From remains one of the strangest shows on television, both in the best and most frustrating ways. There are elements I genuinely admire, and its central mysteries still have a strong pull. But the series also keeps stumbling in ways that are harder to ignore the longer it goes on.
Season 4 got off to a promising start. For once, the characters seemed to be talking to each other and sharing information more openly than they had in the past, which felt like a major step forward. But as the episodes continued, that early confidence began to wobble. Even though I ultimately enjoyed From’s Season 4 finale, I came away uneasy about the show’s future and whether its creators can deliver a final season that feels truly satisfying. There are several issues worth unpacking, so let’s put them into one focused, if not exhaustive, list.
1. The Pacing Is All Over The Place
The biggest problem with From, not only in Season 4 but really since the first season, is pacing. The show has developed a familiar rhythm: open the season with major developments, close with a dramatic finale, and leave too many episodes in the middle feeling thin. The same issue often shows up within individual episodes. Not always, but often enough, the strongest moments are clustered at the beginning and the end, while the middle lacks the natural build, tension and forward motion needed to keep viewers fully engaged.
Many episodes feel as if they could be trimmed significantly and emerge sharper, tighter and more exciting. The series still seems locked into an old-fashioned structure: ten episodes, each running close to an hour, even when there simply is not enough story to justify that length. Then, oddly enough, an episode like the Season 4 finale comes along and feels as though it could have used another twenty minutes. More flexible runtimes would do this show a lot of good, allowing it to cut the excess where needed and expand when the story actually demands it.
That pacing issue is especially clear in subplots like Henry’s coma storyline. It did not need to stretch across so many episodes, and the longer it continued, the more it dragged. A stronger version might have centered the entire descent into madness in one episode, then paid off the confrontation with Victor in the next. Likewise, Julie’s “story-walking” could have carried an episode of its own rather than being served in scattered fragments. Too often, From seems reluctant to concentrate on a strong A-plot. Instead, it spreads its attention across a large cast as evenly as possible, even when certain story beats would benefit from being explored directly and resolved sooner.
2. The Most Interesting Storylines Had Zero Payoff
That might have mattered less if Season 4 had delivered more fully on what it appeared to promise. I went into the season expecting a compelling “story-walking” arc that would follow Julie through time and give the year a distinct identity. Instead, she tried it twice, accepted Randall’s explanation that it was just “seizures,” and stopped. Really?
Maybe the show will return to that thread in Season 5, though at this point it is hard to feel certain. Either way, it was a major missed opportunity. The same goes for the Lake of Tears, which seemed hugely significant when Jim’s ghost appeared and told Ethan to find it. I even went back to the first episode, where Julie tells Ethan the story of the fairies and the Lake of Tears, and I still think that story is the key to understanding this entire show. Yet that thread, too, was quietly set aside, with Ethan apparently satisfied. Surely the doll monsters at the pond were not the entire point of the Lake of Tears. Right?
The series spends so much time on side characters standing around, arguing or explaining things in circles that it sometimes loses sight of what makes it exciting. That includes the monsters, who rarely feel as frightening now as they once did. The finale gave us a bit of that danger, but not nearly enough. Kenny’s moment with the talisman-spear had potential, but it became more irritating than scary as he stood there staring despite Boyd repeatedly telling him not to check whether it worked and to just run.
3. The Characters Are Too Unlikable (Mostly) And Dialogue Is Often To Blame
There are actually two problems at play here. First, Season 4 basically just dropped a lot of characters from the central story. We get very little Donna or Sara, for instance, with characters like Patty and Clara getting almost as much focus. Worse, in many ways, the show has so few characters to root for now. Victor, Jade, Ethan at the top. Oddly, Mari became one of my favorites this season. I should have known that she was a goner. Boyd has become almost intolerable at this point. He’s always rushing around and shouting and not listening to people and getting angry when they’re not doing exactly what he wants. Elgin was pretty worthless. Kenny is super likable but kind of just follows Boyd around like a puppy dog. Henry has become one of the worst characters. The extras are universally irksome. I guess this is a character problem and a broader writing problem.
Like House of the Dragon, there’s not enough comic relief, not enough stuff to make us actually care about our heroes. I think one reason we all like Jade so much is the fact that he’s funny in spite of everything. We like Ethan because he’s a true believer who cares deeply and has wisdom beyond his years. We like Victor because he’s vulnerable and we want to protect him. These are characters with more, well, character. Meanwhile, Tabitha and Kristi and plenty of others have just become People Who Argue About Stuff All The Time. And Randall, who I was starting to like, basically sat this one out, his one contribution convincing Julie to stop doing the one thing we all wanted her to do.
And don’t even get me started on Henry. He may be at the top of my list in terms of characters I’ve grown to despise, taking the crown from Acosta who, oddly enough, was almost like a normal person by the end of Season 4. Oh, and Patty. Why is Patty even in this show? Why can’t we just focus on the main characters and kill off all the extras? Or at least have the extras join the “bad” faction that tries to kill Jade.
4. The Show Has Largely Lost Its Fear Factor
The first and second seasons of From were scary. There were so many great moments where we sat on the edge of our seats as our heroes dashed from a vehicle to the safety of a house, monsters casually walking toward them. Where has that gone? I’m trying to decide if it’s just run its course and we’re all used to the scary stuff by now, or if the show has just dropped these kinds of scenes. The one I mentioned above, with Kenny just standing there, ought to have been really terrifying but it wasn’t. A lot of people talk about how we need more answers, but I think the problem is we spend a ton of time on characters talking about finding answers, unveiling new mysteries, talking about those and so on and so forth, and this just soaks up most of the season’s runtime.
When we do encounter monsters or other terrors, there’s rarely much of a consequence. Yes, that changed in the Season 4 finale when we lost Mari, Elgin and potentially Fatima (she turned monster but we don’t know if she’s dead-dead) but it took the whole season to get any major deaths. Worse, there simply weren’t that many really tense moments. Even the big lake doll monsters only really injured and killed extras we don’t care about, and then when Tabitha stabbed one, the other just sort of loped away. Without a sense of dread and horror, From just becomes a kind of supernatural soap opera where everyone is angry at one another all the time.
5. Sophia The Worst
I thought the Sophia twist was really great at the beginning of the season. Suddenly there was a mole. Suddenly, nobody was safe. The Man In Yellow had infiltrated the compound. All bets were off.
I quickly tired of the shtick. Sophia’s actual actions are just sort of random and nonsensical. She gets back in Sara’s head and then does almost nothing with her. She resurrects Roger (who was killed by the lake monsters) and has him rampage at Colony House, but nobody is killed or injured and Elgin makes short work of him with a totem spear. The second big twist is that Clara is one of Sophia’s pawns, but Clara is a nobody as far as we’re concerned, and it’s not a particularly interesting revelation that some tertiary character we hardly know is actually a spy for the Man In Yellow. It would have been huge if it had been a major character like Donna. In the end, Sophia kills Elgin and steals most of the talismans that protect the Fromville citizens from the night walkers. She dumps them into one of the Faraway trees while having a little chat with the Boy in White.
We still don’t know why the Man in Yellow can do whatever he wants while the Boy in White can only speak in riddles. And really nothing Sophia does this season has any rhyme or reason. She doesn’t really turn the town folk against one another. If her big goal was stealing the talismans, she could have done that right away. She’s enormously suspicious the entire time, and while I realize the characters in the show don’t see all her little smirks, it’s kind of frustrating that nobody even bothers to watch her more closely and that the only time anyone gets a whiff of her duplicity, it’s Elgin with the photograph – which he takes directly to her in one of the most profoundly stupid moments I’ve ever seen on a television show.
Ultimately, this season was a misfire and the first season that I’ve genuinely disliked more than liked. Each season has had its weaknesses, but warts and all I’ve liked the show more than disliked it. Season 4 started strong and then devolved into soap opera and repetitiveness. Unscary, plodding, dreary with a cast of characters that isn’t dwindling in terms of body count, but certainly in terms of my enjoyment and respect.
You’ll note that I didn’t list “We didn’t get enough answers” here, which is probably the chief complaint of From fans. That’s because I’m okay waiting until the final season to get answers. The bigger problem is that From has so little momentum. It doesn’t feel like we’re moving toward those answers, and we’re adding new mysteries and questions all the time. The fifth season will have a really hard time wrapping up everything in a satisfactory way at this point. At the very least, the story-walking subplot should have progressed in Season 4. The division of the Fromvillians should also have been set in motion by this point, with two clear factions squaring off. That’s the only way we get to the whole “this is where they tear themselves apart” goal.
On the bright side, the good guys have the bones, whatever good that will do them. Of course, they also tore down the bottle tree, which is bad . . . for reasons we don’t know. Did it cause day to become night? The weird lightning? Was that just the Man In Yellow making magic? We don’t know! And I suppose we have at least a year to wait before we find out. Hopefully the show’s creators and writers will spend at least a little more time in the gap to tighten up the scripts.
