FROM Season 3 Episode 7 Review: These Fragile Lives

Critic’s Rating: 4 / 5.0

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We’re reaching that point in the FROM season where you can tell the end is near.

But unlike previous seasons, we don’t seem to be building to something major. There’s no town-wide experiment taking place, and the town isn’t overrun with cicadas, which a few townsfolk slipping into terrifying comas.

Instead, this season, there are just a lot of individual stories dominating right now, and FROM Season 3 Episode 7 was all about furthering those and leading us ever closer to the finish line.

In many ways, FROM Season 3 has felt like a different season than what we’re used to. But perhaps only in the way that it’s setting us up for the final stretch.

They’ve been crafting specific stories all season, and it feels like we’re headed toward the climax of those, but they’re keeping so many things separate.

Everyone has their own thing going on with minimal overlap.

Victor, for instance, has remained steadfast on his Jasper quest ever since he and Sara went into Sara’s basement, and he recalls the events before everyone died.

This storyline is independent of everything else because no one knows what he’s doing outside of Henry and Sara.

Now that he had Jasper, the next step was making him talk, and it was driving him a little batty that he couldn’t just get the doll to start spewing everything he knew.

That creepy doll WILL end up talking eventually because this is FROM, but it’s easy to see from the outside why Henry would be worried about Victor’s insistence on getting there.

The Victor and Henry dynamic remains fragile and complicated because you have two men who have only had memories of one another for years. But their circumstances and all that time apart have obviously changed them into people the other doesn’t fully recognize.

Victor doesn’t know his father as he is in this state. Henry grieved his family for years without any answers and had to move on in a life that was never the same nor what he wanted it to be.

Henry wanted to find his family, but he never could, and now that he has this second chance with the son who survived, he’s struggling. And I think that’s okay.

Henry’s fleeting thought about wishing he’d never come there because it was easier when he thought Victor was dead was just that, a fleeting thought.

It doesn’t make him evil or a terrible person. It was a human emotion that crept up amid unspeakable pain and joy mixed in this collage of tangled emotions.

I think one thing getting lost in the reunion was Henry having to come to terms with the fact that his wife and daughter died in that place. And that’s on top of the tremendous guilt he must feel that he wasn’t there to protect any of them.

It’s so hard to know how you’d feel or react in his shoes, but thus far, he’s tried his best, even when it’s obvious he doesn’t understand what’s happening.

I loved him and Donna having a drink together and Donna just listening to him. Donna is someone in that place who always has something to say, but it wasn’t necessary at that moment because he just needed to sit with his own disappointment in himself.

I’m guessing that Henry and Victor will eventually get Jasper to talk, which will do wonders for bridging some of the distance they find between themselves.

Before Donna was playing bartender to Henry’s patron, she and Boyd had a little almost-tiff about Ellis and Fatima, which has become the most intriguing storyline through the latter half of this season.

Finding out in FROM Season 3 Episode 6 that there was no baby didn’t stop Fatima from believing it to be true. This triggered countless discussions about whether or not Fatima was losing her mind.

I’ll admit, my first reaction to finding out Fatima wasn’t pregnant wasn’t to assume she was losing her grasp on reality because it was obvious something had happened to her body.

Seemingly overnight, everything changed for her, and we see in moments when she’s by herself, like when her whole stomach goes concave, and she screams in pain, that something is happening.

There’s something evil inside her stomach. It might not be a baby, but it’s something.

I know those around her aren’t trying to dismiss her pain and her proclamations, but they’re scared for her. However, one thing that can be frustrating in that town is seeing people look at one another like there’s something wrong with them when they tell them something weird and unnatural is happening.

Nothing about that town makes sense, yet certain things will have everyone clutching their pearls and looking around at one another like that person just said the most insane thing they’ve ever heard.

NOTHING that happens to people in that place should be brushed aside as delusion. I understand that there is evidence of people losing their minds in there, and that’s a real worry, but that can’t be the default thinking whenever someone feels something or says something that doesn’t make sense.

They’ve seen too much and have gone through too much not to take people at their word sometimes.

Fatima continued to worsen during this episode, and the debilitating anger was almost the worst part because she was presenting as so insufferable, which is such a departure from the woman we’ve known.

Ellis was trying his best but was really struggling, both with the knowledge that he wasn’t going to be a father and Fatima’s state. You could tell he was immediately harkening back to what happened with Abby.

He had a front-row seat to that in a way his father did not, and that hug between father and son felt like a long time coming, but also maybe something Ellis wasn’t all the way ready for.

Even though he and Boyd have gotten to a much better place, there may still be some residual pain from that period, and him feeling like his father let their family down because he wasn’t there when Abby needed him the most.

In his quest to save all, he failed to save one.

Now, Ellis found himself in what he perceived to be the same situation, and he was understandably struggling to deal with that. He could start by just listening to Fatima, which he did, but it also seemed like he had already decided what was happening.

Hence his trying to steal anti-psychotics.

The demon baby theory may no longer be plausible, at least not in the traditional sense, but it could still be in play. If Fatima feels something inside her, then I believe that.

Maybe it’s something that can’t be seen on a man-made ultrasound. Nothing about that place makes sense, so why not an invisible demon baby sucking the life out of her?

WHY NOT?

Fatima’s rising anger was set to boil over, but even realizing that the ending made me gasp out loud.

We’ve seen some shocking deaths on this show, and while Tillie wasn’t a Tian-Chen type of loss, her death was still a surprise because of how it happened.

Fatima’s anger manifesting in her picking up some sheers and stabbing Tillie in the chest couldn’t possibly be something anyone could have anticipated. Perhaps least of all, Fatima herself.

So many people have been suspicious of Tillie, but how often she talked about her own mortality should have clued us into what was about to happen. But usually, we think of death on this show relating to the monsters when, in actuality, we’ve seen a few instances of people killing people.

So, what happens next? Ellis won’t give Fatima up, but do they end up running from the shed and hope no one sees them? Do they come clean to Boyd? What do they do?

And more importantly, what’s going to be done with Fatima? Sara may be back now, but the town wanted her gone after everything that happened, so how would they feel about this?

Donna was already ready to ship her and Ellis out of Colony House, so what will she think after she finds out Fatima has a body count now?

There is much to think about now, along with what’s to come for the whole town, because something is happening to Fatima.

Boyd’s ever-busy plate will only get busier with this situation, but he was dealing with Officer Acosta in the meantime. And who exactly does she think she is?

I had a feeling that she would invoke a power struggle as the “real” police officer in town. Even if you agree with her position since arriving, which had been not to sit idly by and “accept” the way things are, you must admit that she was coming at it from a very naïve place.

She has not seen the things they’ve seen and been through what they’ve been through. She’s giving Jim vibes by thinking she’s better than people and going to be the savior. And look where that got Jim?

It may have been an accident, but she’s already killed someone. Why should she have her gun? How is that helpful for anyone? She saw with her own eyes that the gun didn’t even do anything to the monsters, and she’s not currently a threat to the town.

We’ve seen Boyd pull his weapon out numerous times in various situations, but it’s not helpful at all to have people walking around with guns. Especially someone like Acosta, who showed everyone that she would shoot first and ask questions later under pressure.

Acosta may reach a point where having a weapon will be helpful, and she can work alongside everyone instead of being firmly against them. But that’s different from what it currently feels like.

She looks at that town with pity and disdain, like she’s somehow Neo from The Matrix, the Chosen One who will figure everything out.

It would almost be funny if she weren’t so obnoxious.

Elsewhere, there were three more independent storylines: Jim, Tabitha, Ethan, and Jade out in the woods looking at the place from her dreams, Elgin’s Polaroid camera taking a picture inside Colony House of cellar doors out in the forest, and Julie and Randall randomly bonding while walking together.

None of it was terribly informative, outside of Elgin, who found a secret door in the cellar (after some curious knocking), only to head into a room with a dead body that looked like it’d been in there for a hundred years.

He then turned to see the kimono woman and whispered an ominous, “Is this really where it happens?”

WHERE WHAT HAPPENS?

We’ve got multiple people in the woods. Donna and Henry drinking. Fatima killed somebody. Acosta going rogue.

And nightfall is right around the corner.

Loose Ends

Multiple people have mentioned that whatever knocks on the cabins at night out by the food is different from the monsters. That’s sure to come back around in the final three episodes.

Jim second-guesses Tabitha at every turn. Can he not? Why is Jade more supportive of Tabitha than her own husband?

I hope Bakta does re-open the diner. It’s always served as a place of comfort.

It was another slower-paced hour, but that’s not always a bad thing. Even though the intensity of the season has ramped down a bit, it’s still bleak as hell, and there’s still much to anticipate about these final hours.

Let me know how what you thought about this one in the comments!

You can watch FROM on Sundays at 9/8c on MGM+.

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