From, Season Four – When Did it All Get So Boring?

Attention! This post includes spoilers for From season four and prior.

Like you all, I was absolutely captivated when the first season of From hit my eyeballs.

It’s engrossing almost from the word go, with a scene involving a demonic-looking creature – concealed within the visage of a friendly old grandmother – tricking it way into a child’s home before ripping him limb from limb. A hell of a cold open, yes; but also the perfect table-setter for what was close to a perfect debut season for a horror TV show.

Season two was also strong – building on its predecessor’s nascent lore, and expanding the characters in fulfilling and fascinating ways – while, despite some forgivable element of diminishing returns, season three still entertained.

Then, April 2026 rolled around, season four landed in our laps, and, well…is the magic gone?

I appreciate everyone will have different takes on this. And, hell, the robust comment-section debate on some of the pieces I’ve written (for example, my ending explainers for Bring Her Back and The Woman in the Yard, respectively – or my Hallow Road (2025) review) are almost what I love most about doing this. (Not to mention serving as a testament to this wonderful, thriving online community of horror nerds I get the pleasure of interacting with here on Talking Terror.)

Still, the fact remains – season four of From isn’t great watching.

But why?

Perhaps it’s the bloated cast of characters. From has never been all that good at killing off its characters (outside of Kenny’s folks, Father Khatri and Jim Matthews are really the only cases you could make for “big” deaths), yet it has been good at introducing them: often, quite literally, by the busload. Early From featured a more egalitarian lineup when it came to relative character importance. Yet, as the episodes and seasons have worn on and the ensemble has blossomed, this overpopulation issue has led to an increasing separation between the key characters and…well, everyone else. The milk has been left on the bench, and the cream – Boyd, Kenny, Jade, Tabitha – has risen to the top, leaving scant screen time (and opportunities for character development) to the rest.

A shot of From's increasingly bloated cast of characters. Who do you recognise?

What this has also led to is From taking a leaf out of The Walking Dead’s book. Remember when that show would suddenly introduce a random character, throw them a bit of screen time and lines, hint at perhaps a more long-term arc or role in the story, then bam – zombie meat? 

From’s writers do. Consider the case, for instance, of Roger – who we met, a couple of episodes back, participating on a local foraging expedition with Donna and Tabitha. He grumbles about something – and even has a couple of throwaway lines! – before meeting his unwitting demise at the hands of a giant doll the gang inadvertently haul out of the lake.

This strategy is clearly a useful one for the writers (who can move the story along, without having to sacrifice any of the pieces on the chessboard), but it doesn’t work for viewers. Where’s the emotional impact? Where’s the enduring resonance of the death on the other characters and their worlds?

There’s also something that rings inherently false about these scenes, particularly in the aftermath – it was beyond cringe to watch Marielle, sitting by Roger’s stitched-up corpse, paying tribute to a character we’d literally(!) never seen or heard of before that.

There’s also something that’s felt jarring and disjointed about the way the story has been told this season. We get fed cliffhanger scenes at the end of episodes, only for those events to not be revisited when the next instalment rolls around. (Consider the hand that comes out of the ground at the end of an early season 4 episode and grabs Boyd by the ankle.) What’s true of specific scenes carries true for individual plotlines. Threads – such as Julie and Randall’s experiments with time travel – appear, only to be abandoned; whole swathes of characters sit by the sidelines while the narrative spins its wheels.

But most of all, From’s season four issue is that, quite simply, it’s just plain boring.

I just watched episode seven – at the time of writing, the most recent episode of From to have been released – and, to its credit, it did end in a moderately exciting way, with Kenny narrowly evading a miserable fate at the hands of From’s smiling ghouls. That said, the vast majority of the episode concerned itself with the townspeople chewing over the (now well-established) revelation that Jade and Tabitha are reincarnated versions of Christopher and Miranda, two of the town’s former denizens. That bright spark of action at the episode’s denouement – which also included Roger’s reanimation at the hands of Sophia – was great to see. But, perversely, it also demonstrates my previous point, demonstrating how From has become less and less willing to take risks and kill off key characters. As the zombified Roger was threatening to run amok in Colony House, and as the door was ripped open to reveal the ghouls encroaching slowly up the porch, I thought: hell yes! But no – Elgin intervenes to spear Roger before he can do any damage, and someone gets the door closed in time to keep out the ghouls.

In this way, From threatens to give us the action and horror it served up in spades in its earlier iterations – but fails badly when it comes to following through.

37 episodes in, I'm still invested in the show. It's not as simple as "if you hate it, why don't you just stop watching it?", for the simple reason that I do love it – and, because I don't want to stop watching it, I at least want it to be an entertaining use of my time. But...

I'm bored with Fatima's golem. I'm tired of Victor's moping around. I'm sick of Henry's alcoholism and complaining; his inveterate cynicism and sarcasm. I'm over Julie's rebelliousness and Ethan...well, Ethan. Donna needs new things to do other than look gruff and have heart attacks. Sarah's redemption arc needs a shot in the arm. And Kristi's character requires some attention after falling off the radar for the last three seasons.

But let me come back to Sophia for a sec. Julia Doyle’s portrayal of the Man in Yellow – masquerading behind the facade of a chaste, bible-bashing young woman – has been one of season four’s rare highlights. Yet still, that high point illustrates a comparative low: that the Man in Yellow is at his most sinister and terrifying best when in his original guise, played by Douglas E. Hughes as a tall, ugly, shambling old man in a filthy mustard suit.

And this, really, is the crux of the problem.

From is still capable of producing images, ideas and moments capable of weeding their way under your skin. This isn’t a show that has run out of imagination – and, to be clear, the issues I’ve described above aren’t the signs of a show that’s run out of imagination. They’re the symptoms of a show that has forgotten how to weaponise it; to extract more danger, more immediacy, and, as a result more power, out of its clever – yet convoluted – story.

The best horror TV understands that fear isn’t simply a matter of monsters appearing in the dark. It’s consequence, it’s loss – it’s why we remember when Glenn died, but why we can’t for the life of us recall who Zach was, or how he met his demise. It is the sense that a bad decision, a locked door, a lapse in judgement, or a moment of misplaced trust might actually matter.

In season one, From’s town felt unknowable. The rules felt brittle, the monsters felt like an ever-present threat, and the characters felt vulnerable.

Season four, by contrast, often feels like a show circling its own mythology – a balding, bespectacled old carrion bird flying laconic laps around the carcass, without ever knowing quite when to strike. It teases danger, then withdraws. It raises questions, then parks them. It gestures towards carnage, then spares the people whose deaths might actually send shockwaves through the story, opting instead for a safer holding pattern.

That’s not to say From is beyond saving. Far from it. The bones are still there: a superb central mystery, some genuinely compelling performances, and a monster mythology that remains one of the most unnerving on television. Boyd remains a fascinatingly battered moral centre. Jade and Tabitha’s connection to the town still has dramatic potential. Kenny’s grief, anger and exhausted resilience still give the show a human pulse. And when From remembers to be horrible – properly, nastily, uncomfortably horrible – it can still deliver.

And, after all, that’s what made From so special in the first place. Not just the talismans, the trees, the voices, the cicadas, the faraway lighthouse or the strange, circular logic of the town itself. It was the feeling that anything could happen here (and that when it did, it would hurt).

If From wants to do what its characters express their own desire for, ad nauseum, in every episode thus far – and find its own way home – it might need to do the one thing it has become increasingly reluctant to do...

Let the monsters win!