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Before

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Paul Asay

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The first time Eli meets 8-year-old Noah, the boy is outside his front door, scratching strange letters into the wood ‘til his fingers bleed.

The second time, the boy is in Eli’s bedroom in the middle of the night, looming over Eli’s bed like a short, solid, uncommunicative ghost.

The third time, Noah shows up as Eli’s client—and that just might be the most surprising meeting of all. Eli happens to be an eminent child psychologist—and he might be Noah’s last, best hope for a normal life. One of Eli’s friends had been pleading with him for days to take the case—the case of a boy whom Eli assumed was a complete stranger.

Coincidence?

Perhaps. The scientifically secular Eli initially believes it can’t be anything but.

But it’s not long before Eli begins to wonder—believe, know—that something else is at work. That somehow, he and the boy are mysteriously connected.

And that connection might help them both to heal … or descend into oblivion.

Less Freud, More ‘Fraid

Noah clearly needs help. The boy is violent. He’s been expelled from multiple schools. Shuffled in and out of multiple foster homes. The kid barely even talks these days. And his latest foster mom, Denise, is trying to do something, anything, to give the boy a chance at normalcy.

But Eli’s not doing all that hot himself. He’s still grappling with the suicide of his wife. And even though he’s a psychologist himself, he absolutely refuses to let his own therapist in.

“Maybe you’re in denial,” she suggests.

“Of course I’m in denial!” Eli says. “But it won’t last, so can’t I just enjoy it for a while?”

But the word enjoy doesn’t quite fit. Eli is plagued by bloody nightmares. He’s haunted by hallucinations of his now-gone beloved. Eli needs help himself. Maybe, if he can help Noah get over his own terrors, Eli’s own may subside.

But Noah’s issues don’t really fit a textbook psych profile. He imagines blackness oozing from dark corners and down walls. He sees tentacles wrap around classmates and teachers and even Eli himself, and Noah does his best to beat them away. And even though he doesn’t speak much, he sometimes starts chanting words in a form of Dutch that hasn’t been heard since the 17th Century.

And then there’s the creepy cabin that Noah repeatedly draws. Eli has a picture of the same cabin hanging on his refrigerator door. Why is it there? Eli claims to have no idea why. But it’s one more connection between he and Noah that coincidence just doesn’t touch.

Yes, the world has gotten pretty dark for Eli and Noah both. But it’s not much brighter for the viewer.

A Different Kind of Haunting

Before labels itself a psychological thriller. But its release right before Halloween is surely no coincidence itself. This show often feels like a straight-up horror story, from Eli’s bloody dreams to Noah’s oozing demons to Eli’s dead wife, Lynn, making many an unexpected cameo.

This approach isn’t all bad: Eli fumes in the opening episode that “there’s no evidence that there’s life after death,” and it appears that the show means to challenge that assumption throughout its 10-episode run. So that’s something.

But wherever this story goes, it’ll be unlikely to land in an orthodox Christian box. And regardless, getting there may be a gruesome chore.

Eli is haunted by not just Lynn’s death, but the way she died—bleeding out in a bathtub. Blood flows from many a wound of those living, too, and Noah’s attacks can be pretty intense.

The same could be said about the show’s language, too. While Before shows more restraint than most TV-MA shows, the profanity—including f- and s-words—would still be more than enough to earn it an R rating in theaters.

Perhaps Noah and Eli meeting was no coincidence at all. Perhaps forces outside their control made it certain the two would connect. But prospective viewers of Before are under no such compulsion. You are free to walk away before you ever watch a minute.

(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at [email protected], or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)

Episode Reviews

Oct. 25, 2024—S1, E1: “The Imposter”

As Eli continues to grapple with the sudden death of his wife, the child psychologist is approached with a new case to work on: a very disturbed 8-year-old boy who’s on the brink of being institutionalized. But when he finally agrees to take the case, Eli discovers that the lad, Noah, is the same little kid who’s been lurking around his house for days.

Eli suffers from a recurring dream: He shuffles, broken and zombie-like, through a room with a huge, empty pool. He makes his way onto the diving board and looks down at the blood-splotched tiles below. He’s clearly made the jump before, and he does so again: His head seems to explode on the pool floor just as Eli wakes up. When talking to his own therapist, though, the therapist tells him that he never dies in these dreams: He just eventually breaks every bone in his body, and ultimately is unable to move. (She suggests that the dream may reflect Eli’s own inability to move on.) In one dream sequence, Eli is pushed.

Eli cuts his hand badly after throwing around a great deal of furniture in his house. He makes his way to the home’s bathroom and vividly recalls how he found his wife in the tub, dead. (We see her corpse.) The memory of his wife, Lynn, is still very strong in the house: Eli sometimes sees and talks to her.

Noah’s own visions are even more troubling. He sees a sort of black jelly ooze from the corners of his house and elsewhere; once it touches ground, it can morph into a tentacled, gelatinous mesh. He sees one tentacle wrap around the neck of a classmate, so he stabs at it with a pencil. (He obviously skewers his classmate instead, and he drops the bloody pencil to the ground.) In another scene, a tentacle begins to envelop Eli. Noah attacks it—but he ends up slugging Eli in the face, giving him a bloody nose. (Later, Eli sees Lynn walking around his house, and she also bleeds from her nose.)

When Eli and Noah first see each other, Noah is carving what appear to be letters in Eli’s front door; his fingers are bloody from the effort. When Eli tries to take Noah home, Noah’s foster mother mistakenly sprays Eli in the face with mace.

Eli talks with a friend who’s smoking marijuana. “It’s medicinal,” the friend claims. He then tells Eli he could use a draught of ayahuasca (a psychedelic drink originating in South America) and mentions his shaman. Eli seems to drink whiskey in the evenings—though not, it would seem, to excess. He and another friend drink in a bar.

Eli steps in a mess that his dog made. We hear four f-words and five s-words. Other profanities include “a–” and “d–n.” God’s name is misused four times (twice with the word “d–n”), and Jesus’ name is abused once.

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Paul Asay

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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