REVIEW: From – Season Three [2024]

Rating: TV-MA | Episodes: 10 | Runtime: 60 minutes
Release Date: September 22nd, 2024 (USA)
Studio: MGM+
Creator(s): John Griffin

We’ll never have this day again.

The teeth are back. Despite season two of “From” flowing better for me after a second viewing, my main gripe remained: it had lost the first season’s edge. Yes, John Griffin and Jeff Pinkner did their best to tell us that the new danger was worse than the monsters in the forest, but the whole Freddy Krueger dreams coming true thing didn’t have the same impact because it was isolating the fear. Everyone watching one person suffer meant they had to worry about what might happen to them too, but we as the viewers didn’t. And when Julie (Hannah Cheramy), Mari (Kaelen Ohm), and Randall (A.J. Simmons) became the “three” from the nursery rhyme, the bigger picture disappeared completely.

Thankfully, that problem doesn’t linger. Boyd (Harold Perrineau) smashed the music box and the whole plotline (worms and all after the bile bullets failed) is dropped. Season three begins back in the danger zone of the first and learns its lesson from the second by ramping up that original danger instead of trying to replace it. How? By giving the monsters agency. No longer are they just creatures of habit methodically roaming the streets to scare someone into letting them kill them. Now they are planning ambushes. They are leaving survivors. They are toying with the residents of this purgatorial town through life rather than just death. As Boyd explains, the talismans made it so people could pretend everything was okay during the day. Seeing reminders of the brutality walking around conversely ensures their horror lingers 24/7.

The result: a body count. That’s honestly part of what made the initial season so memorable. Characters we assumed were leads died. No one was off-limits … at least not to the extent where we couldn’t fear for them. Sure, Boyd probably isn’t going anywhere, but he is on a ticking clock regardless of this nightmare due to early onset Parkinson’s. Griffin and company can milk that, but it still allows him to take risks in ways that make us wonder if maybe he won’t survive. I don’t think it’s a coincidence then that Perrineau, Catalina Sandino Moreno, and Eion Bailey are the only actors with their own name card in the opening credits. It groups the others together without any hierarchy to both roll the dice on their individual salvation and make it so that the other three dying would truly pack a punch.

That’s in the town, though. Anyone who watched the previous seasons knows that Tabitha (Moreno) got out. I was worried this development might split focus much by adding even more characters to the mix as she tries to save her family, but the writers on this season (it’s not just Griffin and Pinkner this time) understood they couldn’t do that again post-bus. Her escape is thus still more about the town than it is about the real world. It’s about advancing the mythology to a place that officially exposes how this whole thing might have been planned out from the beginning. Because it’s not just about connecting back to previous seasons. It’s also about connecting season one and two in new ways through fresh mysteries that birth new questions. If the herd can be culled in the process of making that possible, all the better.

Interestingly, Boyd and Donna (Elizabeth Saunders) take a backseat here. Kenny (Ricky He) and Kristi (Chloe Van Landschoot) too. We begin to discover why it is Tabitha and Jade (David Alpay) keep seeing visions and they take the lead as far as pushing things forward (with the help of Bailey’s Jim, even if he proves more of a pressure point than a helping hand). And since everything they see always comes back to Victor (Scott McCord), you’ll be happy to know he gets multiple chances to shine as well considering he’s ultimately the heart of this whole endeavor. Those three are at the center and the rest need to either get on-board or lose themselves to other subplots meant to ramp up the anxiety and paranoia of the others. Because this town’s worst enemy is generally itself.

Some of those subplots can frustrate, though. Pegah Ghafoori’s Fatima’s trajectory has an interesting payoff, but I won’t lie and say her story was the least interesting part. This is partially because it’s connected to the music box layer of “this is so much scarier despite not being scary at all” and also because it turns her and Ellis (Corteon Moore) into shells of what made them captivate in the past. There’s a point to having some familial drama that isn’t just the Matthews (although that evolution works courtesy of Julie no longer caring about decorum around her parents), but it feels like it’s working towards one specific thing straight from the start—just like it’s actually doing. It exposes a new wrinkle that isn’t too important in the grand scheme of things while also giving Elgin (Nathan D. Simmons) and Sara (Avery Konrad) something to do.

That’s the juggling act with such a huge cast, though. Some things work better than others and, for me, the ones that do are the ones wrapped up in the fabric of the narrative rather than cool little asides. It’s why I found myself waiting to get back to Tabitha, Jade, and Victor whenever someone else takes control. Randall and Julie do good to add some extra intrigue by acknowledging what happened in the second season when no one else really does by forcing themselves into that fabric despite it not initially seeming like they belong. What Julie discovers might end up being crucial to where the show goes next by reinventing the rules without writing over them. So, while some things end up feeling as though they occurred just to take us back to square one, it’s mostly that way to ensure nothing distracts us too long from what truly matters.