What good is the afterlife without a few laughs? That seems to be the attitude of Before writer-creator Sarah Thorp, as she saves some of her most subtly funny writing for last. It bubbles up Eli’s report on his own case, which plays over the final minutes as voiceover narration. By this point he’s completed five months of inpatient psychiatric treatment, and has publicly drawn the conclusion that his and Eli’s strange situation was a matter of acute transference/countertransference — a “shared delusion” with some startlingly detailed elements. Here he adds, parenthetically, “See subheading ‘Worm Hallucinations.’” Generally not something you want to hear in your case file, haha.
A few lines later, he deadpans that Noah — whom he observes from afar at a playground with Denise, and who has little memory of anything that happened to him with Eli — “seems unaffected by the court-ordered distance between Patient A and Patient B,” Noah being the former and Eli the latter. I love sneaking in “court-ordered” before distance, and I love the deadpan self-effacement in saying that Noah “seems unaffected” by it. Oh, he doesn’t miss the guy who dunked him in a lake while he was semi-conscious? You don’t say!
To paraphrase another Billy Crystal chracter, Eli is only mostly recovered. He’s about to slice into his own forehead to retrieve one of those hallucinatory worms before his granddaughter Sophie distracts him, and he draws solace by listening to Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”…at the insistence of his dead wife, who speaks to him through his granddaughter. As Eli himself puts it, his scientific explanation is a surface-level one; privately, he believes not only in the afterlife — the After — but in past lies — the Before.
This is the episode where we find out exactly what happened before. After wandering around lost in the supernaturally labyrinthine farmhouse, Eli emerges into what he hallucinates is a snowy day hundreds of years ago. Here he’s a little boy, while the souls of Noah and Lynn are both incarnated as little girls. After getting stung by bees (hence their role in Noah’s hallucinations; the worms appear to have been solely a product of Lynn’s ex Benjamin’s drug visions), they make a run for it towards the frozen lake. “Eli” accidentally pushes “Noah,” who cracks her head on the ice, badly injuring her even before the ice gives way and dumps her into the freezing water below. When “Lynn” demands that “Eli” jump into the water after “Noah,” he flees. This is the original sin that ties them together.
Eli can see clearly that this wasn’t his fault — it was an accident among kids. But it’s not until he jumps into the water holding Noah that he can work through what’s really haunting him. The business at the lake in the distant past is Noah’s journey; Eli’s trauma over Lynn’s death is his.
So we finally get a clearer version of their last day together. Far from the ailing but vivacious woman she appeared to be in earlier flashbacks, we see Lynn as she really was: haggard, in mental and physical agony, begging to die. That’s why Eli left that day: to get away from the woman he loved because he couldn’t bear to be around her in that kind of pain, which felt to him like giving up. Only when he returns home to find her in the middle of a suicide attempt and holds her beneath the bathwater at her request does he come to terms with her need to put a stop to her suffering and end her life on her own terms.
Once he does that, he awakens beneath the water of the lake and saves himself and Noah both. There’s a great moment right before they part ways where Eli says “We went for a little swim,” and Noah looks at the murky water and says “yuck.” Eli simply cracks up with delight, so happy to hear the little boy say a normal little-boy thing for perhaps the first time in their entire relationship. The cure is so fast and so obvious that when Denise, Jane, and the cops show up, they pretty much just leave Eli alone as he rests on the front steps of the farmhouse, content with a job well done.
Can the same be said of Before? It certainly can for how this episode looks. Jet Wilkinson is a director who tends to do whatever he’s doing as well as it can be done, and in this case he takes the challenge of filming a gloomy horror climax about grief and sets it against a background of hard gray wintry afternoon light. There are shots of Eli alone on the shore stronger and eerier than any of the show’s more explicit horror moments.
Which, I suppose, speaks to Before’s bigger problem: It’s a horror show that was never particularly scary. Surprising, intriguing, occasionally disgusting? Yes. An odd but effective vehicle for Billy Crystal to stretch his legs by playing, basically, a maniac who should never be let near a child again? Definitely. Something that made me afraid, the way Twin Peaks or Channel Zero or Them or the first season of The Terror made me afraid? No. That may matter to you, it may not, but as a Horror Person I feel it bears mentioning.
What I hope people take away from Before is less any individual achievement by the show and more its structural uniqueness. Ten spine-tingling psychological-thriller episodes, nearly all of which clock in under 30 minutes when you subtract the credits, sometimes significantly so? I had my problems with the rat-a-tat storytelling rhythm that resulted, but just because it didn’t quite work for this story doesn’t mean it’s not perfect for something else.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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