In all of our years doing this work, we have never, ever run into an international show that’s only available in dubbed English and not its native language. But, thanks to Hulu, there’s a first time for everything. A new science fiction show from Spain is only available in English, but the show’s problems go beyond a clunky dubbing job.
FROM TOMORROW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “Bizkaia, 1955.” At night, a boy goes through a rocky area with his dog. He and the dog see a meteor strike. He sees something behind a gate that is strange.
The Gist: “Bizkaia, 2024.” Gaby (Marta Hazas) and her husband David (Jaime Zatarain) are moving into a new house with their daughter Emma (Denisse Peña) and son Teo (Amets Otxoa). David is upset that a floor tile in their kitchen pantry was left off, exposing a mysterious rock underneath. After he leaves for a business trip, she sees the rock and almost touches it, but is called away.
That night, after making sure her kids are OK, Gaby goes into the pantry to find something that was packed away. She accidentally touches the rock with her foot, and is transported to some point in the near future. An emergency physician, she sees herself in her medic uniform on a call, seeing Emma unconscious and possibly gravely hurt on the ground. She then sees a vision of her mother before coming back to the present.
Gaby is so shaken by this vision that, when she gets to the hospital for work the next day, she requests an emergency CT scan of her brain. Her friend Aranxta (Nuria Herrero) gets the head of neurology, Esther (Valeria Alonso) to read the scan — the two are dating — and everything is clear. Gaby is about to explain the vision when she’s called out on an emergency.
The call takes her to the campus of Geocorp, the corporation started by her father Aurelio (Ramón Barea). Apparently, two teens were trying to scale an electric fence to a restricted area and one of them burned his hands. Gaby is none too happy when the teen with the burned hands is Mikel (Gabriel Guevara), who is dating Emma. He and the other teen were there during the school day to try to investigate or disrupt something that Geocorp is doing that is harming the environment.
At the scene, Gaby sees Andrés (Álex González), a police detective with whom she’s an acquaintance. Gaby apparently treated his late wife three years prior, right before she died, and he’s never forgotten Gaby’s compassion. When he overhears ger tell Aranxta about her vision, his interest is piqued, to the point where he disables her car in order to drive her to her new house.
While Gaby is dealing with the vision, she’s more preoccupied by the fact that Emma was the other teen with Mikel when they tried to scale the fence at Geocorp, whose CEO is Gaby’s brother Nacho (Pablo Derqui). As the family gathers to celebrate Aurelio’s birthday, we find out that Aurelio was the boy who saw the meteor crash in 1955, and he founded Geocorp to study the “unique mineral” that’s underground in the region.
Gaby ends up having another vision, this time showing men in hazmat suits pulling her away from Emma. Later that night, she sees Andrés stalking outside her house and demands to know why he’s there. That’s when he reveals his late wife had the same visions she did. But what he doesn’t tell her is that earlier that night, he saw some suspicious things going on a Geocorp.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? From Tomorrow (original title: Desde el mañana) has a bit of a Sliders-esque feel. It’s a sci-fi mystery like, say, Outer Range, but much lighter in tone.
Our Take: We’re not really all that sure about what kind of show From Tomorrow wants to be. At times, it’s dark and foreboding, at times it has scenes that could fit on a medical show like Grey’s Anatomy. There’s weirdly-toned jokey lines and a soundtrack that sometimes veers from dramatic, spooky tones to something out of Virgin River. All of this is fed through a really clunky English dub, which is the only way viewers can watch the show, because Hulu doesn’t provide the show in its native Spanish.
The story is chock full of coincidences and happenstances in the first episode, which is no way to set up a story. Gaby is called to her family’s corporate campus and happens upon the husband of a woman he treated three years ago. And, oh by the way, the kid she treats at that scene is her daughter’s mysterious boyfriend. Either they live in a tiny town or that’s just too many coincidences to believe.
It’s not difficult to figure out where the story is going: Gaby and Andrés team up to figure out just what is going on with these visions, what the rocks under the house are made of, and what they can do to save Emma from the fate Gaby saw. In the process, Gaby’s father and brother will be implicated in whatever mysterious goings-on are happening at Geocorp.
We usually don’t harp on language in a show, but for the longest time we thought that From Tomorrow wasn’t necessarily a family show, but at least one that’s family-friendly. Then f-bombs start dropping, among other out-of-left-field dirty lines, in the second half of the episode, and we wondered why they were even necessary. Do they want the show to seem more realistic? Again, it speaks to its muddled tone and indecision on what kind of show it wants to be.
To be honest, the English dub is way more potty-mouthed than the English subtitles are, which to us speaks to just how much the English dub took us completely out of the show’s story.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Aurelio, dressed in a hazmat suit, opens a locked gate in a restricted area.
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the subtitle translators, who seemed to use a whole lot more restraint than the translators who wrote the script for the actors who dubbed the show into English.
Most Pilot-y Line: When Emma asks her mother if Mikel is ok, Gaby says, “Well, he won’t be able to jerk off for awhile,” to which Emma replies, “Don’t you worry about that. I’ll do it for him.” That was both in the dub and the subtitles. Yeesh.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Even if we watched From Tomorrow in its native Spanish, we would still be rolling our eyes at the plot contrivances and shifts in tone. But the horrible English dub just makes things even harder to watch.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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