Preamble
This series first entered my radar when the proprietor of media critique/review blog Storming the Ivory Tower tweeted that
Okay, but, like, didn't Lost... suck?
Okay, that is the prevailing consensus, but there was a lot of potential to the concept of being stuck in a mysterious location. And, honestly, my personal problem with Lost was the character drama. It felt to me like Lost was sort of hamstrung by the length of its seasons. It had 20 episodes ordered per season, had to spread its plot pacing a little thin to fill out that length, and relied too heavily on stock character drama to fill out the rest of the soup. That usually took the form of relationship drama, which usually stemmed from something sex-related.
So I read Lost, but without the sex and heard Lost, but without the filler. Which sounded rather appealing to me, and I decided to give it a try to test out my Sonarr setup.
The first season of From was 10 episodes in length.
So, How Does it Stack Up?
Much like its spiritual predecessor, From starts out quite strongly. The premise is compelling, I want to learn more about the setting, and I want to see how the characters cope with it. For the first 5 episodes, I am absolutely hooked. My enthusiasm gradually diminishes over the latter half, and in the end I'm left wishing the series was backed by a more competent writing staff.
What it Does Well
It sets up the premise quickly: this is a small but inescapable town infested with monsters. If you hear knocking on the doors or windows at night, don't ask who it is, or they'll manipulate you to get inside. Don't let them in or you and your housemates will die horribly.
For the first half of the season, it presents questions and revelations at a good, satisfying clip. It has a good list of compelling questions: Where is the town? How did we get here? How did the residents get here? How did the town get here? Do people wind up here by chance or by reason? How is there electricity?
I also think I like the themes that the writers are trying to convey.
What it Does Poorly
Some of the questions and revelations come a bit too fast in the initial episodes. I really needed more time to get to know some of the characters before the shocking revelations about them. Yes, I'm looking at you little miss murders-a-man-at-the-end-of-episode-1.
It works too hard at disrupting the status quo every episode. The problem is that it doesn't spend enough time establishing the status quo for the disruptions to be meaningful. For instance: After 6 people have died in three episodes, we're informed that the town had gone half a year without an incident before this. It would have been more effective to actually show a bit of order for an episode or two before throwing things into chaos. This isn't even the worst example of the show failing to spend time on setting things up before it knocks them down.
After five episodes of new questions and revelations coming at a satisfying pace, the plot stalls out a bit and we just have to deal with character drama.
One of the characters is the Abusive Genius CEO archetype that needs to be fucking expunged from the imagination of every writer of any medium. It doesn't help that the writers' conception of "genius" is having even the tiniest bit of intellectual curiosity.
At least one of the main writers just, doesn't understand how people behave, and constantly has characters make decisions in service of the consequences they need to occur, instead of having consequences occur in service of the decisions that characters make. For instance, having a character approve of a project because it's worth a shot and will bring the town hope, only to turn around the very next episode and be psychotically angry that these charlatans are peddling false hope that will destroy the community when it falls through.
Final Thoughts
This show is about people who are
- stuck in a cramped place they can't leave
- surrounded monsters who look and sound just like their loved ones, but will kill everyone in their home horribly if allowed in
- chafing at a series of confusing and annoying rules which keep the threat at bay
So I found myself wondering if it was trying to say something about the Covid lockdown. And, in the end, I think it might be? Certainly, the obvious theme that it hammers over the viewers' heads is that of the tension between the desire to return to a status quo, and the necessity of accepting and adapting to the present reality. It even seems to be pretty heavily on the side of implying that accepting and adapting to the changed circumstances is the better choice.
I just wish there were better writers trying to make this point.