Kill them with Kindness
On the surface, the night monsters in the show are polite, neatly dressed, well-meaning creatures. They walk around in a slow and orderly manner. They knock. They smile (sometimes too much). “You doing okay in there, Boyd?” politely inquires one of them. “Hi, Julie. Remember me?” calmly asks another. Few of us could brag of having neighbors nearly as agreeable as this bunch. And yet, we think of them as monsters—and rightly so—because they torture and kill people.
On the surface, Boyd and the others are the protagonists in this story. They are trying to save people and make sure everybody goes home. But even in the very first episode, Boyd uses his authority to put a grieving father in the “box,” condemning him to death. Later, he is prepared to literally torture Elgin and lets Sarah take out his eye. “What you did to that boy... you are a MONSTER,” Acosta tells him.
But, of course, he is nothing like those other monsters. Is he? Boyd is only trying to save Fatima. She is like a daughter to him. What would one not do to save their child?! “A man protects his family,” yells Boyd at Frank Pratt in the very first episode. Boyd himself makes an incredibly difficult, split-second decision to kill his wife in order to protect his son. He makes a sacrifice to save his child.
And here is my theory: What if the original sin of the townspeople wasn’t that they sacrificed their children, but that they tried to save their children by making sacrifices of others? They made a Faustian bargain not for themselves, but for their loved ones. It is the same bargain that the characters on the show are making many times over on their quest to save their families, undergoing changes in the process. “I feel myself changing,” says Boyd in the fourth episode of the fourth season. “She never changes. Does she?” he says about Fatima in the very first episode of the show.
That first episode seems to have many important clues, doesn’t it? It is centered around relationships between children and parents, an overwhelming desire of parents to protect their children at all costs, and all the horrible things done for the sake of the greater good, including torture and murder. “It is a murder of crows,” Julie says after seeing those birds by the tree. “I don’t think it’s crows at all, but ravens,” Tabitha interjects. “Do you know what a group of ravens is called? Unkindness.” You see, in the twisted world of From, it is as hard to separate murder from unkindness as it is to tell crows from ravens. Will the characters on the show stand the ultimate test and choose to do the right thing over the “kind” thing?