Diksha Sundriyal
In Apple TV+’s ‘Before,’ a child psychiatrist is confounded by the case of an eight-year-old boy who is completely closed off from people around him. The show, tagged as a psychological thriller, builds momentum in its first two episodes, but it also shows the audience that a lot of unexpected things are in store for them, especially with the introduction of supernatural elements, though it remains to be seen how real they are and what impact they have on the story. For now, the premiere episodes give us a lay of the land, with more focus on the trauma and grief that lingers in the background while things get more and more tense with the boy. SPOILERS AHEAD
Eli Adler Struggles With the Grief and Guilt of a Tragedy
Eli Adler is haunted by the dreams of the broken man. In the dream, he sees himself falling from a jumpboard into an empty pool. The landing breaks his bones, but still alive, he drags his body out of the pool, only to walk back to the edge of the board and jump in the pool again. He doesn’t talk about this dream with his therapist, though he knows that it might lead to some insight into his brain. Or perhaps he doesn’t talk about the dream exactly because he knows it will tell the therapist more than he wants her to know. His awareness comes from the fact that he himself is a psychiatrist and knows all the tricks of the trade.
What makes him feel worse is that despite being a psychiatrist and being trained to spot all the signs of mental instability in a person, he couldn’t see what his wife, Lynn, was going through until he found her dead in the bathtub of their house. Eli misses his wife so much that he sees her around the house and talks to her apparition while being perfectly aware that it is a figment of his imagination. He doesn’t tell anyone about it or about the fact that he hasn’t been able to enter the bathroom on the ground floor, which is where he’d found Lynn’s dead body. All of it is too much to process, and he is in the middle of it when Noah comes knocking at his door.
One day, Eli hears a scratching at his front door and finds a boy with bloodied fingernails at the door. Before he can find out more, the boys run off into the street. It is a strange encounter, made stranger a few nights later, when the boy sneaks into Eli’s house through the dog door. Eli asks him about his family and where he lives, but the boy doesn’t speak. Rather, he runs away, and this time, Eli follows him. The boy ends up at a house, which turns out to be his foster home, where he lives with Denise.
Eli is Fascinated by Noah and the Connection They Seem to Have
The next day, Eli is brought the case of a boy who has been in the system for too long and has struggled so much that they don’t know what to do with him anymore. A reluctant Eli takes the case, only to discover that the boy is none other than the one who’d scratched his door and broken into his house. The boy’s name is Noah; there is no history of his parents, and he has been through too many foster homes and been thrown out of many schools by far. In yet another incident, Noah stabs a boy at his current school and faints, which lands him in hospital.
Before this happens, Eli has a brief session with Noah, where he tries to get the boy to talk. Instead, Noah attacks him and says something in a foreign language. When Eli runs it through a translator app, it turns out to be archaic Dutch, in which Noah is asking for help. When Eli visits Noah in the hospital the next day, he talks to him in Dutch, and lo and behold, the boy understands and responds to it. Unbeknownst to everyone else, Noah has been having visions/hallucinations where he sees a dark, watery figure appear on the wall and float its way to the floor. Once it is close to a person, its tentacles hover over them, ready to pounce. It is this thing that Noah saw when he attacked Eli and the boy at the school, but he doesn’t tell anyone about it.
Convinced that Noah can speak and understand Dutch, Eli tries to talk to him in that language, but then, Noah finally speaks and it’s in English. He asks to be taken home, but there are some tests that need to be done. Moreover, the authorities need to figure out if Noah is stable enough to be put in a home or if he would be better off in a mental facility. Eli tries to convince his case worker that he can crack Noah’s problem, but he needs more time while completely disregarding his own deteriorating relationship with his daughter.
Now that Noah has started speaking, Eli decides to get him to talk, especially after he notices a farmhouse in almost all of his drawings. Interestingly, it is the same farmhouse whose picture is on Eli’s fridge, though he doesn’t quite remember where he found it. Eli comes up with a game where he gets Noah to talk about all the things that make him mad. It starts with the general things, but then things get weird when Noah talks to Eli about something the psychiatrist has done (which reminds him of his wife), and then Noah speaks in Eli’s voice before screaming into his face while he has a nosebleed. This leaves a lot to process for Eli, as its clear that there is a reason Noah found him, and the connection that they have runs deeper than a psychiatrist treating his patient.
Read More: Is Before a True Story?
