“Who hurt you?” “You did.”
‘She committed suicide. I couldn’t do anything.” “Liar!”
Well, there you have it, eh? That is For in five sentences. Eli asks his young accuser Noah about the identity of the person who hurt him in his past, and is told that 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 this all true? Is Eli at the root of the trauma that both Noah and Lynn experience? Or will he also become a victim somehow, by whatever dark force ties all these events together?
Beats me! But they certainly seem connected, if only because the only person who can see what’s really going on with Noah’s violent outbursts is Eli and Lynn’s granddaughter, Sophie (Rebecca Ruane). Sophie, who seems to be on the spectrum, notices that in the drawing Noah almost automatically made of himself stabbing that boy at school from the premiere, Actually “Stab the bad thing in the neck.” But this discovery leads to the question that prompts Noah to say Eli hurt him, so we don’t understand anything anymore.
We certainly don’t get any clues as to the final way Noah’s visions manifest. Instead of a menacing black mess with worm-like appendages sticking out of it, the ceiling of his room now turns into a block of ice as his lips turn blue and his breath comes in icy gasps. At one point he almost drowns, even though the only water around him can barely fill a glass. As a result, he is treated as a suicide risk and transferred to a psychiatric ward.
However, we get a lot more insight into what happened when Lynn committed suicide. Her gentle “Wait, you’re leaving?” Ignores them. On the day of the event, Eli went to the pool, where he saw a woman swimming, and to pick up Chinese, where he saw a lobster swimming. When he got home, she was gone, having slit her wrists and drowned in the bathtub. Lynn was battling cancer, Eli notes, but there were no signs she was in despair until it was too late.
All of this explains many of Eli’s fixations. He naturally feels tormented and guilty because he believes that choosing to go out despite her wishes prevented her death. His nightmares take place at an empty swimming pool because he visited a swimming pool that day. I’m honestly surprised that egg drop soup doesn’t play a bigger role in his trauma iconography.
Is that all Lynn meant when she called him a liar? Or, as the final shot of Eli choking her suggests, could she have meant something worse? It seems unlikely to me that Eli is a murderer of women, but stranger things have happened.
One thing I realize is that keeping us guessing is an artifact of the show’s running time. An unusual half-hour drama. I don’t think Apple TV+ will submit this for Best Comedy, The Bear–style – it’s also an even more unusual half-hour supernatural mystery thriller. What this means is that it has to end about every thirty minutes with a cliffhanger that raises more questions than it answers to keep us going through all ten episodes, instead of doing that every time. sixty minutes or so to get us through the same number of episodes or less.
In other words, writer and creator Sarah Thorp designed anything but For to deny us answers. The mysteries pile up until it is next week, ditto For-time, same thing For-channel. Either way, we’ll be in the dark like Eli for a while.
However, director Jet Wilkinson does more than just plunge us into darkness. I quite liked random, well-lit moments, like Eli pouring milk in his kitchen, or standing like zombies outside his apartment as paramedics carried his wife’s body down the stairs. But the episode also delivers the show’s nastiest, grossest, and most effective fright yet: In a dream, Eli worries about a spot on his neck until it turns into a wound, which he then tears open and peels off pieces of his skin. It’s disgusting! And it’s good horror, in a show that needs it.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling stone, Vulture, The New York TimesAnd wherever he will beReal. He and his family live on Long Island.