Reunited with Tabitha, the townsfolk of From decide to hold possibly the worst town hall meeting in television history. Episode four had a lot of plot developments that needed to be discussed by everyone. With Dale leading the charge, though, the town meeting quickly devolves mainly into a yelling match against Boyd and Tabitha.
The monsters’ goal to “break” Boyd is seemingly being carried out by the townsfolk fueled by their fear and survivors’ guilt. The process of grieving was on display in all its forms, from Victor’s complete denial to Ellis’ anger (a strange change of pace from a couple episodes ago when he was talking Boyd’s anger down). Others, like Jade, decide to lean on their strong suits to carry them through trying times.
The returned Randall is an unavoidable reminder of death. The episode was an examination of people’s response to death with the clarity of “The Light of Day”, as the episode is titled, and the tension that makes people or puts people into the sides of pools. The way each character reacts to both Tabitha and Randall’s separate returns tells a lot about how they’ve fallen into the complacency of the light of day. Dale’s off the handle response is indicative of him growing comfortable with his situation despite how nightmarish it was. Henry, on the other hand, is getting used to his new situation and is noticing things with a fresh pair of eyes.
Photo: Chris Reardon/MGM+
One thing Henry notices is the town’s empty pool and hotel sign, but no hotel, and made me wonder if Henry might be the property genius of the show. We will return to the hotel pool later because Henry has a more pressing issue: reuniting with his son, Victor, who is now an adult. After getting a wardrobe upgrade by Donna (who might be the secret fashion stylist for the whole town?), Henry stumbles upon Victor. These two reuniting is interesting because they are another case of two people returning from the dead.
Jade is the one who does the most with Tabitha’s return. He has Tabitha bring him to the bottle tree that teleported her to the lighthouse. Jade’s curiosity leads him to start tinkering with the bottles, which is questionable for the software designer doesn’t know better than to mess with the tree’s hardware. Jade and Tabitha’s experiment is interrupted, however, when Dale comes along thinking he knows best.
Even besides the fact that Jade had just changed the tree’s status quo by removing the bottles (that have numbers written on paper inside them, in a software like twist), there was no way to determine where the tree would take Dale. That means when the scene cuts to Boyd hearing a bunch of commotion from the non-hotel pool, you knew that there was no way it didn’t involve Dale’s screw up.
As Boyd stepped into the pool with abject horror on his face, it hit viewers’ what he was staring at even before it was shown: Dale had been transmogrified into the side of the pool. After Dale gasped his last breath with his body being crushed inside the concrete wall, Boyd uses this as an opportunity to show the townsfolk why they should listen to him unlike Dale did. Boyd’s sermon is interrupted by Donna, who finds the last remaining person who came to town the same time as her, and both of them commiserated their fallen townsfolk as the episode ended.
Night may be when the monsters show up, but “The Light of Day” shows they have their claws in the characters no matter the time. It is an episode that had a lot of coming to terms with current circumstances, mourning people lost and reckoning with people who have returned.
New episodes of From air Sundays on MGM+.
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