“Who hurt you?” “You did.”
“She killed herself. There was nothing I could do.” “Liar!”
Well, there you have it, huh? That’s Before in five sentences. Eli asks his young charge Noah the identity of the person who hurt him in his past, and is told it was Eli himself. Eli finally walks his therapist (Julia Chan) through the events of the day of his wife Lynn’s suicide, only for his wife to appear to him and accuse him of lying when he says there was nothing he could have done to save her. Is all of this true? Is Eli at the root of the trauma experienced by both Noah and Lynn? Or is he being somehow victimized too, by whatever dark force connects all these events?
Beats me! But they definitely seem connected, if only because the only person capable of seeing what’s really going on with Noah’s violent outbursts is Eli and Lynn’s granddaughter, Sophie (Rebecca Ruane). Sophie, who appears to be on the spectrum, notices that in the drawing Noah almost automatically created of himself stabbing that boy in school from the premiere, he was actually “stabbing the bad thing on his neck.” But this discovery leads to the line of questioning that prompts Noah to say Eli hurt him, so we’re back to understanding nothing.
We’re certainly given no clues about the latest way Noah’s visions are manifesting. Instead of menacing black goop extruding worm-like appendages, now the ceiling of his room turns to a block of ice, as his lips turn blue and his breath comes in frosty gasps. At one point he somehow nearly drowns, even though the only water near him could barely fill a glass. Because of this he’s being treated as a suicide risk and moved to a psych ward.
We do get a lot more insight into what happened when Lynn killed herself, though. Ignoring her gentle “Wait, you’re leaving?” the day of the event, Eli went out to go to the pool, where he watched a woman swim, and to pick up Chinese, where he watched a lobster swim. When he got home, she was gone, having slit her wrists and drowned in the bathtub. Lynn had been struggling with cancer, Eli notes, but there was no sign she had despaired, until it was too late.
All this explains many of Eli’s fixations. He naturally feels haunted and guilty because he believes choosing to go out despite her wishes kept her from preventing her death. His nightmares take place at an empty swimming pool because he visited a pool that day. I’m surprised egg drop soup doesn’t play a bigger role in his trauma iconography, honestly.
So is that all Lynn meant when she called him a liar? Or, as the last shot of Eli choking her indicates, could she have meant something worse? It seems unlikely to me that Eli is a wife-murderer, but stranger things have happened.
One thing I’m realizing is that keeping us guessing like this is an artifact of the show’s running time. An unusual half-hour drama — I don’t think Apple TV+ will be submitting this one for Best Comedy, The Bear–style — it’s also an even more unusual half-hour supernatural mystery thriller. What this means is every thirty minutes or so, it’s got to end on a cliffhanger that raises more questions than it answers to keep us moving through all ten episodes, instead of doing so every sixty minutes or so to move us through the same number of episodes or fewer.
In other words, writer-creator Sarah Thorp all but designed Before to deny us answers. The mysteries add up one on top of the other until it’s tune in next week, same Before-time, same Before-channel. For a while, anyway, we’re gonna be as in the dark as Eli.
Director Jet Wilkinson, however, does more than just immerse us in murk. I quite liked random well-lit moments, like Eli pouring milk in his kitchen, or standing around zombified outside his apartment as EMTs carry his wife’s body down the steps. But the episode also delivers the show’s nastiest and grossest and most effective scare yet: In a dream, Eli worries at a spot on his neck until it opens into a wound, which he proceeds to tear open, peeling away chunks of his skin. It’s disgusting! And it’s good horror, on a show that needs it.
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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