who always discourages any sort of investigation into the nature of the town, tries (without success) to persuade Jade not to eat the mushrooms he found in the woods.
Asked if the Man in Yellow hurt him, Victor tells Henry to follow him, and digs up a pouch containing drawings from a long time ago. “He came in a car just like the rest of us,” Victor tells his father. “I thought his yellow suit was funny, and we thought he was just like us. We brought hm in and we made him our friend. But he wasn’t like us. When everyone died, when I found mom out by the bottle tree, I saw him. He was eating her.”
Cruciatus stellarum
Randall watches as Julie walks into The Ruins
Julie (Hannah Cheramy) and Randall (A J Simmons) go through the books they recovered last episode. Julie reads aloud The Grand Gooligog’s conversation with his (or her) distant cousin, Fred the Storywalker. The Gooligog asks: “How do you choose a point in the story you wish to see?” and Fred replies: “You have to create a bookmark.”
Julie wants to control just where in the past The Ruins send her, and concludes that to do this she must create a bookmark. After cutting her hair to shoulder length (possibly to impress Randall) she enters The Ruins with a piece of paper in her pocket. The paper she uses is lined and might be the same sort of lined paper on which Pastor Dunne’s correspondence was written. She plans to leave the piece of paper (suitably marked) behind in the time she visits, reasoning that when Randall pulls her out, the paper in her pocket will have acquired the mark she made.
The Man in Yellow eating from a dead body in the street.
She is transported to a time before she was born (the late 1970s soon after everyone in town, other than Victor, died). Some twenty corpses are visible on the town’s main street in various stages of dismemberment and Julie is horrified to see the Man in Yellow eating one of the bodies. She hastily leaves the bookmark and when Randall wakes her, checks the paper in her pocket, but it has no mark. It is possible that the mark might appear once another, as yet unknown, condition has been met, or it might be that Randall, in a fit of protectiveness, switched the paper to discourage Julie from trying any more of this.
Par insolitum
In her bedroom at Sara’s house, Sophia (Julia Doyle) looks through the Pastor’s personal effects. We see two envelopes with “Pastor Dunne” written on them, one of them in a child-like hand. There is also a letter. Since the outfit she’s wearing was buried in a suitcase in the woods, it is reasonable to assume there was once a real girl named Sophia, because the shapeshifter likely needed some sort of template into which to shift so he or she could fit into those clothes.
The dilemma of the pitcher and the glass.
Sara (Avery Konrad) asks her new roommate why she moved in. “Because when I met you, I knew you were kind,” Sophia replies. “I know what you did was terrible, but my father used to always say that only good people are tortured by the bad things that they’ve done.” After Sara goes downstairs, Sophia mutters something under her breath and Sara hears it in her head. She tells Elgin (Nathan D Simmons) that the voices have told her to to go to the diner, pour a glass of water from the pitcher, take a sip, then pour it back in. Failure to do this by midday would cause something bad to happen to someone Sara cares about, and it will keep happening until she follows instructions.
Kristi and Mari
At the diner, as Kristi (Chloe Van Landschoot) and Mari (Kaelen Ohm) are debating the existence of a higher power and the usefulness of prayer. Sara arrives, sits alone at the counter, and pours a glass of water, silently considering whether or not to follow orders. Bakta (Angela Moore) tells Sara: “You used to work here, right?” “Well, if you ever want to come back, I could use the help. Look, I wasn’t here when you did what you did. But who you’ve become while I’ve known you? That girl deserves a place.”
Instead of pouring the water back into the pitcher, Sara asks Bakta to dispose of it. Almost immediately, Kristi and Mari run outside to find Sophia lying at the bottom of the empty swimming pool with a broken left forearm. “I was standing by the edge,” Sophia explains, “and then it felt like something pushed me.” Horrified, Sara pours another glass of water and does what she was told to do. Afterward, Sara sits in the diner and watches the pitcher to see who might drink from it. No one does, and Bakta pours its contents down the drain.
Quod scribis, quod accipis
Fatima sculpts a golem.
Meanwhile, Fatima (Pegah Ghafoori) is making a golem. She is somehow still connected to the Smiley Creature to whom she gave birth in Episode 310. She and Smiley feel one another’s emotions. “He feels how afraid I am. He likes it,” Fatima tells Boyd. “But making this, it makes me feel strong.”
How Fatima plans to animate her golem is not clear. According to legend, The Golem of Prague, came alive when Rabbi Lowe wrote the three-letter Hebrew word for “truth” on its forehead. To deactivate it, the Rabbi erased the first letter of the word, leaving the two-letter word meaning “death”.
After speaking with Fatima, Boyd (Harold Perrineau) finds a wedding band and when he picks it up, sees it has an infinity symbol engraved on the inside, just like his wife’s ring which he keeps in a box near his bed. But when he tries to compare the two rings, the one he found has vanished.
Simon and his mother Tabitha at the settlement.
Tabitha and Ethan (Simon Webster) go along with Donna and the others on a food-gathering trip to The Settlement, which is near to a lake. Ethan finds a wounded nighthawk and tries to heal it by dousing it with lake water, but the bird does not heal, so the location of the Lake of Tears remains a mystery. Roger (Eugene Sampang) inadvertently unearths a rope which, when pulled, brings something weed-covered to the surface of the lake.
Director Alexandra La Roche
This is the sixth episode of FROM directed by Alexandra La Roche, one of only two women to direct on the show (The other is Jennifer Liao, who directed “All Good Things”, and “Broken Windows, Open Doors” in Season One.) La Roche won the Directors Guild of Canada award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in a Dramatic Series for “Song of Moses”, episode four of John Erwin’s historical epic HOUSE OF DAVID.