♫ Que Sera, Sera ♫
From (2022-present) is an American Sci-Fi Horror series created by John Griffin and produced by The Russo Brothers. The series airs on MGM+ (formerly Epix).
While on a road trip, the Matthews family inadvertently crash their RV and find themselves in a strange small town in middle America. As it turns out, anyone who enters the town is unable to leave, which is a very bad thing as every night mysterious shapeshifting creatures come out of the woods to kill anyone they can find. The townsfolk are protected only by a set of mysterious talismans. The town has divided into two factions: the main township, led by Sheriff Boyd Stevens (Harold Perrineau), and the Colony House, a commune led by Donna (Elizabeth Saunders).
The second season aired April 23, 2023.
In June 2023, the series was greenlighted for a third season set to premiere somewhere in 2024.
Tropes appearing in this series include:
- Accidental Murder: Sara ends up accidentally slashing Nathan's throat when he tries to stop her killing Ethan.
- Actually Pretty Funny: While talking with Bakta the bus driver, Jade tries to alleviate her guilt over driving her passengers into the town by snarking that if they were riding a bus their lives probably weren't all that good to begin with. He immediately apologizes for it as a bad joke, but after a moment Bakta starts laughing.
- Agent Scully: Deconstructed. The primary reason so many people die on the first night is because of their refusal to accept anything but a logical explanation for the explicitly supernatural conundrum they have found themselves trapped in, resulting in actions that put both themselves and everybody around them at risk. When a bus full of new people arrives in Season 2, Donna has no choice but to force as many passengers as she can into the diner at literal gunpoint before nightfall hits because there is absolutely no way for her to explain to them what is going on without coming off as a complete lunatic.
- Anti-Hero: Boyd. He's gruff and somewhat volatile, but he's a genuinely well-meaning man dedicated to helping the townsfolk.
- Arc Symbol: The circle with several lines going through it that Jade keeps seeing in his visions, and which Tabitha finds in the tunnels under the town. In the Season 2 finale, Jade has a vision while exploring the tunnels of the pale children lying on stone tables and looking up at a hole in the ceiling which has several roots passing over it in the same pattern, suggesting that the symbol is a representation of what they're seeing.
- Asshole Victim: Averted with Toby, who is genuinely regretful about the car accident he and Jade caused and is horrified when he thinks it caused someone else's death.
- Big Damn Reunion: Season 2 premiere "Strangers in a Strange Land" has Kristi and her fiancée Marielle (who is one of the passengers of the bus that arrived in the town in the season 1 finale) tearfully hug each other when they reunite after they haven't seen each for months due to Kristi being trapped in a mysterious town.
- Bisexual Love Triangle: Paramedic Kristi and Deputy Kenny have feelings for each other, but she and Kenny can't be together because she still has a fiancée who is a woman. Things get complicated when Kristi's fiancée Marielle (who is one of the bus passengers) arrives at the mysterious town where Kristi and Kenny are.
- Bugs Herald Evil: Late in Season 2, cicadas start appearing in ominous and threatening ways in town after Boyd kills one of the creatures.
- Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Boyd refuses to put Sara "in the Box" regardless of having every motivation in the world to do so because her ability to telepathically communicate with the Boy in White might be their only lead to finding a way to escape the town.
- Cliffhanger:
- The Season 1 finale ends with Victor and Tabitha fleeing the creatures in their underground tunnels, Boyd trapped in a shaft in an unknown location, and a bus arriving in town.
- The Season 2 finale ends with the Boy in White shoving Tabitha out the window of the lighthouse, after which she wakes up in a hospital in the outside world.
- Closed Circle: Once you enter the town, it's impossible to leave by road (as you just end up back where you started), and going into the forest is basically a death sentence because of the creatures.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Victor, a member of the Colony House, is a very strange man, spending all his time drawing creepy pictures and measuring the trees to see if they've moved. Of course, his behavior is rather justified by the fact that he's been in the town longer than anyone, ever since he was a small child, so the accumulated trauma has clearly affected his development.
- Conspiracy Theorist:
- Jim starts sliding into this mindset in Season 2, when he convinces himself that the town and everything in it is a Government Conspiracy to study how people react to stress. In his case, it's because of his desperate need to rationalize the situation and his inability to simply accept the impossibility of everything involved in it.
- Randall is an even bigger one than Jim, not just latching onto his theory but taking it even further, becoming convinced that every death in the town is staged as part of the experiment and that virtually everyone except himself and Jim is in on it.
- Contrived Coincidence: The fact that Kristi's fiancé Marielle happened to be on the bus that arrives in town. Several of the others note the oddity of that happening, when no one else's loved ones have ever shown up.
- Creepy Child: The children that Tabitha starts hallucinating in Season 2 are pale, sunken-eyed, balding, and constantly staring at her.
- Creepy Crows: Whenever someone comes across the felled tree that ends up redirecting them to the road into the town, there's always a murder of crows cawing away in the branches above them.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: The punishment for breaking Boyd's rules for the town is to be locked inside of a decrepit shed infamously called "the Box" where the guilty party is left for dead during the night so they can be taken by the creatures. The "cruel" part is that the monsters don't kill their victims quickly - they like to make it last.
- Dead Person Conversation:
- When Boyd starts having hallucinations in Season 2, he has several conversations with the deceased Father Khatri.
- In the Season 2 finale, Jade has a conversation with Tom the bartender, who died earlier in the season. When the latter questions why he's not freaking out about it, Jade replies that he's pretty much Seen It All in regards to his hallucinations at this point, so it's not that big a deal to him.
- Death of a Child: A young girl is brutally murdered by one of the creatures in the pilot's Cold Open.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: At the climax of "Pas de Deux", Boyd kills one of the creatures by using his blood to transfer his mysterious parasitic infection to it.
- Dreaming of Things to Come: In season 2, one of the bus passengers Elgin claims that he had a bad dream about the mysterious town before the bus arrived. This is why he panics and tries to tell the bus driver Bakta and the other passengers to turn the bus around once he recognizes the town.
- Driven to Suicide: Frank chooses to let himself be put defenseless in the Box and left out for the monsters to kill him because he can't live with himself after the death of his family. Sure enough, he's killed during the night by one of the creatures.
- Eldritch Location:
- The town. People arrive in it on the same road from all over the country, it's a Closed Circle that can't be exited once entered, all the buildings have power despite the lack of a power grid (or even actual wires in the power cables), and of course, there are the monsters that come out every night from tunnels under the town to kill everyone they come across.
- The forest surrounding the town as well. The monsters emerging from it every night already make it supernatural, but exploring it just brings up more mysteries — on his first extended exploration, Boyd discovered a ruined structure composed of stones that repel the creatures from buildings when hung from a doorway. Later, he and Sara find their tent moved by something overnight, ending up in a grove covered in giant spiderwebs, wherein Boyd sees what appears to be his dead wife suspended in a cocoon, before they later stumble across a giant lighthouse. And there's also the matter of the "Farway" trees, large hollow trunks that will teleport whoever enters them to a random location.
- Et Tu, Brute?: Kenny is outraged when he learns that Boyd knew that Sara was responsible for his father's death and is continuing to protect her regardless, to the point of quitting as deputy.
- Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: This actually comes up in-universe, as Tabitha wonders if she and her family were actually killed when their RV crashed in the town and they're in some kind of afterlife. Father Khatri admits other people in the town have had the same theory, but convinces Tabitha she's still alive.
- The Fair Folk: The monsters' demonic forms bear a very close resemblance to sluagh
, creatures from Irish mythology who can be avoided by "running (or staying) indoors after dark, or by not tempting fate walking alone in secluded, unpopulated areas (dark forests, empty streets, etc)". - Fatal Flaw: Jim is completely unable to accept anything less than a completely rational explanation for everything happening in the town, which drives him to take risks to find that explanation, such as continuing his investigation even after the storm seemingly caused by building the radio tower, or trusting the clearly unstable Randall.
- Forced to Watch: Kelly, one of the new arrivals on the bus, is pinned to a tree by the creatures with a piece of rebar and forced to watch as they torture her boyfriend to death.
- Gorn: The series showcases a lot of grotesque violence. Special mention goes to Laurie and Meagan's corpses, which have been viciously ripped open and gutted, and Sara's murder of Toby by first slamming a screwdriver through his throat, after which you can clearly see it in his mouth when he gags in agony, and then her further mutilation of his body to make it look like the creatures had done it.
- Genius Loci: Sara recalls that her brother once speculated that if the people try to escape the town and its environs, the land itself would fight to stop them. When a harsh storm hits the town and the forest following several attempts to escape, the Boy in White tells Sara her brother was right.
- Hearing Voices: Sara hears voices which compel her to kill, but which clearly aren't hallucinations, as they know things that she herself couldn't possibly know, like when new cars will arrive, or where Father Khatri buried his secret bag.
- Heroic Host: In Season 2, Boyd is infected by Martin with some kind of blood-based parasite that gradually drives him insane with visions relating to a creepy ballerina coming after him. The only way to get rid of the parasite is by passing it onto someone else via blood transfer, which Boyd uses to kill one of the creatures.
- Humanoid Abomination: The creatures look like normal people, minus the creepy smiles they're always sporting. When they actually attack, they tend to revert to a more demonic appearance.
- Immune to Bullets: The monsters cannot be killed or even seriously hurt by conventional firearms.
- Jerkass with a Heart of Gold: Jade is a rich prick whose only concern is figuring out a way out of the town for his own sake, and expects everyone to do whatever he asks to help him. But he also strikes up an unlikely friendship with Tian and helps her deal with her husband's death, and shows sympathy for Victor after learning a bit of his Dark and Troubled Past.
- Jump Scare: Plenty, but special mention goes to the ventriloquist's dummy in "Strangers In A Strange Land", which out of nowhere roars at Jade (who, after a Beat, roars right back at it in a CMOF).
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: It's hard to talk about Season 2 without mentioning the bus that shows up in town at the end of Season 1.
- The Leader: To paraphrase Father Khatri, the people trapped in the town were dying in droves and living in perpetual fear before Boyd showed up and took charge of the situation. Using his military experience to organize the survivors into pooling their resources, rounding up animals that could be used as livestock, and his discovery of the talismans that keep the monsters at bay, culminated in Boyd being named the de jure leader of the entire community as the town sheriff. However, The Chains of Commanding have clearly been taking its toll on Boyd's mental health, leaving him rather irritable when needing to interact with other people.
- The Lost Lenore: Boyd's wife Abby underwent Sanity Slippage after their arrival in town, until finally he had to kill her to stop her shooting rampage.
- Mercy Kill: In "Tether", Kenny and Ellis find a girl from the bus in the forest, having been pinned to a tree by the creatures ramming a piece of rebar through her head. While she's somehow miraculously alive, Kristi knows that she won't survive them removing the metal without medical equipment they don't have, so with her permission they remove it so that she can die.
- Mistaken for Pedophile: Victor gets this twice from Jim, who first thinks he's luring Ethan out into the woods to do something unsavory to him (and threatens to beat him for it until Victor retaliates by pulling a gun), and then the second when Julie talks about how she went to Victor's room during the monsters' attack on Colony House - she was actually up there because to escape the embarrassment of romantic rejection from Fatima.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Sara's reaction when she accidentally kills her brother while trying to kill Ethan - especially after she reveals to Boyd that the reason she had murdered Toby and let the monsters in to slaughter the clinic's inhabitants was that they would kill Nathan if she didn't comply.
- My Greatest Failure:
- For Boyd, it's his wife's death. He was so focused on exploring the forest around the town that he failed to notice her Sanity Slippage until she went on a shooting rampage, and he had to kill her to protect their son from her.
- Father Khatri ended up in the town right after his greatest failing. Namely, not protecting a young boy in his congregation from the boy's abusive father, who ended up beating him to death, followed by Khatri giving the man a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
- "Forest for the Trees" reveals that Victor used to have a sister named Eloise. The night that their mother and everyone else in town died, she made the two of them hide in the root cellar, but Eloise chased after her, and Victor was too scared to follow. He's been so traumatized by guilt over this that he repressed the memory for years.
- Mysterious Watcher: The Boy in White, a figure whom only Victor, Ethan and Sara can see, and who seems to be trying to guide them in uncovering the town's secrets.
- Nice Day, Deadly Night: The very plot of the show. The characters are trapped in a pocket dimension or parallel world, where during the day is very nice and peaceful, but during the night, all kinds of horrible monsters that can shapeshift start to hunt everyone whom they get outside of their houses.
- Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: Victor's childish scribbles in the intro that depict various scenes from the nightlife in the "village".
- Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Victor, who has been in the town the longest and seen horrible things such as a street full of eviscerated victims including his mother and sister, and communicates with the Boy in White and his dog. It's left him pretty traumatized and mentally childlike, although he occasionally shows moments of lucidity, like when he helps Julie escape Colony House when it's being attacked by the monsters.
- Ominous Music Box Tune: One of the hallucinations Boyd starts having in Season 2 is of a music box with a ballerina figurine on it, which is usually accompanied by an actual ballerina that shows up and dances creepily around him before attacking. Then the box starts showing up in other people's nightmares as well.
- Ominous Walk: It's noted that the creatures never run, even when in pursuit of prey.
- Pet the Dog: Jade agrees to Victor's request to play "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" on the fiddle, the way his mother used to do whenever he got scared as a child. While he's doing this in exchange for learning what Victor knows about the strange symbol Jade keeps seeing, it's also clear that he feels genuine sympathy for Victor.
- Rain of Blood:
- Seen during the monsters' attack on Colony House. One member gets a few drops on his arm, then looks up to see a monster grinning down at him with Trudy's blood dripping off his chin.
- Jade also has this happen to him while he's exploring the outer edges of the forests and hallucinates a dead and mutilated Civil War soldier hanging in the tree dripping blood onto his arms and face.
- Sinister Minister: Downplayed. Father Khatri strongly encourages Boyd to go through with executing Frank as a warning to other would-be rule breakers, but this is a case of doing what has to be done for the good of the community.
- Slasher Smile: The most unnerving physical characteristic of the creatures, unless they're in the middle of trying to trick someone or they've shifted to their full-on monster form.
- Surreal Horror: Happens quite a lot in the show. For example the monstrous ballerina that Boyd has visions of when he is infected with blood worms. The nightmares that people have, especially the ones caused by the Cicadas that have the power to actually kill them.
- To Be Lawful or Good: Boyd's greatest personal challenge as the town sheriff is his struggle to uphold the Repressive, but Efficient laws he himself established for the sake of maintaining peace and security within the community, even if that means damning people he sympathizes with to a Cruel and Unusual Death as punishment for breaking those laws.
- Too Dumb to Live:
- Kevin. No matter how lonely you feel - letting the monsters in because they happen to look like your beloved ones (and you're fully aware that they do this to get into your head) is practically the definition of this trope for any adult.
- Just barely averted with Tabitha, who feels the need to respond to every one of Victor's warnings to stay quiet so they don't wake "them"note with a loud "What?! Why?! Wake who?! Where are we going?!"
- Vagueness Is Coming: Throughout Season 2, there begin to be signs that things are about to go From Bad to Worse for the town, as first the trees start losing their leaves (which according to Victor has never happened in all the years he's lived there), people start suffering from nightmares all featuring the same music box, and then cicadas starts plaguing the town.
- Was Once a Man: The creatures are heavily implied to be this in the episode "Belly of the Beast", when Kristi performs an autopsy on the creature Boyd killed and discovers its internal organs are human, albeit shriveled and desiccated.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Pretty much everyone in town is pissed at Boyd for hiding Sara's return from the rest of them, as well as refusing to punish her for her various actions. Kenny in particular is furious after he learns that Sara caused his father's death and that Boyd never told him.
- Wham Shot: Tabitha waking up in the hospital at the end of season 2.
- Would Hurt a Child:
- The creatures establish how dangerous they are by brutally murdering a young girl and her mother in the pilot's Cold Open.
- The voices that Sara hears tell her to kill Ethan.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: During the back half of Season 2, characters start suffering from nightmares that see them suffering injuries that transpose into the real world, such as Kenny getting a burn on his arm and Elgin nearly drowning.
