The Ending Of From Season 2 Explained
The MGM+ series "From" has come to a shocking second-season conclusion and fans are now eagerly waiting for the third season to explain at least some of what happened. The show, created by John Griffin, executive produced by heavy hitters like "Avengers: Endgame" directors Anthony and Joe Russo and "Fringe" writer Jeff Pinkner, and starring "Lost" alumni Harold Perrineau along with a stellar ensemble cast, is a nightmare vision of what happens to a group of random people thrown together in a town they can't escape from.
As the stakes get higher in Season 2, things get increasingly scary. The town these people share is preyed upon by things that look just like people, except they're definitely not because while they may look like normal humans, they can tear a person apart. That's scary enough, but Season 2 has given the people of the town additional frights, none more terrifying than the three people who become comatose after being attacked by cicadas that only they could see in the season's penultimate episode.
As Jade (David Alpay) declares in the finale, understanding what's happening in the town "[is] like opening a book and starting from the middle." Let's see if we can shed some light on the events of the finale and explain the ending of "From" Season 2.
What to remember about the plot of From
Millions of people drive to random places every day, but in "From," a few of these individuals somehow arrive in a village which doesn't seem to have a name. Their first clue that things aren't normal is that they see a fallen tree in the middle of the road that they can't bypass. Their second clue is that they drive through a no-lights town on their way to find a better route to wherever they're going, but no matter what they do, after trying to drive away, they all end up trapped in the town, forced to comprehend what the monsters there could want with them.
Boyd (Perrineau) has lived there for a few years when the Matthews family — parents Tabitha (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and Jim (Eion Bailey), plus children Julie (Hannah Cheramy) and Ethan (Simon Webster) — arrive. Each individual in the town is nursing their own tragedies. The Matthews family is especially broken because they lost a child, Julie and Ethan's little brother Thomas, before they arrived.
As a result, Tabitha and Jim are splitting, although Julie and Ethan don't yet know this when they end up in the town. Perhaps as a result of Tabitha's openness to children, she's been having visions of a gaggle of kids coming to her. But now, as she goes into the second season finale, she thinks that instead of the children attacking her, which was her original instinct, they're asking her for help.
Boyd's heartbreaking story
Other people have tragedies too, but some, like Boyd's, have occurred after they arrived in the town. A few of these stories factor into the final episode of the season. For example, Boyd's story has a strong bearing on the show's narrative. Boyd arrives in the town with his wife, Abby (Lisa Ryder), and his grown child, Ellis (Corteon Moore), and quickly takes a leadership position in the town. But while he finds the talismans that allow the townsfolk to live in their houses at night instead of cowering in cellars from the creatures, he neglects his wife's mental health.
Eventually, he comes back to town one day after foraging in the surrounding woods to find Abby indiscriminately firing a gun at the townspeople. She's convinced she's trapped in a nightmare, but when she turns her gun on Ellis, Boyd fires on her and kills her. His wife's death and his responsibility for it weigh on Boyd and end up alienating his son, although by the time the ending of Season 2 rolls around, Boyd and Ellis have seemingly reconciled. Still, Boyd continues to periodically see Abby at random points, including in the penultimate and final episodes of Season 2. The question is: Is this really her or is this an apparition that Boyd sees?
Victor's horrifying tale
Meanwhile, Victor (Scott McCord) may have the most perplexing and terrifying tale of all. While he's a middle-aged man now, he's been in the town since he was a young child, before the townsfolk had the talismans to keep them safe at night. Each night the townsfolk would find different places underground to try to stay safe, but one night, Victor's mom dropped him and his sister off at an underground bunker and took off for the tower to help the children there. She claimed that helping them would allow them all to be free of the town. Victor's sister took off after her, leaving Victor all alone.
When he opened the bunker's doors in the morning, everyone in the town was dead. The street was lined with bodies, except his mother's, which was found in the woods. Victor managed to stay alive but his growth has been stunted ever since, and although he finds the town as terrifying as everyone else, he's been there so long that he claims it as his home. Tabitha is now inspired by Victor's mother to seek out the tower where the children are. She decides that she needs to go there to try to help the children, and perhaps the town as a whole.
How does Season 2 end?
When the final episode of Season 2 begins, Julie, Marielle (Kaelen Ohm), and Randall (A.J. Simmons) are all inexplicably in comas. The trio have been attacked by cicadas that no one else saw, which has changed their eye color and caused them to fall asleep. They're now dying, and while everyone is trying to help, no one knows what to do. The only thing they've discovered is that Elgin (Nathan D. Simmons) had a dream that foretells their fate, in a nursery rhyme that goes, "Here they come, they come for three, unless you stop the melody." And time is of the essence: if the trio dies, anyone in town can die in their sleep.
Three people, in particular, take big swings to try to fix the problem. First, Jade tries to figure out what the symbol he's seen on the walls means. He reluctantly goes to the tunnels where the creatures live during the day to find out. He is surrounded by the kids that Tabitha has been seeing. They're all sleeping on stone palettes and periodically saying the word "Akooie." Jade looks up and realizes the symbol is above them, in a skylight made out of leaves and bushes.
Boyd and the music box
Boyd, meanwhile, takes Sara (Avery Konrad) and Kenny (Ricky He) out to the ruins of the place where he found a man who mixed his blood with Boyd's. After that, Boyd killed one of the monsters by cutting a slit in his hand and letting his blood mingle with the monster's, but that gave rise to the issue that's plaguing the town now — that they can die, even in their sleep. At the ruins, Sara, her nose gushing blood, tells them she can hear the music from a music box which Boyd has been randomly hearing ever since his blood mingled with the man's. Unfortunately, he can't see the music's source.
But later, Boyd goes to find a torch from the day he met the man who he mingled his blood with. Although he's shot in the shoulder by Reggie in the process of getting the torch, he ultimately makes it to the ruins. He lights the torch there and suddenly the ruins become a full keep, where Julie, Marielle, and Randall are chained to the walls. Boyd tries to wake them, to no avail. Then he sees the mysterious music box, which has been haunting him all season. Before he can smash it, though, Abby appears and encourages him not to do it, but he decides to destroy the music box anyway. The trio wake up in their beds, and the keep changes into ruins again with only Boyd there. How was the trio simultaneously unconscious in their beds and chained in the castle keep? It's one of many unanswered questions.
Does Tabitha escape?
Tabitha asks Victor to take her to the "faraway tree" that transports people to the tower. Victor guides her there, after which Tabitha goes in the tree and finds herself in the woods. She walks to a nearby clearing, finds a tall tower that also doubles as a lighthouse — although it's in the middle of a forest — and begins to climb. She can hear the kids urging her on with "akooie" and keeps climbing as she passes children's toys on the stairs.
She climbs to the top of the tower where the light is shining and there she sees the boy in white, which Sara said earlier wasn't really a boy. The boy in white has appeared throughout the season to tell various townsfolk how to survive the horrors of the town, but while more than one person has seen him, they never see him together. He tells Tabitha he's sorry and then pushes her off the top of the tower.
Tabitha wakes up in the real world — or is it? She could be in another manufactured world that's just more open. Either way, she learns that hikers found her three days earlier, lying unconscious on the side of a trail. While it's unclear where in the world she is, she's found an escape from the town and, unfortunately, away from her family.
What does the end of the season signify?
While the end of the season doesn't provide us with a lot of information that adds up, there are two possibilities that could explain what's happening to the townspeople. The first is that the town is a dreamland or alternate dimension. This could account for the monsters, while also explaining why the people can't get out. Perhaps the monsters are trapped there, too, but are still compelled to slaughter the humans in the town.
The biggest reason for the dreamland theory, though, is where Tabitha ends up. She falls from a great height and dies in the realm of the town, but wakes up with injuries in the real world — or at least some other world. Maybe if you die in the dreamland, you wake up in the real world. This would effectively keep the people who find themselves there trapped until they meet their deaths, unwillingly or not. Or they could only wake up after dying in certain circumstances. For example, perhaps you wake up in the real world — or a different world — after you're killed by a normal person, but stay dead if you're murdered by a monster. Either way, next season, expect to see Tabitha struggling to find a way back to her family and possibly finding Abby and other people that used to live in the town in the real world.
Another possibility
Another explanation could be that they're all part of a social or scientific experiment. Sure, Randall and Jim had been working on the same theory before Randall succumbed to the cicadas, but what if — instead of an experiment in the real world — the experiment is in virtual reality?
Let's say everyone is hooked up to VR technology and made to believe they live in a little town that they can't escape, in which monsters that come at night. The experiment asks how much can people tolerate, how much do they try to make the most of their lives, and how much do they succumb to fear. Each individual has different answers to those questions but this, like all experiments, looks at the data on average. And on average, so far, the subjects are doing well.
Occasionally when one of the townsfolk ventures out farther than they've been before, parts of the forest that haven't been used in a long time have to be reactivated in the VR program. But overall, the experimenters have the situation well in hand. When people die, they wake up in the real world, and the people controlling the experiment sedate and drop them off near a hospital, like they did with Tabitha. The experimenters presumably represent a small, closed group who won't let people know what's happening until they finish their study.
What Harold Perrineau has said about the ending
In an interview with ScreenRant a day before the finale aired, Perrineau said that unlike the Season 1 finale, which left him and the audience with a feeling of "What do we do now," the Season 2 finale leaves Boyd battered but with a little bit of satisfaction. "[The viewers] are going to think that Boyd should have reached his tipping point. He's there, he's tipped over, he's cursing God directly, and so, he's reached that point where all bets are off," said the actor. "I think the fans will see that and his resilience, and I think they will trust him a little bit more that whatever happens to Boyd, he's going to keep fighting to save everybody if he can."
That said, Perrineau believes that Boyd's the only one that gets any gratification at the end of Season 2. The rest of the town is traumatized because of what happened to Tabitha, especially Tabitha's family. But Boyd has had his troubles too, especially with his son, who he's always leaving to go help others. In the end, Perrineau appears to be just as unsure of what's going on as the audience, but he's fully in support of Boyd doing what he can to help the other townspeople.
Where does the series go from here?
Boyd and the townsfolk are getting closer to finding their way out. Given how short this kind of TV show is these days, we predict there'll be another season, maybe two, before at least some of them will find their way to the real world. Now, in particular, with Tabitha trying to find them in the real world, they could be in a critical period. While the people in the town don't know about Tabitha, she might find a way to get a signal to them that tells them ... something.
The problem is that if something like falling off a tower is required to rejoin the real world, it's going to be hard to convince the townsfolk to take the risk. After all, from their perspective, that could seem pretty final, even more final than the risks they've taken this season. From Tabitha's perspective, though, and the perspective of anyone from the town she meets in the real world, death in the town may be the answer to life in the real world — or at least a world more free than the town. Only time will tell how Tabitha's storyline will come together with the narratives inside the town, but the Season 2 finale opens up a brand new direction in which the story can unfold.