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| Oh no, it's The Joker! |
All throw mysteries about like confetti, but not all deliver satisfying answers.
Part of the fun of watching a show like this is trying to put the puzzle pieces together and gain a deeper understanding of what the show is about. Lost famously dropped the ball at the finish line, 1899 got cancelled after one season, while Yellowjackets burned through my goodwill even faster; Dark is the only one that stuck the landing.
Will From?
I have no idea, but it’s a highly addictive, bingeable show: I went through all three seasons over Christmas break.
It’s about a town from which there is, seemingly, no escape. The road goes in, and as you leave, you find yourself entering again. It’s impossible, a mind bending mystery for both the audience and characters to ponder.
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| Google Maps image of the town of Fromville; it includes production facilities and other roads out. It was built from scratch in Nova Scotia, Canada. |
Yet another Mystery Box in a Bottle show in the same vein as Lost, Dark, 1899, Yellowjackets, and their great grandaddy, Land of the Lost.
Not being able to leave unfortunately is the least of the drafted inhabitants problems: of higher concern are the smiling, easy going fifties archetypes who stroll about town at night, issuing bland platitudes and inquiries… until they get close to you, and then they morph into lamprey mouthed horrors and rip your face off. Okay, okay, they actually leave faces intact, they just disembowel their prey, sometimes after playing with it, like a cat with a mouse. A deep rooted sadism lies behind their cheery demeanour.
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| Aerial shot of Fromville: Colony house on the hill at top, and from right to left on the main strip: the church, various houses, the diner, the post office, the gas station, the barn. Production facilities are along the bottom edge. |
Residents avoid being torn to bits at night by putting a small rune stone (otherwise known as talisman stones) by their door: so long as its hanging, the ‘vampires’ cannot get in. How very convenient! A show about unwashed, smelly, dishevelled, desperate people hiding in dirty bolt holes would be unappealing. The vampires don’t even try to force the windows, even though they have superhuman strength and are practically invulnerable: they shrug off bullets like raindrops.
The town is presided over by Boyd Stevens, a 30-year army veteran who’s got a lot of experience at managing chaos, having set up and managed bases in the world’s worst trouble spots. Boyd sets the place in order: he’s the one who finds the stones that allow people to live in the houses, rather than trying to hide in random nooks and crannies, with nothing but hope and crossed fingers to protect them.
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| Map hanging on the wall of Boyd's Post Office/Police Station. Note the circles in the top half by the sides. Not sure what those represent. The water holes perhaps? |
So as insane as the circumstances of the town when the show starts, it’s a step up from what it’d been. We enter the story 96 days after the last ‘incident’ (ie. horrible death), with two vehicles: one carrying a tech founder, Jade, and his minion, and the other a camper van carrying the Matthews clan: Jim, Tabitha, Julie (16?) and Ethan (6?). They almost crash into each other, naturally: this show thrives on drama and danger as well as mystery.
Victor knows this best: he's been in town since he was 8, when his mom and sister, and all the other residents, got butchered in the streets. Victor, now middle aged, is really weird. Go figure.
The Town
The town is very small: one main street, with a church, several houses, a diner, a motel sign beside an empty swimming pool (other than the crashed truck in it), a gas station, a post office that serves as a police station, and a barn without a farm house. It’s an odd mix of buildings.
They’re augmented by Colony House, up on a hill outside town, and a small high school that serves as a hospital. Season 2 adds an automated lighthouse and ruins that revert to a building when entered by Boyd or Julie. Season 3 introduces 3 abandoned long cabins further out, surrounded by spooky wards.
The church is the oldest looking structure in town, possibly hundreds of years old, going by the look of it, probably the same era as the abandoned log cabins. The diner and post office look the most modern; the decrepit gas station is maybe 1930s. Colony House looks like turn of the century architecture, while the high school is probably from the 50’s or 60’s.
The town can be viewed on Google maps, but it’s not quite the same as the in universe one. You can see a model of town differs from the real world, eliminating roads and adding rugged terrain behind the gas station. Or is the model a giveaway that this is all an experiment presided over by Kenny?
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| Model of Fromville. Note the deletion of the road going south (lower left) and the addition of rugged forested terrain north of the gas station. The high school can be seen upper right, but it's not in the same position as it is on the map in Boyd's office. |
At first I thought this might all be some kind of virtual simulation, like Harsh Realm (oh yeah, spoilers), but season 3 has disabused me of this now quaint notion. The show’s firmly set in the supernatural, which means no logical explanations are necessary. Fantasy can do anything, but that said, it’s far more satisfying when the fantasy world follows rules we can make sense of.
So let’s join Dale and dive into the mystery pool!
SPOILERVILLE AHEAD
Spoilers, I say spoilers, ahead!
What we know:
We learned at the end of season three that the vampires (Yes, I’m going to call the creatures vampires) sacrificed children to a demonic being in exchange for immortality. Like a classic genie, the demon gave them what they asked for, but not quite what they wanted.
Jade and Tabitha are reincarnations of a married couple that died trying to liberate the children from their purgatory, the last time two cars came in on the same day, some 50 years earlier. I had been betting on Tabitha actually being Eloise, but she has a mom (introduced in season 3, on the phone), and as yet there is no indication she was adopted.
According to Victor, when the seven children laid on the stones to be sacrificed, 'they poured their hopes into the roots above that formed the symbol, and the roots became the (Farway) tree." The Boy in White tells (Christopher) he has to go through the tree, but Christopher wouldn’t listen, that jerk. So Victor tells his mom, and she goes off and gets promptly killed by Smiley the Joker fan. Cue 50 years later, when Tabitha and Jade arrive, reincarnated, to do the whole cycle all over again.
...yet mysteries still abound:
1) The number of people in town seems larger than the number of houses available. Is there another street somewhere? Doesn’t seem to be. The extras seem to change from show to show, too. This may simply be an issue with sloppy or difficult production issues.
2) Boyd and Kenny both carry badges, but there was originally no police station in town: it was post office. So where did they get the badges? Where did they get their guns? Where did they find the keys to the buildings?
3) Why is there a motel sign without a motel? Were the buildings pulled at random?
4) Why don’t the creatures set fires and burn the town residents out of their homes? One good fire would take down the rickety wooden Colony House. There’s no fire department. The creatures are clever and will lay traps. They seem to understand technology. They also seem somewhat robotic, like they are running on limited scripts, which limit their initiative. They could smash the greenhouse, kill all the animals, burn the crops, but they don't. Do they need the humans as a food source? They went 96 days without any fresh meat, though, so it doesn't seem to be a sustenance issue. So why do they kill people? Shits and giggles? Are they simply sadistic? They live such incredibly empty, barren lives, wandering around town tapping on windows and making banal comments, trying to lure people outside so they can eat them. What a seriously crappy immortality.
5) All the vampires wear 1950’s and 1960’s themed clothing: milkman, cheerleader, librarian, nurse, mechanic, sixties twiggy, cowboy, jock. Yet there’s no postman in the set, no diner cooks, no waitresses, farmers, priests, high school teachers, or police officers. There’s no medical building in town, yet TWO vampire nurses. So… are the town buildings a mish mash lifted from different eras and plopped down together in a pocket universe? Did the post office workers not go along with the immortality thing? Did the nurses work out of town? Would it have been common to commute in rural mid-century America? Why don’t the buildings match the vampires roles? Do the vamps have names? One called herself Jasmine. What about the others? Why not label them? How many are there? I have so many questions.
6) Father Khatri arrived first. He gave the few desperate residents hope. Boyd came next: he provides order and some measure of normality. Jade and Jim follow: one a tech guru, the other an engineer, who can empower the residents in all new ways. Were they chosen for that purpose? Is there a deliberate selection process? If so, why did the gods that be get angry when they started to experiment? Or were they chosen by different entities (The Boy in White?), ones at odds with the powers that be?
7) Speaking of which, who’s the Boy in White? He looks like he walked off a cricket field, and not at all like a child who escaped being sacrificed. Is he a good spirit in opposition to Yellow Suit?
8) The old white guy in the cheap yellow suit seems to be the dark power behind the whole place, and he’s as worn and rough as the boy in white is clean and sparkly. Yellow Suit looks like he just stumbled out of a dive bar after a week long drinking binge, with an attitude born of a hangover from hell. This bodes well for next season: they’ll very likely toss out a few crumbs relating to his nature, now that he’s appeared in the flesh. Who is he? And more importantly, why is he orchestrating all of this? It seems like a lot of work for someone who can't be bothered to have his suit cleaned. Just saying.
9) Jade had a vision of an angry Civil War soldier, along with a bunch of dismembered troops hanging from a tree in bits. He also saw an early English colonist (circa 1660) nailed to a tree, and, later, drinking blood out of a skull, because that's just what you do when you're an apparition. This area has been messed up for a long, long time.
10) What was lurking around the log cabins at night? It wasn’t the vampires, so what? Mystery goats? Giant spiders? Ghosts? Production staff? Fans exploring the site? Moose? There are a lot of moose in Nova Scotia.
11) What’s with the spiders? Boyd goes through a forest wrapped in webs trying to reach the lighthouse, rather like on Guam, which is overrun with the eight legs.
12) What the heck is with the whole music box subplot, and the ballerina? That has to be the whackiest, random thing in the show so far. It was more goofy than spooky. And why did it bring 3 new people into the not-ruin, and subject them to yelling?
13) Who the hell is Martin the Marine, the guy tied up in the ancient ruin (in its intact state, which can only be accessed by collapsing screaming and having an epileptic fit, apparently). What’s with his magic worm infested blood that kills creatures and births cicadas?
14) Why is Randall the only one to keep seeing the cicadas?
15) Who's maintaining the magic lighthouse, and why was there a toy ambulance on the stairway along with playing cards? Is it because that's what will bring Tabitha back to From in the following season? It's a portent, right? Why does getting pushed out of the lighthouse teleport you to a park in Maine, even though it's clearly Nova Scotia?
16) Why is the place shifting to winter from fall so suddenly, after being stuck in summer for 50 years? It wasn't winter outside Fromville... is it now winter there? Is this going to be more of a giveaway that something's not right, when newcomers arrive and find themselves switching from summer to winter, all of a sudden? Mind you, instantaneous temperature shifts can be very hazardous to one's health...
17) Why do the lamps and telephones have no wires, just wire wrappings? Why do these empty tubes go straight down into the earth, to the caves inhabited by the monsters? Why are the electrical outlets useless?
18) They have running water... where do the pipes go? Are the stoves and ovens electrical or gas?
19) What do they do for soap? Shampoo? Toothpaste? Cleaning dishes? Laundry? Why are there no laundry lines outside, or drying clothes inside?
20) Why doesn't every house have a garden?
21) Animals simply appeared in the woods, a few cows and a bunch of goats, but where did they come from? There are only 2 cows, which is not sufficient as a breeding population, and it's been 50 plus years since the massacre of the town when Victor was a child. Those would be some very old cows, inbred younguns, or out-of-towners. It's like the place is being stocked occasionally, like pouring food into a fish tank. Something introduced the animals. Who? Or what? And why? Are they trying to establish some kind of (semi) functional equilibrium between the vampires and the towns people?
22) Why are some people seeing ghosts of dead characters? Khatri and the bartender, for example?
The whole thing with the music and the bottle trees, into which the children poured their hopes, is pretty… bonkers. Jade worked out the tune from the notes in the bottles, then played the music on Victor's violin, which summoned both the children and the Man in Yellow. So.. the bottle tree mystery is kind of sort of solved, but I don’t feel particularly satisfied. Maybe an apertif would help? If this is the kind of answer we can expect for the rest of the show’s mysteries, I’ll be nonplussed.
That said, I have enjoyed the acting, the mysteries, and the drama so far, so maybe this is all about the journey, and not the destination.
From: The Drinking Game
Every time someone says to another character, 'it's not your fault' or 'everyone's just doing their best', take a swig. You'll be drunk in no time.
