Episode 8 of MGM+’s mystery horror series From seemingly brings in a completely new type of horror to the strange town and its residents, as staying indoors after dark is no longer enough to keep one safe. Jim Matthews had teamed up with the banished miscreant Randall after realizing that the young man had a drone with him, but this turned out to be the wrong decision. On the other side, the ever-nervous and shaky Victor now finally decides to face his fears, at least a bit, and a completely new revelation is made.
Spoilers Alert
What New Form Of Horror Strikes Kenny And Elgin?
Episode 8 begins at Kenny’s house, where the young man offers to help his mother cook like he often does. Tian Chen tells her son to set the table instead, and at that very instance, the telephone at the house starts to ring. It is evident from both characters’ faces that the ringing of the telephone is an extremely unusual and concerning event that has probably never happened before. Nonetheless, they also deem it necessary to take the call, and Tian Chen asks Kenny to pick it up. As Kenny follows the advice, he hears the voice of a man whisper from the other side in a rhyming sort of manner. The words essentially talk about new dangers that are about to come upon the townsfolk and mention that the only way to stop them would be to stop the melody. Kenny keeps the phone down after the message is over and then sees that his mother’s cooking pot is filled with big cicada insects. The man also immediately hears and spots the music box as one of the cicadas jumps onto his arm and hurts him.
As Kenny swats off the cicada, he is woken up by Tian Chen, and it becomes clear that the man was asleep and everything prior was just a nightmare. His mother says that Kenny had been shouting in his sleep, which had alarmed her, and she had come to wake him up. Although Kenny is relieved to know that none of the things he saw were real, this feeling changes very quickly when he looks down at his arm to find a big burn mark exactly where the cicada had jumped. The burn wound hurts as well, and this is the first time that Kenny wonders whether dreams can actually hurt them.
Episode 7 ended with scenes of Elgin lying down in a tub to take a relaxing bath, only to be spooked by a monstrous woman who constantly kept trying to drown him in the tub. Episode 8 now reveals that this was a dream as well. Sheriff Boyd is approached by Sara, who does not want to stay holed up inside the church any longer and wants to be of some help to the community. Boyd visits the colony house to look for some work for Sara from Donna when he hears of Elgin’s predicament from the previous night. Boyd now meets with Elgin, and the young man says that the monster in his nightmare was genuinely trying to drown him when he must have made some noise, and someone must have shaken him awake. While Elgin did not have any physical marks or injuries to show, like Kenny, he, too, was quite nervous after the whole incident.
Elgin happens to be one of the very few members to know about the killed monster, as he had been present at the emergency clinic when all of this had taken place. He now gives a plan to Boyd in order to try out the extracted bile against the other monsters. Elgin’s idea is that Boyd laces some of the bullets of his gun with the bile and essentially creates “silver bullets” of sorts, which could then be fired at the other monsters from a distance to check whether there was any special effect on them. Boyd agrees with the plan, and he goes to the clinic along with Kenny to extract some more bile from the monster’s body. But the men find a very different scene at the clinic, where Kristy and Mari are extremely spooked about some loud noises they had heard from the boiler room, where the corpse of the monster is still kept. Boyd and Kenny now go to check on it, and they find that innumerable big cicadas have seemingly crawled out of the monster’s body. Kenny identifies the insects as exactly the ones he had seen in his sleep, and it now becomes clear to him and Boyd that the emergence of the cicadas also means that the townsfolk can possibly be harmed in their dreams. So far, only Kenny and Elgin had been hurt, possibly because they had both witnessed the killing of the monster and had been near the corpse. Both of them had also survived the attacks because they had been woken up in time by someone else, but not every townsfolk could possibly be so lucky.
As the discussion about this goes on at the emergency clinic, Donna visits the place and only now gets to know about the killing of the monster and the extraction of the bile. She is clearly upset with Boyd for not having informed her earlier, and the sheriff then takes Donna to the boiler room to see the corpse. However, much to Boyd’s surprise, there are no cicadas at the place anymore, and he cannot believe that the insects have scattered away, for he had shut the door to the boiler room. Donna orders the corpse to be burned, and Boyd follows the command along with Kenny. But as they return to town, they suddenly hear the loud buzz of cicadas from inside one of the houses, and the man who lives inside suddenly runs out, calling for help. The man is evidently injured and bruised at many spots on his body, and it becomes clear that the cicadas are very related to the new danger upon the townsfolk, which is that they can now be attacked inside their dreams as well.
What Is Randall Up To?
Jim continues working with Randall in episode 8, as the two successfully attach the radio signal receiver to the drone. But as the drone is sent up in the air, it is unable to fly high enough, and more mechanical tweaks need to be made. As they keep working, Randall continuously talks about his theory that one or multiple people in the town must be aware of the experiment that they are forcefully being made part of and that they must also be working for the people running the experiment. Although Randall had said this earlier too, and Jim had seemingly ignored it, he now starts to talk more about the events in the town with Randall. Jim mentions how it was Donna, Sheriff Boyd, and Father Khatri who told him and his family what to do when they first arrived in the town. Randall does not know who Father Khatri was, as the man had died in season 1, but after hearing about his death, Randall questions whether he had actually died at all. He suggests that it could be that Khatri was in on the experiment and that his death was only a faked incident. Randall claims that every death at the place could have been fake, for he had not seen any of the bodies up close, and neither had Jim.
Jim talks about Sara killing her brother Nathan, but Randall questions that too and feels that the incident was a staged one as well. It is quite clear that Randall is someone who would suspect anything and anyone to fit in with his twisted ideas, but Jim still gets convinced by his words. Jim takes the man to the church, where they question Sara about Nathan, even suggesting that the brother might be alive. Donna walks in on this scene and stops the two men from creating more mess, and Randall firmly believes that Donna is also very much involved with the running of the experiment. Later on, Jim and Donna meet at the town center, where the woman warns Jim not to get too close to Randall because she knows what sort of messed-up lunatic that man is. Jim assures that he has not told everything to Randall either, mentioning that he has kept Sara’s hearing voices a secret from the man. But what neither Jim nor Donna is aware of is the fact that Randall spotted them coming together and talking from his spot on the roof of the bus.
Jim and Randall make a plan to meet at the RV after dark and spend the whole night there watching what the monsters are up to when they are not scaring people. However, Randall then sneaks up to the emergency clinic and sees the corpse of the monster. He next meets up with Donna and tells her that he wants to apologize to her and start over. However, Randall is clearly a pathetic, self-obsessed man, and he kidnaps Donna and ties her up to a tree. When Jim goes to their decided meeting spot before dark, he sees the RV and then finds Donna tied up and Randall standing next to her with a menacing knife. Randall is suspicious of Jim as well, and the man is surely now in deep trouble for having trusted the miscreant for so long.
What Does Victor Reveal?
As Tabitha and Jade had discussed the mysterious symbol back in episode 7, the woman had mentioned the underground tunnels, and now in this episode, she takes Jade to the entrance of the place. The man does not dare to enter, but he suddenly realizes that Victor had not told him anything about the tunnels earlier. Horribly angry with the man, Jade confronts Victor and has to be stopped from hurting him, and Tabitha takes the side of Victor. She goes to meet with the man back in Colony House and gets to know about the time when his mother had asked him to stay inside on that horrible night so many years ago. Victor mentions that his mother had told him something about where she was going, but he cannot, obviously, remember it now. But the man, then a young child, had made drawings of everything with his crayons, just like he still keeps doing, and he believes that looking at the drawings can actually make him remember.
Together with Tabitha, Victor goes back to the car dump yard and finds his mother’s car, inside the trunk of which are the drawings he had made at the time. As they open the trunk and Victor goes through the drawings, painful memories from his childhood days return. When his mother left Victor behind in the underground shelter, asking him to stay hidden throughout the night, he was not alone in the place. Victor actually had a sister named Eloise, and on that night, his mother had left both siblings together. However, Eloise did not want to stay in the shelter, and she ran out of the place, following her mother, but Victor listened to his mother and left the shelter only the next morning when nobody else was to be found in the town.
Has Tabitha Seen The Tower Before?
Along with this new information, Victor also shows Tabitha a drawing of a long tower-like building, saying that his mother had gone to that tower on that night in order to save the children. The tower in the drawing looks somewhat close to what Tabitha had seen during her adventures, and the children that Victor mentioned also seems to be the same monstrous ones that Tabitha had seen on multiple occasions by this time. The exact manner in which the tower is drawn, especially with a yellow bar at a portion towards the top might also suggest that this was actually the stone lighthouse that we had seen in season 1, and that Victor’s mother had actually gone to the lighthouse. Exactly what all of this means is not very clear yet, and more explanation is surely to come in the following episodes.
What Can We Expect In ‘From’ Season 2 Episode 9?
The exact meaning of everything that Victor had newly revealed, or at least what Tabitha interpreted from it, is surely going to be an important point of focus, as a means of escape from the place can be linked with it. On the other hand, Jim’s plan of working with Randall had gone terribly wrong, and now whether Jim comes up with some ploy to save Donna or just gives Randall his deserved death and rescues Donna in that manner will be interesting to watch. The fact that the townsfolk could now be attacked inside their dreams, which would leave behind very real pains and scars, is definitely a very intense matter, making survival in the town even more difficult now. Finally, what the cicadas mean and whether their presence has something to do with Boyd’s previously infected blood will also be seen in the next two episodes of the season.
