Things Father Used To Say
FROM – Season 2 Episode 10 – SPOILERS
Sheriff Boyd Stevens
Elgin (Nathan D Simmons) hears this nursery rhyme in a dream: “They touch, they break, they steal. No one here is free. Here they come. They come for three, unless you stop the melody.” Then three of the townspeople, Mariella (Kaelen Ohm), Julie (Hannah Cheramy), and Randall (A J Simmons), pass out after bouts of seizures and cannot be wakened. Unable to help her fiancée, Kristi (Chloe Van Landschoot) has nearly lost hope, and Kenny (Ricky He) tries to comfort her. “My dad”, he tells her, “used to say, ‘It’s hard to see the sweater when you’re only just a thread’. I didn’t really know what he meant ’til now. All of the people that have gotten stuck here – maybe we aren’t the ones that get to go home. But maybe what we did here makes it easier for the people who come next. Maybe we’re the reason that they get to go home.”
While Victor has an occasional five o’clock shadow, he is never seen with noticeable facial hair.
Julie’s mother Tabitha (Catalina Sandino Moreno) has not lost hope, and remembers that the last thing Victor’s mother did (according to Victor) was try to rescue “the children in the tower”. Tabitha has been having visions and dreams about zombie kids who constantly repeat the word Anghkooey. She has also dreamt of a tower, which looks like the lighthouse that Boyd (Harold Perrineau) and Sarah (Avery Konrad) spotted at the end of Season One, just before the Boy in White (Vox Smith) sent them into a farway tree.
At her request, Victor (Scott McCord) takes Tabitha to the place where he found his mother’s body, which is near the bottle tree (The same tree where Boyd and Sarah found large numbers of spiders in Episode 1.9.) Victor and Tabitha find no sign of arachnids, but Tabitha steps into the bottle tree, which is also a farway tree, and emerges in dense forest, after which she quickly locates the tower/lighthouse.
Randall, who knows no one in town and has exhibited signs of paranoid delusion, is found unconscious in the woods and brought back to Colony House.
The Wedding
Ellis (Corteon Moore) and Fatima (Pegah Ghafoori) have a lovely wedding at Colony House, and Fatima becomes the second character in this episode to reference the advice of an absent father. She tells her husband-to-be: “My father had a saying. Well he had a lot of sayings, actually, but my favourite one was always ‘Life is a journey through the unknown, and though your eyes and mind may sometimes deceive you, your heart will never lie.'” (In other words, look at things the right way, and it all makes sense.) After the wedding, Ellis’ father has an epiphany.
Abby‘s ghost and the ghost of Tom
Boyd leaves the wedding, grabs a torch from Victor’s truck, and returns to the place in the woods where he encountered the ex-marine Martin (Robert Verlaque). When he lights the torch, the chamber becomes visible and he sees Mariella, Julie, and Randall shackled to the walls just as Martin had been.
Back in town, all three begin screaming as soon as their eyes open as though they are seeing something terrifying, and Boyd also hears their screams. The music box is playing and as Boyd prepares to smash it, his dead wife Abby (Lisa Ryder) appears and tries to convince him not to, saying it is hope, not fear, that feeds the forest. (To leave a place means to enter another. Perhaps she is paraphrasing Dante’s “Leave behind all hope, ye who enter here.”) Boyd trashes the box anyway.
The screaming stops and the three wake up, none the worse for wear. When Boyd extinguishes the torch, he finds himself in the woods again and sees the same dog he saw in “The Kindness of Strangers” (Episode 2.2). Though the dog wears no collar, Boyd called him Gus the first time he saw him.
Tabitha and (inset) Dr. Brody — Moreno also stars as Saya in John Woo‘s film SILENT NIGHT
Tabitha climbs to the lantern room of the lighthouse and meets the Boy in White who says apologetically: “This is the only way”. and pushes her through the surrounding glass. Then, in the episode’s most intense scene, a confused Tabitha wakes in hospital and climbs out of bed. Doctor Brody (Sharleen Kalayil) enters the room.
TABITHA: “Where am I?”
DR. BRODY: “St. Anthony’s Hospital. I’m Dr. Brody. Three days ago, a pair of hikers found you in the woods. You were lying unconscious on the side of a trail.”
TABITHA: [bewildered] “No.”
DR. BRODY: “Do you remember what you were doing out there?”
TABITHA: [with growing horror] “No. No. No, no, no, no, no.”
As she ascends the stairs in the lighthouse, Tabitha (Catalina Sandeno Moreno) passes a toy dump truck, a toy medical vehicle, and an interrupted card game. We can read one card, the eight of clubs. In a Tarot deck, that would be the The Eight of Wands, and, if upright, would indicate the end of a long journey.
A small town on the shore of a lake can be seen outside the hospital window. It is possibly relevant that St. Anthony is the patron saint of lost items, and is credited with miracles involving lost people.
Meanwhile, Jade (David Alpay) has an encounter with Tom (Reid Price) who died a while ago trying to help rescue Tabitha. The spectre of Tom, whom Jade thinks is “some sort of stress-induced psychosis,” talks Jade into a trip to the tunnels. Once there, Jade’s phone acts like Boyd’s torch, allowing him to see his surroundings differently. He sees seven zombie kids lying supine in a circular formation chanting Anghkooey. Looking up, he sees a skylight that resembles the unexplained symbol in Victor’s notebook.
Is Tabitha seeing her surroundings for what they really are, or has she transferred to a different illusion?
Seasons One through Three can be streamed on MGM+.