Watching From is like attending a Halloween party and playing Twister with a bunch of people dressed like characters from Lost, Yellowjackets, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Salem’s Lot — which is to say, elements of MGM+’s horror series are familiar, but the ways in which it reconfigures these elements makes the overall experience a blast. Perhaps you need to fill the Evil-shaped hole in your heart, or the yearslong wait for Stranger Things feels interminable. If so, you’re in luck: From is the perfect spooky-season watch, and with its third season premiering on September 22, we’re here to catch you up on what you need to know.
The series, created by John Griffin, follows a group of people stuck in a town that seemingly defies all rules of space and time; over decades, each of these people came upon a gigantic tree in the middle of the road as they were driving, saw a murder of crows flying above them, and ended up in this small community. The place is basically a living nightmare, so mysterious that the citizens of the town wonder if they’ve died and gone to hell or are stuck in purgatory. And thanks to the ravenous monsters that nightly disguise themselves as smiling humans and eat anyone unprotected outside, plus various other eldritch horrors like ghosts and malevolent bugs, not to mention dwindling resources and communal infighting, everyone is always on edge. Small-town living — it’s fraught!
If you approach From wanting answers on, say, the town’s weather patterns, or how the talismans that protect the humans function, or why the monsters only seem to move at a slow, methodical walk, you’re in for a frustrating watch. That’s because the keys to From’s puzzle-box structure are really its characters and how they deal with living in a world where little makes sense but nearly everything is fatally dangerous. The townspeople’s friendships, romances, and enmities are tangible ways to understand what’s going on here, and their complex bonds help amplify the show’s life-and-death stakes. Whether you’re a loyal From fan who just needs a refresh before the premiere or a new viewer looking to learn what you need to know, here are the eight relationships to understand before the series returns on Sunday night.
Spoilers follow for the first two seasons of From.
Town leaders Boyd, Donna, and Father Khatri
From’s unnamed setting is divided into two communities, and each person who shows up has to choose where they want to live. There’s the more family-oriented Township, with single-family homes, a diner, and a church all on a main street, and there’s the more hedonistic, collectivist, and unstructured vibe at Colony House, located on a sprawling piece of hillside property that grows all the town’s crops. Sheriff Boyd Stevens (Harold Perrineau, exceptional) oversees the town; Donna Raines (Elizabeth Saunders) oversees Colony House; and when From begins, the two groups don’t really interact. Donna and Boyd even tell newcomers that their decision on where to live is permanent, given that it’s meant to reflect how they want to live. But that self-imposed separation crumbles fairly steadily as the series progresses, both because the monsters stage a massive attack on Colony House that scatters its surviving residents into available houses in town, and because Boyd and Donna have such a strong understanding of each other.
He knows that she needs compassion and vulnerability, despite her gruffness; she knows that he needs a steady, experienced figure at his side since he was forced to kill his wife, Abby (she thought the town was a dream and went on a deadly shooting spree). The pair balances each other out, and each of them also get some support from the community’s religious leader, Father Khatri (Shaun Majumder). Before he got his throat ripped out by a baddie, Khatri had a slightly Old Testament vibe and was more willing than Boyd to punish people for hurting others in town by putting them in the Box (an enclosure in public that is unprotected from the monsters, guaranteeing that whoever’s inside is torn apart and eaten). His arguments with Boyd about whether Boyd was getting too soft, how the citizens’ lack of discipline might hurt them, and what the monsters want provided some of the series’ moral backbone, and those conversations have become even more complex now that Khatri is dead but Boyd is still seeing and talking to him.
Lovers Ellis and Fatima
Boyd and his son, Ellis (Corteon Moore), aren’t really on speaking terms in From’s first season. We learn about their estrangement through later flashbacks, which show that before Abby’s death, Ellis went to his father and told him about his mother’s increasing disconnect from reality, but Boyd was so consumed with trying to find a way out of town and providing hope for their fellow citizens that he didn’t take Ellis’s concerns seriously. There’s a lot of familial friction there, as well as some typical father-son stuff, like Boyd being an Army veteran with combat experience and leadership responsibilities, and Ellis a sensitive artist with bad taste in pendants and a seeming physical inability to button his shirt all the way up.
We learn more about Ellis through his relationship with Fatima Hassan-Rostami (Pegah Ghafoori), Colony House’s sunniest, most positive resident. The two put their tragic backstories behind (Fatima’s family is Iranian and her father was an outspoken cleric targeted by the government) to be together and serve as poster children for Colony House: peace, love, understanding, and, yes, some drug use. Their bond is life-affirming and proves it’s possible to live in this place without giving in to despair — they even get engaged! But then Fatima gets pregnant, after being previously told she couldn’t carry children. Donna thinks that means the baby is a miracle, but Fatima isn’t so sure. Is this a Rosemary’s Baby thing and the child won’t be human? Are we being set up for an emotionally devastating miscarriage subplot? How would Boyd and Fatima’s happy relationship survive any of these things? That’s the kind of punch in the gut From is great at.
Unrequiteds Kenny and Kristi
Boyd, Donna, and Father Khatri (when he was alive, at least) run the town as its A-team; deputy sheriff Kenny Liu (Ricky He) and town doctor Kristi Miller (Chloe Van Landschoot) are its second line of defense. In their previous lives, Kenny was in college and helped care for his mostly Mandarin-speaking parents, and Kristi was a third-year medical student and EMT, so the two have a similar willingness to help people in need and respond to crises. Their similar ages and personalities make them one of the tightest friendships in town. But: Kenny also happens to be in love with Kristi, who seems to return his feelings, but Kristi left a fiancée back home and isn’t ready to give up on that relationship yet because it would mean she’s accepted a future stuck in this place. It’s complicated!
It only gets more so when Kenny’s father is killed by the monsters thanks to the misguided actions of diner employee Sara Myers (Avery Konrad), whom Kenny’s mother, Tian-Chen Liu (Elizabeth Moy), had treated as a daughter, and when Kristi’s fiancée, Marielle (Kaelen Ohm), arrives in town in season two. When Kenny learns what Sara did and that Boyd, his replacement father figure and boss, protected Sara afterward, the double betrayal rattles Kenny’s spirit and affects his friendship with Kristi. This all comes to a head when Kenny, Kristi, and Boyd collaborate on an autopsy of one of the monsters, a super-grisly sequence that shows how Kristi’s mission-oriented mentality is a major benefit to the town, and how Kenny’s passionate desire to protect those he loves might lead to recklessness.
Sara and everyone who knows what she did (which was bad stuff)
Speaking of Sara: She’s one of the series’ most mysterious characters and is recurrently used to push From’s stakes higher. She’s introduced as a young woman suffering from seizures, visions, and voices in her head who promise her that she and everyone else in town will be able to go home if she kills whomever the voices say. After murdering a newcomer she’s entrusted with caring for and causing Kenny’s father’s death, Sara voices her situation as a hypothetical to Kristi, and Kristi admits that she’d probably do what the voices asked if that meant everyone would be free. So Sara decides to kill the voices’ next target: a little boy named Ethan Matthews (Simon Webster). When Sara’s kidnapping attempt is interrupted by her brother — who learns what Sara’s dealing with from Father Khatri — she accidentally slits his throat instead, securing her status as a reviled member of the town. Some think she should have gone into the Box, most don’t trust her, and Boyd is doubted for letting her live; she’s an outcast in a town where being alone is its own kind of death sentence.
But Sara remains fascinating for her impossible-to-predict decision-making process, which feels tonally right for a place that is constantly mutating. On a trek into the forest with Boyd to find the edges of the town, she protects him when he gives up hope; later, she accepts the townspeople’s cruelties to her but draws the line at new resident Randall (A.J. Simmons) insinuating that she’s a crisis actor. A show that is constantly changing itself up needs a character to embody that chaos, and that’s Sara.
Marrieds Tabitha and Jim
From introduces us to its world through the Matthews family, amusement-park-ride engineer Jim (Eion Bailey); his wife, Tabitha (Catalina Sandino Moreno); their teen daughter, Julie (Hannah Cheramy), and young son Ethan, who while on a road trip crash their RV and end up in the town. The series explains everything about its monsters, the Township-vs.-Colony House divide, and how this place traps its citizens via conversations with the Matthewses, who when they arrive are barely holding together as a family. Tabitha and Jim are secretly filing for divorce, Julie bullies Ethan, and the family had a third child who died when he was only a few months old due to a moment of parental neglect from Jim and Tabitha.
But! Can you believe that the nightmares of this place bond the family together? Jim builds a radio tower on top of Colony House to communicate with the outside world, and Tabitha digs dozens of feet down in their home’s basement to figure out where their electricity comes from; these missions unite and give the Matthewses purpose, even if they ultimately just lead to more confusing scenarios. And when Tabitha disappears at the end of season two, traveling through a tree and waking up in a hospital — with Jim, Julie, and Ethan having no idea where she is — that’s From asking whether a happy family really can survive this place.
Unlikely friends Ethan and Victor
It’s rare to live in this town for very long. Most people die, killed either by the monsters or by suicide, a reality that’s implicitly suggested by the diner’s back room (which operates as the town’s storage unit and is full of people’s outdated and decades-old things). But Victor (Scott McCord) has been here for decades, growing up among these monsters to become an eccentric, emotionally stunted, and awkward-but-kind man. The only survivor of a massacre that killed the entire town, including his mother, Victor is more like a child than an adult, and his spotty memory means that his knowledge about the monsters isn’t always useful.
His friendship with Ethan, though, opens him up past just being a Log Lady analog — he lets Ethan in on his suspicions that the town’s landscape is changing, he saves Julie from the monster attack at Colony House because he knows Julie is Ethan’s sister, and he guides Tabitha through a tunnel system where the monsters live because he wants to make sure she safely reunites with her family. Victor is maybe too much of a deus ex machina, but Ethan helps humanize him; Victor gains the Matthewses as his surrogate family, and they draw out his insights about this place. And while Ethan was always going to lose his innocence here, Victor’s friendship helps ground him; when the world feels like it’s ending, it’s nice to have a friend with whom you can pass the time drawing pictures and walking through the woods.
Possession victims Julie, Randall, and Mari
In the first season of From, there’s a routine between the townspeople and monsters. At sundown, Boyd walks through the town, ringing a bell and reminding everyone of curfew. At night, the Township and Colony House citizens stay inside, where they’ve hung a talisman that protects them from the monsters who disguise themselves as smiling humans, knock on doors and windows, and ask to be let inside. If the talisman falls, or if someone inside the home opens a window or door and lets the monsters inside, that protection breaks. (It’s basically vampire rules.) The monsters are still a threat, but the humans know what to expect from them.
That normalcy changes in the second season, when Boyd is infected by parasitic worms that cause him to hear a music box playing, visualize a murderous ballerina, and communicate with Abby, who, like Buffy’s First Evil, preaches nihilism and encourages him to let the town’s citizens die. The new monster Boyd brings back to town in his blood starts terrorizing people in their dreams, Freddy Krueger style, and possesses Julie, conspiracy-theorist Randall, and Kristi’s fiancée, Marielle. Remember the Flayed on Stranger Things? Julie, Randall, and Marielle go through something similar — they’re trapped and tortured in a different dimension. Boyd saves them by the end of season two, but their ordeal proves that the town’s nightly monsters aren’t the worst things they’re going to face while here.
Jade and many, many ghosts
Software developer Jade Herrera (David Alpay) is initially one of From’s most annoying characters: a wealthy, abrasive asshole convinced that the town is a massive escape room organized by his friends, with all of its citizens in on the gag. Once he starts seeing ghosts, though, he realizes what they’re actually going through and (in between benders) devotes himself to trying to get everyone out. Jade goes from being the series’ greatest skeptic to its most haunted, seeing all kinds of ghosts — a man crushed by a boulder, a Civil War soldier shooting at him, a group of kids restrained on sacrificial altars — that could provide a glimpse into the history of this place. From might be setting Jade up to be a second version of a character named Christopher, who lived in the town when Victor was a child and who Victor describes as being a good guy until he became obsessed with a certain symbol affiliated with the monsters. Or From might just be doing its own version of Thirteen Ghosts with Jade at its center, bombarding him (and us) with spooky stuff to keep us on our toes, and that’s better than any escape room.
