It is the year 2023, and we just got the finale of Manifest, which revolves around a fictional reality just like our MGM series From. And even though we are a bit disappointed with the way Manifest wrapped up its finale season, we still have high hopes for the MGM series. After finishing the first season of From, we were literally scratching our heads trying to understand the origin of Fromland. However, with Season 2 coming to an end, we guess we have most of our doubts cleared. The second season has revealed certain patterns related to characters, their memories, and the topography of their world that make us believe that the fictional town is not a nightmare but a simulation.
A note before we start. The article is based on the writer’s subjective experience of watching the show and has been written for the joy of theorizing about it. Many of these theories or interpretations can end up being entirely false because we never know what new revelations will turn up in a series like From. Hence, we hope you enjoy them and share your theories with us.
Spoilers Alert
The Mysterious Trees
Let’s look at the structure of Fromland. It is a town in the middle of nowhere. People arrive here when they come across a fallen tree in the middle of the road while traveling in their vehicles. It is the first pattern of this world that people encounter. Secondly, according to Victor, the location of the trees keeps changing in the forest, which isn’t possible in the real world. Additionally, he told Ethan Matthews that the leaves on the trees never change color, nor do they shed as if they were not alive. However, this pattern did change in the second season after the death of Martin, the man in chains. Winter had arrived in town, and trees began to shed their leaves. It seemed like someone intentionally changed the behavior of these trees with the push of a button. The trees and vegetation in the region are extremely irregular and don’t follow a natural cycle, which makes us wonder if they are really real.
Last but not least, we have our Faraway Tree. This one literally reminded us of all those glitches in our video games where the character gets stuck in one place. Sometimes, after being stuck in a glitch, the character falls from the sky and ends up in a completely different location (upon refreshing the game). The Faraway Tree has a similar function in Fromland. It can also be seen as some kind of backdoor in the simulation.
In the second season, we also saw Boyd burn a firelight to transport himself to a hidden dungeon, where he met Martin. This is yet another suggestion of a glitch or a hidden room, which we usually experience in a game or a simulation. All these clues in the second season really convince us that the show is purely science fiction and doesn’t deal with supernatural elements.
A Pattern Between Christopher And Jade
Jade came to Fromland along with the Matthews, and before their arrival, a few people had died in town. A theory suggests that the number of townsfolk has to be beyond a certain limit for the simulation to work perfectly, which could be one of the reasons why a bus arrived in town after the Colony House Massacre. But it wasn’t the first time something like that had happened in Fromland. Victor told Jade about the man in the polaroid, whose name was Christopher. Like Jade, Christopher, too, started having visions of the eerie symbol, after which his demeanor changed. Probably, like Boyd’s wife, Abby, Christopher, too, believed that everything around him was a bad dream and he just needed to wake up. Maybe he was the reason behind the first massacre in town, with Victor being the only surviving member.
If we observe the pattern here, then Jade, too, has been slowly drifting toward insanity since he started seeing these symbols. He has been hallucinating things and acting weird, which makes us believe that he, too, might end up doing something like Christopher in Season 3. However, if Christopher’s actions were an error in the simulation, then the creators won’t let history repeat itself and will try to improve the turn of events this time around. It can be speculated that this is not the first time that this simulation has been created. In Tabitha’s dream, she saw certain years engraved on a stone door, which makes us believe that the simulation has been created for different eras ranging from the 15th century to the 21st century, and that might have been the reason why Jade had visions of civil war soldiers who could have been a part of the previous simulation.
Monsters Who Act Like NPCs
In the series, we have monsters who feast on the human heart and come out only at night. We believe that Fromland stays away from the general structure of a human society where one has to work to earn a living. However, the absence of struggle can make a person lazy, and hence, the creators of the simulation introduced these monsters to keep humans awake and on edge. The monsters follow certain rules and cannot cross them, much like the NPCs in a game. Their clothing and make-up, too, are exactly similar and date back to 1970, which makes us believe that these NPCs haven’t been updated in a long time. Additionally, the talisman that Boyd found in the jungle stops the monsters from entering a house as if they are rigorously following a written code. The first season of the series treated these monsters in a more dynamic manner, where creatures like Jasmine manipulated a colony house guy named Kevin in order to bring upon their doom. In short, they were much more creative with their hunt, but the second season has literally turned them into robotic creatures. We don’t know how and why there is such a drastic change in the behavior of these monsters in Season 2, but we can speculate that the creators of the show want to point us in a certain direction through these choices.
Dreamland: Where the Impossible Comes True
A similarity that can be drawn between a simulation and a dream is that real-life impossibilities are possible in both. In the first season, we found that none of the wires in the house were connected to any power source. Additionally, there wasn’t any machinery to create electricity for the town. Then what kept the appliances running? Magic? It is impossible for any of it to work unless it is a game or a simulation where the laws of physics and chemistry don’t apply because it isn’t reality but an imitation of it. But why was it created? We believe most simulations are created to delve into human behavior and psychology and to observe how the same people react in different situations and circumstances, which again brings us to the point of why we are noticing so many patterns quite recently in season 2. The creators of the simulation don’t want another Christopher, but they also want to understand what made Christopher lose his mind, so to replace him, we have Jade. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Kristi’s fiancé, Mari, ended up in the same location until and unless someone wanted to understand the impact of her arrival in Kristi’s life and how it affected her dynamics with Kenny.
Secondly, Ellis’s love interest, Fatima, knew that she couldn’t get pregnant in the real world, but it happened to her in fantasy land. Whatever this realm or simulation is, it is playing with the human psyche so that those experimenting with it can understand their reactions to different situations. Additionally, how come the new boy, Elgin, knew about Fatima’s pregnancy even before she did? And why does Elgin look so similar to Boyd and Ellis? Could he be Ellis’s son from another ongoing simulation? It could be the only possible explanation for why Ellis asked his fellow passengers to turn the bus around when it first entered the town. Maybe he had already been to a similar location and didn’t want to end up in another one.
Memories Are Being Repurposed
When it comes to artificial intelligence, we are certain of one thing: it is incapable of creating memories. Hence, they repurpose past events to make them look new, but does it really work? The second season of From has stressed the fact that everything happening in Fromland is a story. It was Victor’s mother who believed that, and thus, we started looking for clues. In the first season, Sara Myers predicted the arrival of Matthews’ family, information that was given to her by a certain voice in her head. Initially, we believed that this voice had a supernatural origin in the series, but we are now certain that it belongs to someone operating the simulation and maybe trying to observe the impact of their own inputs. Additionally, the voice told Sara some secrets from the character’s past that no one could have known unless they had been inside their mind.
In the second season, we witnessed a similar thing. A couple named Brian and Kelly arrived on the bus, but what came next completely surprised us. During his first tour in Iraq, Boyd had a colleague named Corporal Brian Kelly, who died in his arms. As far as we know, Boyd never discussed these incidents with anyone in the entire series until these names started coming up. And it wasn’t the first time something from his past had turned up. In Season 1, Sara somehow knew Boyd’s nickname from the army, which couldn’t be a mere coincidence or a supernatural occurrence. Another thing that we noticed in Season 1 was a bracelet that Tabitha had found. It was the same bracelet that her husband had given her, and there was no satisfactory explanation for how it ended up in this town. Well, now we believe that whoever created Fromland tried to make it look like reality by using the memories of these people, but like all artificially created things, there were glitches, patterns, and irregularities. It is possible that the conflicts that the townsfolk experienced in the first and second seasons have also been repurposed from the memories of people who could or couldn’t be a part of the current simulation.
An Uncanny Resemblance Between Victor And Ethan Matthews
Speaking of patterns, the similarities between Victor and Ethan’s storylines are the most obvious ones so far. Both their mothers had visions of the tower or the lighthouse, where they believed that some children had been trapped. Secondly, we believe Victor was Ethan’s age when he arrived in Fromland. However, in Ethan’s case, he has his father and sister with him, which is different in Victor’s case, and thus, it makes us believe that the operator of the simulation has been putting characters with similar traits in different situations to assess how their lives are affected by these variables. Other similarities between Ethan and Victor are their fondness for drawing, their visions of the boy in white, and their curiosity toward inexplicable things in general.
The Boy Dressed In White: Is He The Moderator?
The Boy Dressed In White appears randomly in the series without any explanation of his origin. Usually, people who hear the voices in their heads are able to see him, and so far, Sara, Victor, and Ethan have witnessed him roaming in the woods. He acts as an in-game helper who gives people clues when they are stuck at a crossroads. For example, it was he who told Victor about the Faraway Tree, and it was he who told Sara how to protect herself during the finale of Season 1. In the second season, The Boy Dressed In White made yet another appearance at the end, where he pushed Tabitha off the lighthouse as he told her that it was the “only way.” We are not sure if he was protecting Tabitha or the truth about the world, but we are certain of one thing: whenever someone tries to get close to the lighthouse, he appears in front of them in order to distract them or shoo them away. We still believe that the lighthouse is the key to solving all the mysteries of Fromland, but with The Boy Dressed In White around, we are not sure if it would be an easy task to solve what lies beyond it or inside it.
Can There Be More Than One Simulation?
At first, we believed that there was only one simulation at play here: the town where Boyd and everyone else was stuck. However, the end of Season 2 proves us wrong. Tabitha wakes up in a hospital with injuries that look like she has been in a car crash; in her case, it could be the RV that met with an accident. A doctor told Tabitha that some hikers found her in the woods near the side of the trail, which was exactly the same thing that happened during the RV accident. However, it is important to note here that the RV slipped after entering Fromland, which means that this incident didn’t occur in reality but in the simulation, and thus Tabitha has been transferred to yet another simulation, where her family has probably died. Or maybe she was the one driving the vehicle, and her family didn’t exist in this simulation.
Whatever the case may be, our reason for believing that this is yet another simulation is Tabitha’s reflection on the window of the hospital, where instead of seeing her face, we saw a blonde girl who was probably Jasmine, the monster who attacked the colony house in Season 1. So what is it? Yet another glitch in the simulation and a planned breadcrumb for the audience, or does it suggest that people who die in Fromland turn into monsters, as several theories suggest? Hopefully, we will find more clues and answers in the third season of From. But as of now, we are certain that this isn’t a horrible dream or a pocket universe but an artificially created reality to test human minds.
