From Series 2

 

From Hell

From - Series 2
Airdate 23 April - 25 June
10 Episodes

Warning: Yeah, I think this one will have to have spoilers.

So Season 2 of From gives us very little answers to the many questions posed on an almost weekly basis in the first season (reviewed here). The cast, including Harold Perrineau, Elizabeth Saunders, Eion Bailey, Ricky He and Avery Konrad... also return with many of the surviving regular characters and, in the case of a few people... dead ones too. Some in flashback but also some as ‘personal ghosts’ who appear in certain characters’ heads to help them try to think out their problems... or perhaps hinder them, who knows. We also have a bunch of new characters to contend with too.

This one carries on from exactly where the last season left us, with at least four cliffhangers to be taken care of... so thread one: Sheriff  Boyd is teleported by the tree to a structure where he manages to escape from a well with the help of an old man chained to a wall (yeah, hold that thought). The old man dies but not before he transfers his blood to Boyd, which now has worms crawling around in it and which also gives him hallucinations about a music box. The music box will also overlap into other characters’ sleeping and waking dreams as the show progresses, playing an important part in the season finale.

Thread two: The voice on the radio who knows exactly what’s going on... is unresolved and perpetuates a mini mutiny involving a new way of thinking between two of the trapped characters, with some dramatic consequences.

Thread three: The character digging to find where the electricity comes from (only to find their wires lead to nowhere and there’s no way any of them should be able to have electricity at all) falls through the house, which actually collapses... but is rescued by Victor, who helps her navigate the tunnels where the creatures sleep (it would seem).

Thread four: The bus full of new arrivals... this takes a while to resolve and introduces us to, among others... the doctor’s girlfriend, who just happens to be on the bus and who is going through drug withdrawal; a sensitive and almost prophetic guy who seems to have some kind of way of navigating all this locked away inside him (if he could only access it); a bad guy who is as unstable and tough as they come, just to throw a spanner into the works and, also, a fairly calm and rational little old lady, who I think will come to play a much more important role in the following seasons (which I hope all get green lit as soon as the next one).

And, yeah, I binged the whole thing in a few sessions because, although there aren’t that many new crazy things happening in this one (although, honestly, there are a fair amount of new ideas... one of them meaning that nobody in town dare go to sleep or be left alone), it’s still pretty compelling and the actors really nail their characters and work well together.

So it’s all pretty gripping. Once again, Victor, the longest inhabitant of the community who has been there since he was a boy (when the rest of the town died overnight on him), seems to be the key to everything... or at least the key to having a better chance of survival. If he was just able to remember stuff but, of course, his slightly stunted ‘child’s brain in an adult body’ is a very convenient way for the writers to drip feed the necessary story beats and revelations over time so, he’s also a very useful character to the overall drama of the show, for sure.

My one big criticism of the show would be how Sheriff Boyd doesn’t notice and ask the obvious question in the first episode. You’re stuck in a well like structure and the voice of an old man helps you and a rope is thrown down. When Boyd gets out, the old man is a prisoner, chained to a wall. Yeah, right? Then who was it who threw the damned rope? And why does nobody stop to ask this question? Has this been left here as a sleeper element for another season or were the writers seriously just running through the wet paint around the corner they painted themselves into here? Don’t know... I may find out, I guess.

The last episode has a conclusion of one of the mini arcs in that Boyd manages to save the lives of three people who are dream sleep victims. It also has a big cliff hanger in which, through being injured in a big fall from a very specific place in this weird world, one character appears at the end to actually escape but, I’m not sure we’ve been given the full picture concerning that little revelation, obviously... so we’ll have to wait and see. Wait until 2024 I guess, which is when Season Three of From, which has been commissioned (thankfully), is due to air. Meanwhile, if you’ve not latched onto From yet, it’s pretty compelling... and sometimes brutal... stuff so, yeah, maybe give this one a go.

From

Hello There

From
Airdate: Feb 2022
MGM Ten Episodes

Warning: Spoilers is probably the only way to go, to give a flavour of this one.

Well From is a gripping show but, I’m kinda dreading where it ends up going.

This relatively new series (there was a time lag between streaming in the US and streaming in the UK... these companies really need to start thinking globally about these things and their presence on social media) but it’s a pretty good one and it got onto my radar towards the end of 2021 when I saw a trailer for what I thought was a new horror movie but, it turned out to be this. Before digging in, I read up on it and thought the basic premise of it sounded almost like a remake of my favourite TV show, The Prisoner. Well, don’t worry... it’s actually not that at all.

I also found out that it shared one of the producers of Lost and, as I discovered when I started watching, it also stars one of the main stars of that show, Harold Perrineau, as one of the lead characters, the Sherif of an un-named village (more like a village surrounded by forest, actually) full of mystery. However, those two people don’t seem to be the only similar elements the show features (yeah, I’ll get to the whole Lost thing in a little while).

The basic premise, which gets slowly added to from the first episode onwards, is a small community in a village where, once you somehow see the ‘upended tree and the crows’, you can’t help but drive your vehicle on into their communty. Once you do, however, you can’t escape. Every straight line away from the village just brings you back to village again. Worse, though, than not being able to escape, is that you need to get into a safe place before sundown... safe being a place where doors and windows are shut and a mysterious talisman is hung by your door. Otherwise the vampire-like monsters that come out at night will smile at you while they tear you apart and eat bits off you.

So the family unit of a mother, father, daughter and younger son who we start off with in the first episode... who have a traumatic experience when they crash their wagon far outside the main hub of the community and the young son is pinned to the van by his leg, with a rod going through it, just as day turns to night... are another set of main characters in a show which is populated by little overlapping cliques of characters, who just want to try and somehow get out of their village and survive each night. Before the show properly starts, we are shown a little girl tricked into opening a window to the monsters and, after the credits, which are accompanied of a really flat but ‘it’s growing on’ me version of Que Sera Sera (performed by The Pixies.... for the record, I prefer the Doris Day version), we see a mother and the little girl have been torn apart, mutilated beyond belief with their rib cages poking through the flesh etc. It’s a good way of letting your audiences know just how dangerous and ruthless the creatures are and, as time goes on, you realise none of the regular characters are necessarily safe from being killed at any given time.

Because of elements like this, it’s quite gripping and, frankly, I binge watched the whole of the first series very quickly. Asides from Perrineau, who is one of the best things in it, there are a whole host of really good actors such as Elizabeth Saunders, Eion Bailey, Ricky He and Avery Konrad doing a pretty good job here, breathing life into their characters and making the sometimes quite brutal and dark drama come to life.

But my problem is, every time something brilliant keeps happening in the show to keep me watching, the more I worry that I’m just watching another Lost. To explain, I only saw the first two or three seasons of Lost (due to the girlfriend I split up with at the time being the only way I had access to the episodes)... but when I heard how that series ended, apart from being pretty much what I expected, it had also been done before with more of less the same ending to the British TV shows Life On Mars/Ashes To Ashes. Oh, everyone is dead and in some kind of weigh station trying to prove themselves (without their knowledge) and discover whether they will ascend or descend. And when you think about it, that’s pretty much the only way you’re going to be able to end that kind of series which keeps throwing one bonkers concept after the other into the mix.

So, I’m worried that From will have a pretty similar ending. In Lost we had stuff like the random polar bear in the jungle... here we have random juke boxes playing songs, electrical power to the houses which doesn’t have any wire in the cord, people having visions, people hearing voices in their heads and killing or trying to kill their fellow survivors, a huge radio tower project which ends up with the voice at the other end knowing exactly who the caller is and what’s going on in the village, a tree which teleports objects and people to other places and... yeah... loads of tricky stuff which just compels you to watch because none of it makes any sense. So, from episode one, I was pretty sure everybody was already dead and just having a hard time in Hell and, that feeling has just grown on me over the course of the first ten episodes comprising Season One. Now, the writers do try and address this obvious conclusion in a discussion between two characters in the first episode but, my biggest fear here is that’s deliberate misdirection and they really are trying for this kind of end game again at some point. I hope not because, it felt like a real obvious ‘cop out’ in the other two shows I mentioned and, frankly, I can’t figure out a solution to the events here which isn’t going to be some form of similar endgame, it has to be said.

But, also like I said, From is a terrific series and so I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that the producers of the show can take it in a direction I can’t see coming. It’s a tall order considering the insane nature of the show and its Matryoshka doll-like revelations but, oh heck, at least it’s a gripping and intriguing show, for sure. Let’s just hope I get to find out what the ending is before some bright spark decides to cancel it prior to leaving any loose ends, is my hope for it. Definitely worth a watch if you like dark horror shows which don’t pull punches, though.