‘Before’ Episode 2 Recap: “The Scientist”

“I’ll help you.” Eli, the widowed therapist who tries to help a strange little boy named Noah Forrepeats this sentence to him over and over again, in what I assume is clumsy but very clearly sincere archaic Dutch. Now that he has identified the language in which the usually mute boy cried for help during a final attack, he may be able to reach him. Maybe him can help him.

“I want to go home,” the confused boy answers in perfect English.

It’s not necessarily a laugh line – it’s the first thing he’s said in weeks, and his foster mother Denise is overjoyed – but if you’ve ever had or worked with children, it’s a very funny moment. Here’s a guy who contacted a linguistics professor or a semiotician or something (for some reason played by violinist Itzahk Perlman) to get his hands on cutting-edge technology capable of identifying virtually every language ever spoken. He deciphers the cryptic sentence of a boy with an ODD diagnosis and a penchant for breaking into his home. Even though he has no idea why the child is attracted to him or Why he speaks in a dead dialect, this man, no doubt wondering what exactly to say, memorizes a phrase in that same dialect and repeats it over and over in the hope of breaking through the boy’s psychogenic fog push. The response? “I want to go home.” Children, am I right?

But this is not a simple request to return to Denise’s house. Noah later refers to Denise as mean because she He won’t take him home either, but he can’t say where ‘home’ is. At this point, this explanation for why he thinks Denise is mean is a bit of a relief. Despite being played by one of the most sympathetic actors of the past thirty years, you can’t make out much in her dark eyes. She’s also the kind of person who agrees to an at-home interview with her troubled child’s therapist, then pours herself a long drink of cabernet while they chat. That’s the kind of move you might find concerning, so it’s good to hear that Noah’s complaints against her aren’t any worse.

When asked, Denise tells Eli that she suspects Noah is really “afraid of himself,” and not of anything external; she mentions his shouting fits and his slow loss of language when he moved in with her. If I were her, I might pay a little more attention to his piles of creepy drawings, all of which somehow contain an image of that farm from Eli’s refrigerator. I would also wonder a little harder why my son seems to have psychically located his future therapist and broken into his house, but that really only seems to worry Eli.

There are, of course, many things that worry Eli. In the last episode, he destroyed his apartment when he stepped in his dog’s poop, the straw that broke the camel’s back. In this episode, his panicky daughter Barb shows up at work; After seeing the state of the place and hearing from his department that he was in the hospital, she naturally put two and two together. The fact that he is physically healthy but still more interested in his patients than she is is one of those good news/bad news situations for Barb, who is clearly struggling with her own issues. However, she is the one who pushes Eli to actually talk to her about her mother’s suicide; he puts it off with a ‘yeah yeah, we’re going to lunch’ type response.

However, this leads to another funny bit, where the show makes us believe that Eli’s wife or some other supernatural entity has magically cleaned up his destroyed house, only for him to find a note from Barb about the cleaning service she has hired. Later, Eli is visited by an attractive woman named Sue-Ann, who seems to be looking for something from Eli that he isn’t quite ready to give yet; it seems like she’s trying to get involved with him with romantic plans now that his wife is dead, but she’s really just a real estate agent trying to convince him to finally sell the house. Writer-creator Sarah Thorp has peppered both episodes so far with this little “Huh! Not what I expected!” moments, which go a long way to livening up (and illuminating) things.

But the focus of the episode remains Eli’s attempts to figure out what’s going on with his patient. A harrowing MRI goes awry when the boy hallucinates one of those black tentacle worm things, a small one this time, emerging from the top of the room and sliding into his IV wound. I So I wish they had taken the time to use practical effects on an image that was inherently twisty and awkward; the CGI just doesn’t feel as scary and gritty as it needs to be. (Being more creepy than actually scary is a consistent problem for the show.)

Later, in a one-on-one session, Eli teaches Noah something he calls “the crazy game,” using blocks to help the boy put into words the things he is angry about. (He was inspired to do this when Noah asked him, “Are you crazy?”; since he sometimes speaks like he’s from the 17th century, I think he was asking Eli if he was crazy in an old-fashioned/European way.) Just as it looks like Eli is making a breakthrough, with Noah revealing what makes him most angry of all: “people who hurt other people… bad people who do bad things”, the child’s nose starts to bleed, just as it from Lynn in one of Eli’s hallucinations of her. “You know!” the boy growls. “You know what you did!” Lynn repeated again. Finally, he tells Eli, “I can’t take much more of this”… in Eli’s own voice, just as Eli had said to Lynn’s ghost.

Does this mean that Noah’s fate is somehow tied to Lynn’s suicide? What is the connection to the mysterious farm, or to Noah’s photographic memory of the exterior of Eli and Lynn’s house in Manhattan? Does his use of old-fashioned Dutch have anything to do with the time when New York City was known as New Amsterdam? What about the initials on the back of the farm photo, “BW”? Is it all connected, or is working through the supernatural just a coincidental way to help Eli overcome his own demons? The fact that there are still eight episodes to go indicates that there is a lot we don’t know yet, just like Eli.

Meanwhile, the show is most artistically successful in Eli’s dreams. Whatever else you think of what’s going on, and whatever you think of Crystal’s performance (I like it, but I don’t feel like he’s had a chance to do much nuanced work with this material yet) , the man repeatedly dreams of being mutilated and killed – by Noah, by Lynn, by himself. That’s the depth of despair and darkness beneath the superficial warmth that everyone in Eli seems drawn to. I wonder how much Noah and the phenomena around him will drag into the light.

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.