FROM Season 4 Episode 3 Recap: Crows, Golden Teachers, and a Hand From the Grave

Jade inspecting the golden teachers

Season 4, Episode 3 | "Merrily We Go" | MGM+ | Fear and Wine Podcast Recap

Nobody gets a break in Fromville. You already knew that. But Episode 3 of Season 4 really commits to it. "Merrily We Go" opens on a double funeral and closes with a hand clawing out of the ground at Boyd. In between, we get Victor wetting his pants in the woods, Jade pocketing wild mushrooms with the confidence of a man who has absolutely nothing left to lose, and a murder of crows that shows up to a burial looking very much like it is celebrating. This town is not subtle.

It is also not a filler episode. It just looks like one if you are not paying attention. FROM never wastes a frame. Everything in this hour is a brick being set in a wall that is going to fall on somebody in Episode 4. Let's get into it. We will release our podcast coverage of this episode next Tuesday, 5/12/26.

The Funeral Nobody Asked For

The episode opens with the town burying two men: Jim Matthews and the man everyone believed was Sophia's father. It is the kind of grief that should bring people together, and it does, briefly. Boyd speaks. People stand in their coats. And then the crows arrive.

Not a few crows. A murder of them. Loud, circling, utterly indifferent to the mourning happening below. Julie watches them and says out loud what everyone is already feeling: those birds are not mourning. They look like they are celebrating. That single observation reframes the entire opening. The town is being watched, and whatever is watching does not feel anything like grief.

Victor shows up at the Matthews table during the gathering at the diner and hands Ethan a drawing. A drawing of the family. Their RV. Done in that careful, compulsive way Victor does everything. It is a kind gesture wrapped around something that makes your skin crawl, because Victor's drawings do not come from nowhere. They never have.

Victor's Drawings and the Lake of Tears

This is the thread that runs through the entire episode and it is the one that matters most going into Episode 4.

Ethan has a mission this week: find the Lake of Tears. The idea was planted in Episode 2 when the ghost of Jim appeared to him and told him to find it. Ethan assumes, with all the hope of a grieving child, that the Lake of Tears will bring his father back. He enlists Victor to help him search.

The two of them make their way out into the woods and find Jade floating face-up in a nearby lake, doing his version of meditation. Ethan explains the Lake of Tears to both of them. He frames it carefully: he thought he invented this place as a child, the same way Tabitha thought the red boulders were something she imagined. The red boulders were real. Significant. A real part of the Township's architecture.

Victor does not recognize the name "Lake of Tears." But when he looks at one of his old drawings, the lake is right there. He drew it. He has no memory of why.

This is the thing about Victor's drawings that Season 4 keeps returning to: they function as unconscious maps. He is not drawing from imagination. He is drawing from memory he cannot consciously access. The lake exists. That drawing is confirmation. And what else has Victor drawn without knowing why?

The search gets derailed before any real answers surface, because the woods in Fromville do not let you stay focused for long.

The Yellow Suit and Victor's Collapse

The three of them are walking through the woods when Victor stops cold. There, on the forest floor, is the Man in Yellow's suit. Abandoned. Discarded. Empty.

Victor, who has lived in this town longer than anyone and survived the decimation of the previous settlement, completely loses it. He wets himself. He runs. Ethan and Jade go after him and find him cowering against a tree, muttering that he had convinced himself it was not real.

That line lands hard. Victor is not afraid of the suit because of what it looks like. He is afraid because the suit means the Man in Yellow is somewhere close, walking around without it, which means he is wearing something else. A face. A name. A borrowed identity that no one can see through.

Henry and Tabitha arrive just as Victor breaks down, and while the parents focus on the kids, Jade's attention drifts to a cluster of mushrooms growing nearby. He has been trying to unlock his sealed memories through meditation all episode without success. The mushrooms represent a different approach. A blunter one.

A crow lands and starts cawing. The woods, as always, are paying attention.

Boyd at the Edge

Boyd's season-long arc is one of the most genuinely tragic things happening on television right now. Harold Perrineau is doing something extraordinary with this role. Boyd is a man who has held this town together through sheer will and moral authority, and Season 4 is the story of what happens when both of those things start to fail simultaneously.

He is carrying Elgin's secret. He is carrying what happened with Fatima's baby. He is carrying Jim's death. And now Acosta, the cop he put in jail for trying to escape, reminds him of Abby. So he puts her to work sorting through the town's discarded, uncatalogued items. The dead-letter office of Fromville. He says he is looking for anything they might have missed. He is also, clearly, trying to keep someone from breaking the same way his wife did.

Abby's presence haunts the entire episode. The dream sequence at the top of the hour. The parallels with Acosta. And then the ending.

Boyd goes to Abby's grave to talk to her. It is quiet and sad and very Boyd. A man who processes by speaking out loud to people who cannot hear him anymore. He is at a crossroads: still faintly encouraged by Jade's information, still broken from Jim, still not sure if any of it is worth the cost.

Then a hand comes out of the ground.

It grabs at him. He fights it off. He survives. The episode ends there.

Almost certainly Abby's hand. Almost certainly not friendly. The town knows when Boyd is starting to feel something other than despair, and it does not like it.

Everything Else You Need to Know

Tabitha heads to the bottle tree while Henry tries to talk her out of it. The Boy in White appears, older this time, and tells her she is running out of time. She does not get to pass through. Henry pulls her back before she can try again. The bottle tree worked for her before, but the Boy in White is clear: too much has changed. What worked then may not work now.

Julie recruits Randall to help her dig through the collapsed house for Ethan's storybooks. She believes the books hold the key to understanding and controlling her storywalking. Randall, with full awareness that Julie is barely holding it together, volunteers to go in himself. He finds the bag. He also finds a decomposing body in the rubble. This show.

Sophia continues her quiet campaign of controlled chaos. She takes the priest's tooth after the funeral. She stirs the pot with Julie and Kenny at the diner. She moves in with Sara by the end of the episode, which should alarm everyone who cares about Sara. The Man in Yellow is inside the town's walls, choosing a soft target, and nobody sees it.

Fatima has Elgin dump dirt inside her room. That is all we know. That is enough to be disturbing. I am guessing she is going to be sculpting something, but I have no idea what!!

WINE (bourbon) PAIRING

In honor of Harold Perrineau's outstanding performance since Season 1, Episode 1, we are suggesting a wine cocktail this time. The Avenue Spritz, made with Prosecco & SABLE Bourbon. Enough to get a buzz, but not crazy enough to not get on Jade's level (yet)

Avenue Spritz Recipe from the SABLE Bourbon website

Episode 4 Preview: What's Coming

Here is what we know, and here is what we are watching for.

Jade found those mushrooms. Next episode, we are almost certainly watching him eat them. This is Jade. Of course he is going to eat them. The question is whether they are Golden Teachers trying to crack open his sealed memories or something the Township planted specifically to make sure those memories stay locked. Either way, David Alpay is about to do something unhinged and we are completely here for it.

Victor's drawings are the other thread we cannot stop pulling on. He has been drawing things he does not consciously know about for decades. The Lake of Tears. Things we have not identified yet. Episode 4's synopsis makes clear that more of those drawings are coming into focus, and at least one of them depicts the creatures of Fromville doing something that goes well beyond the nightly attacks we have gotten used to seeing. We are going to find out what the Man in Yellow's relationship to the creatures actually looks like, and Victor drew it before anyone knew to be afraid.

Boyd survived the grave. That hand reached for him and he got away. But the town does not forget, and it does not miss twice.

Sophia is inside Sara's house now. Think about that.

Episode 4 drops Sunday, May 10 on MGM+ at 9/8c. We will be back with the full recap and our wine pairing the same week. If you are not already listening to Fear and Wine, now is a genuinely good time to start. I highly recommend joining BOYD and other cast members on X (Twitter) where they live tweet and interact with fans every Sunday! I was lucky enough to get a replies from Harold Perrineau & MGM+ this past Sunday:

Listen to the Episode

We covered FROM Season 4 in full on Fear and Wine, all the dread, all the mythology, all the wine. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. If this is your first time here: we are a horror podcast that pairs every show and film with wine, takes the content seriously, and does not take ourselves too seriously. Pull up a glass.

Listen on to our Episode 2 coverage on SPOTIFY