With its season finale now just one episode away, MGM+’s mystery horror series From has totally picked up its pace to take us to a thrilling end. Episode 9 continues on the new horror that has come to town—the cicadas, which are also seemingly related to the fact that people can now be killed inside their nightmares. Sheriff Boyd’s plan of trying to kill other monsters with bullets laced with the bile of the killed monster is also tested out in this episode, while Jim has a tough time dealing with the obnoxious Randall.
Spoilers Alert
How Do The Townsfolk React To The New Horror?
From season 2 episode 9 begins with the matter from episode 8’s ending, in which a man in the town had run out of his house screaming for help, with the loud noise of cicadas heard in the background. Sheriff Boyd and Kenny run to help the man, named Reggie, and as he takes them inside his house, tragedy has already struck. Reggie’s wife, Paula, had been taking a nap when she started screaming, as if seeing a nightmare, and when he tried to help her, Paula did not wake up but kept talking in her sleep. Soon after, something seemed to go very wrong inside the woman’s body, as her body cracked open and killed her, leaving only a disgustingly mutilated site. Boyd asks about what Paula had been saying in her sleep, and Reggie discloses that it was a sort of warning that claimed that nobody in the town is free. Concerned about the safety of the rest of the town, Boyd sends word to every house and also the Colony House that nobody should sleep that night.
The grieving Reggie is also taken to Colony House, which is currently being run by Fatima and Ellis since Donna had been taken hostage by Randall at the end of episode 8. Reggie clearly starts to lose his mind because of the sudden and horrific death of his wife, and the man starts to panic about others falling asleep. The situation gets so tense that Reggie has to be forcibly taken away from the common area and put into a room by himself so that he does not do anything harmful to the others out of panic. The other residents in the Colony House are also scared that they now cannot even sleep without getting killed, but most also stay together and find ways to avoid sleep for a while. Ellis, on the other hand, is quite tense about what avoiding sleep would mean for his pregnant partner, Fatima, as he does not want her to get hurt or sick in any way. As Kristi and Mari are now at the Colony House following the discovery of the cicadas in the clinic, Ellis has a word with Kristi about this, who is the closest professional to a doctor in the town. The young man expresses his fears about his partner giving birth to their child in this strange and unsafe place, and he also says that he is sometimes scared their child will come out as a monster. Kristi assures Ellis that although pregnancy can be a very confusing thing, nothing would go wrong and that he does not need to worry about Fatima avoiding sleep for some time.
Around this same time, Kristi’s partner and fiancé, Mari, goes through horrible withdrawal effects as she has not taken drugs in the last couple of days. The woman starts to lose her mental and physical well-being and is sickly at most times, unable to walk on her own, either. Seeing that her condition is getting worse, Kristi asks for a separate room to be prepared for them in the Colony House, and the couple are soon given one. Mari notices the straps on the bed and asks about them, to which Ellis replies that the beds are specifically for the new members who do not believe in their strange predicament and so have to be tied down to their beds. Kristi now uses the same bed to keep Mari in control after the woman seems to hallucinate something and tries to rip open the boards on the windows of the room. Thinking that her partner surely imagines things because of her withdrawal, Kristi tries to manage the situation by consoling Mari. But Mari has a rough reaction to this, as she angrily claims that she was in this situation only because of Kristi, as the woman had suddenly left and caused Mari to go back to her drug addiction. Mari’s outburst is definitely because of her drug-craving mind, but something more sinister soon follows.
When Kristi leaves the room to fetch some drinks, Mari starts to hear and see giant cicadas somehow enter the room, even though the windows are shut tight, and swarm around her. The woman tries to fight the insects and get them away from her, but she can barely move as her hands and legs are strapped to the bed. Hearing her screams, Kristi rushes back to the room to see that there is nothing odd at all, except for a panicking Mari trying to fight some invisible enemy. As Mari’s eyes turn feculent and gray, it still seems like all this is because of her drug withdrawal, but her falling unconscious does make the matter very serious.
On the other side, Boyd had instructed Julie to return to their house and keep her family together inside without letting any of them sleep that night. Julie had followed the instructions and had gathered everyone inside Kenny’s house, where she and her family had been staying. Apart from Jim, who is with Donna and Randall, Julie keeps the rest of her family close, along with Tian Chen, Victor, and Jade, as the latter two come over to the house. Most of the time here is spent following Tabitha and Jade, who once again discuss everything they have found out so far, especially about Victor having had a sister in his childhood days. Jade spots a drawing of two Civil War soldiers, which are reminiscent of the soldiers he had seen, or hallucinated, in season 1. Tabitha then also reveals that the tower in Victor’s drawings, the one where his mother had supposedly gone on the night of her disappearance, looks familiar to her from her recurring dream in which she climbs up a similar tower. She also now wonders if, despite being spooked by the children she keeps seeing, they might actually be asking for her help. Maybe she too, is supposed to go to the tower and free the children, just like Victor’s mother once tried to do all those years ago.
The young Ethan is also now extremely scared, and despite Tian Chen’s best efforts to play board games together, he cannot be helped. Ethan expresses disbelief in his favorite Cromenockle storybook character for the first time till now, as he is genuinely scared that either his father or maybe all of them are soon going to die. While the people at this house stay safe for most of the episode, as they all avoid sleep, the end completely turns this around, as Julie suddenly falls to the ground, shaking and trying to fight some invisible thing off her body. It is exactly as if the girl is fighting off cicadas, like Mari earlier, and then Julie starts to choke too. The same situation with Julie now makes it very less likely that whatever Mari was seeing was because of her withdrawal. Julie had no problems with drugs or even hallucinations, and yet she gets attacked by some invisible force at the end of the episode.
What Happens Between Sara And Kenny?
When Boyd plans on telling everyone not to sleep on this particular night, Kenny instantly thinks of Sara, who is living by herself and, therefore, would need to be accompanied to ensure that she does not fall asleep. Kenny goes over to the sheriff’s office, where Sara is at present, and decides to keep her company. The man hardly talks, though, and makes Sara feel even more guilty for what she has done. The young woman also has an interesting theory about the sudden emergence of the cicadas, saying that she wonders whether the nightmares of the people who die in the town then become part of the forest and return to haunt the rest of the townsfolk. The reason for Sara feeling this way is that her brother Nathan used to be terrified of cicadas ever since his childhood days, and now it could be that his nightmare had become part of the place’s reality after his death.
Kenny is not much moved by this theory or anything else Sara says, and he remains silent throughout. However, the young man loses his calm when Sara apologizes for having led to his father’s death, and Kenny angrily suggests that if Sara is so guilty, then she should just kill herself. Sara is hurt and follows the words, too, attempting to let fate decide whether she lives or dies. Loading two bullets inside Boyd’s spare revolver, she pulls the trigger on herself. Luckily, the chamber is empty on this turn, and Kenny stops her before she can pull the trigger a second time. Although Kenny is still angry and disappointed in Sara, he does stop her from potentially killing herself.
Do The Bile-Laced Bullets Work Against The Other Monsters?
When Boyd hears from Julie at the beginning of the episode that Jim had gone to spend the night at the family’s crashed RV, the sheriff goes looking for him. The scene Boyd stumbles upon is not something he had been expecting, as he sees Randall holding Jim and Donna hostage, with the latter tied to a tree. Randall had told Jim about how he saw one of the monsters being taken away from the clinic, and he believes this proves that Donna and the others were indeed mixed up in this experiment. When Boyd enters the place, Randall is outnumbered, but the man still throws away the keys to the van in which he had driven to the place. With daylight going out in the next few minutes and the keys to the van lost, Boyd, Jim, Donna, and Randall have to take shelter inside the crashed RV for the night.
The monsters do eventually come, and Boyd thinks of trying out the bile-laced bullets. Donna even suggests that they send Randall to test out the bullets, as his death will not hurt or upset anyone in case the bullets do not work. Boyd agrees too, but then the same strange music from the music box starts playing over the radio inside the RV, and the monsters also stop at a distance from the van, as if waiting for something. Loud thuds follow, which spook Randall, and the man breaks out of the van to run into the forest. Boyd also now instructs Donna and Jim to run out and start the van somehow while he shoots at the monsters. But strangely, or maybe expectedly to some, the bile-laced bullets have no effect on the monsters whatsoever, and the whole matter still remains a mystery.
Boyd then also sees his dead wife Abby inside the RV, who asks the man to go back to her, and for a brief second, the sheriff is totally affected by this. But Donna’s shouts and the flickering lights manage to pull him back to reality, and he runs to the van and drives away along with Donna and Jim. It is not entirely clear how Donna and Jim managed to start the van since the keys to it had earlier been thrown into the forest by Randall, and this had been the sole reason for the group to spend the night inside the RV. The only explanation might be that they either jumped the cables in such a short time to start the van or that they had luckily found the keys on the ground, but both seem extremely stretched. On the other hand, had they known of some other way to start the van, then they could have tried it earlier, too, before taking shelter in the RV. While the three characters drive back to the Colony House, Randall keeps running inside the forest, with the monsters chasing after him, until the man is swarmed by cicadas. The insects completely overpower him, crawling into his mouth and ears, and this would possibly kill the man after all, although we are technically not shown his death yet. Or it could even be that the cicadas enter Randall’s body and turn him into a monster, or maybe with the power to kill monsters like Boyd once had.
Back at the Colony House, Elgin suddenly remembers what he was dreaming of aboard the bus when they were coming to town. Hearing that Fatima is pregnant, Elgin remembers that he had seen a young boy dressed all in white, uttering a rhyme about having to stop the melody to seemingly stop the monsters. This rhyme is, in fact, the same one that Kenny heard in his nightmare in episode 8, in which someone had uttered the same words over the telephone. Hearing all of this, the bus driver, Bakta, remarks that the words were actually the lines of an old nursery rhyme, and when she recites the entire rhyme, Boyd realizes that the words uttered by Paula in her sleep were also part of this same rhyme.
What To Expect In The ‘From’ Season 2 Finale
As much as we would have wanted to, we are surely not going to get all of the answers to the mysterious questions in From at the end of season 2. Therefore, expectations to understand the broader picture should not be kept too high, and instead, the smaller details can be hoped to be resolved. To start with, what happens to Julie, Mari, and Randall will perhaps be revealed in the next episode, and why the first two were attacked specifically can also be explained. As the bile-laced bullets do not work on the monsters, Sheriff Boyd is once again clueless about how they should fight their situation, and he would definitely try to find a link between the nursery rhyme and their reality. On the other side, Tabitha is convinced that her going to the tower and saving the children might solve the problem, but she has probably yet to find the tower. Overall, the ending of From season 2 can be expected to provide some immediate answers but also pose some more questions for the future.
