Diksha Sundriyal
Apple TV+’s ‘Before’ follows the story of a psychiatrist named Eli Adler, who is grieving the death of his wife. While he is still processing that traumatic event, he becomes entangled with the case of a young boy named Noah. No one knows anything about his origins. The best Eli can find out is that Noah lives in foster care and has an undiagnosed mental disorder, which makes it difficult for him to have a normal life. Eli meets Noah even before the boy’s case falls right into his lap. The more he dives into it, the more Eli realizes that Noah has something to do with his deceased wife, Lynn. By the penultimate episode, he has developed a theory based on all the evidence that has presented itself so far, but the story is far from over. SPOILERS AHEAD
How are Noah, Eli, and Lynn Connected?
Being a man of science, Eli doesn’t believe in the otherworldly stuff. When his house is put on sale, and the realtor brings in someone to cleanse the house of negative energy, Eli scoffs at them, even though he himself has been haunted by the visions of his dead wife and has been increasingly sharing in Noah’s hallucinations. He believes that whatever ails Noah is rooted in something scientific, and once he finds where his problems stem from, he will be able to help the boy. In the end, everything points him toward the mysterious farmhouse, whose picture has been on his fridge since the first episode.
After Eli notices the birthmark on Noah’s chest, he realizes that he may have to rearrange his belief because of the way things are turning out, and science may not be able to explain what’s going on with Noah. The birthmark happens to be in the exact same shape as the injury on the chest of a patient whom Eli had tried to help and revive. This patient was Jonathan, Lynn’s ex, who also seemed to suffer from the same condition as Noah’s. Like Noah, Jonathan also complained of worms under his skin and talked about the things that didn’t make any sense. To help Jonathan, Lynn brought him to the doctor, Eli, but his condition worsened until eventually he passed away. In his final moments, Eli tried to revive him by giving him CPR, which is how he got the mark on his chest. Years later, when Eli sees the same mark at the same place on Noah’s chest, it convinces him that Eli is none other than Jonathan.
Another thing that convinces Eli of the reincarnation theory is that Lynn had drawn the same thing that Noah later does. She was writing a story that is eerily close to the one that Eli pieces together from his talks with Noah. Thus, Eli is convinced that Lynn and Noah were somehow connected, and that connection may be due to Noah being Jonathan’s reincarnation. However, that still doesn’t solve the problem of how Eli is connected to Noah. The connection gets more and more prominent with time, and it comes to such an extent that they have shared hallucinations and get the same injuries simultaneously.
In the end, Eli is convinced that he, Lynn, and Noah have a past connection. He is proven right when he takes Noah to the farmhouse, and the whole picture comes to light. It turns out that before Noah was Jonathan, he was a little Dutch girl (which explains his Dutch-speaking skills). Eli and Lynn were also a boy and a girl who played with Eli’s Dutch version. One day, by accident, the Dutch-Eli ended up pushing Dutch-Noah, who fell on the icy layer of a pond and died on the spot. Instead of helping, Dutch-Eli ran away, and Dutch-Noah drowned in the water. This trauma stayed in Dutch-Noah’s soul and resonated through his next two incarnations. Whatever Jonathan and Noah saw was connected to the Dutch-Noah’s traumatic death in the icy water, where his soul still seems to be trapped.
Do Eli and Noah Die? What Happens to Them?
While Eli has yet to ascertain the connection between the farmhouse and Noah, he knows that they must be brought together to unlock Noah’s trauma and help him heal. He deliberately injures himself to get himself in a minimal security ward, from where he escapes with Noah, who is in an ambulance on his way to Ithaca. Eli takes Noah to the farmhouse, where the horror of the place immediately sets in. Despite his intent to stay together, Eli loses Noah and is not able to find him anywhere in the house. When he comes out of the door, he finds himself in a completely different world. It is the same farmhouse, but the timeline is entirely different. When he sees a little Dutch girl, he realizes that this is the past life that Noah had been projecting and even drawing.
Following the Dutch girl, who is Noah in a previous life, Eli also finds Lynn’s version as well as his own. This is when the whole drowning part happens, and Eli realizes why Noah would show signs of hypothermia and drowning even when he is nowhere near a water body or a cold environment. At the end of the vision, Eli finds Noah caught up in a vision of his own, but he has no idea how to break out of it. In the past life, Dutch Eli was supposed to jump after Dutch-Noah, but instead, he ran away. This time, Eli decides to jump into the water, and he does so with Noah in his arms.
In the water, Eli is taken back to the moment of Lynn’s death. He thinks about how far her condition had deteriorated and how she had pleaded with him to help her die. He thinks about how he completely ignored her pleas, and then she tried to kill herself in the bathtub. When he found her, she was still alive, and instead of getting her help with the cuts on her hands, she asked her husband to help her by killing her. Despite not wanting to lose his wife, Eli knew that Lynn needed this, so he drowned her in the bathtub, ending her misery. When this memory ends, Eli hears Lynn’s voice, which asks him to wake up. On waking up, he gets a hold of Noah and gets him out of the water. For a moment, it seems Noah has drowned, but then Eli revives him, and Noah seems to be in much better shape than he was when he arrived.
Does Noah Get Better? Does He go to Ithaca?
The cause of Noah’s problem was the trauma he suffered in an earlier life, for which he found no resolution. The trauma of dying in the icy water remained with him through his next two lives. It haunted him when he was Jonathan, but no one understood what he needed, and he died again. But when he reincarnated as Noah, things changed drastically. It seems that the only thing that could break Noah out of this cycle of trauma that persisted over different reincarnations was for Eli to do what he should have done when they were all little Dutch children playing around the ice. Had Eli saved Jonathan, the cycle would have ended, but he failed back then, and his trauma resurfaced in the new incarnation as Noah.
When Eli jumps with Noah in the water, he recreates his death as the Dutch girl. Noah feels exactly what he felt two lifetimes ago. But this time, he is pulled out of the water and revived. This breaks the trauma of his first life as a Dutch girl. Interestingly, when Noah died in his second life as Jonathan, the revival didn’t work for him, no matter how hard Eli tried. This time, when Eli revives Noah, he also fulfills the task that he failed at with Jonathan, which breaks the trauma of Noah’s second life as Jonathan. With both the traumas resolved and Eli having performed his part, Noah is broken out of the memories of his past lives, and he is back to normal.
Before Eli abducted him and brought him to the farmhouse, Noah seemed beyond all help. It was decided for him to be moved to a psychiatric facility in Ithaca, but Eli knew that once there, Noah would receive sedatives and become an empty shell of himself. Of course, no one wanted that, but with no other option, that was the last resort. However, once Noah seems more normal, the plan to send him to Ithaca is scrapped. He is put back in the care of Denise, and with time, Noah goes back to normal. It is a journey, and the boy needs more time to settle into a normal life, but a few months later, when Eli sees him, Noah doesn’t appear any different than other kids in the park, and it is clear that he has finally broken off of the trauma from his past lives.
What do The Worms Mean? Is Eli Still Hallucinating?
In trying to help Noah, Eli became so obsessed with solving the mystery of the boy’s case that he entered his own state of hallucinations and mental instability. For a minute, it seemed that he, too, would have to spend the rest of his life in psychiatric care. It gets worse when he abducts Noah and brings him to the farmhouse. In the end, his act helps Noah, but it cannot be ignored that he endangered the boy’s life. Had he been more lucid, Eli would have been charged with abduction. However, considering that he himself was struggling mentally, it was decided that he needed to be in a hospital rather than prison.
With Noah’s case cleared up, Eli is able to rest easy. His mind is at ease because now he knows exactly what happened to Noah, even though he cannot yet explain it scientifically. All he knows is that the reincarnation theory ended up helping the boy. Over the next few months, Eli receives the care he needs, especially in processing his guilt and grief over Lynn’s death. Eventually, he is healed enough to be let out and get back to his normal life. He keeps tabs on Noah and is happy to know that the boy is in a safe environment and has gone back to living a normal life under Denise’s care.
Eli himself seems to have made quite a lot of progress as he spends more time with his family. However, he talks about a thing that has stayed with him since the events in the farmhouse. Noah’s case confirmed that the whole thing about past lives is real. He now knows that he, Lynn, and Noah used to be those Dutch kids in the farmhouse in a previous life, but that was just one life. It is natural to assume that there would have been many lives before that life, which means that getting the answers from Noah’s case has only led to more questions. This becomes even more interesting, considering that now Eli knows that the traumas of past lives have a way of surfacing in subsequent lives, and they do not go away until they are properly resolved. This makes Eli wonder about his own traumas and what past lives he must have had before being that Dutch boy in the farmhouse.
It is this can of worms that he talks about when speaking of unraveling the mysteries of the universe. In the end, as he looks at himself in the mirror, he sees a worm crawling inside his skin. Noah used to complain of worms like that, and Jonathan did too before he died. Both of them were plagued by the events of their past lives. At first, it seemed that the worm may have had something to do with how Noah/Jonathan died in one of his past lives, but the events in the farmhouse reveal no such thing. In the end, the only logical explanation for the worms is that they are the indication of the past buried in one’s soul, which is trying to find a way out. It is the thing buried inside his own self that he must bring out to get those worms out of his skin.
Another thing the worms suggest is that while Noah has broken out of his hallucinations, Eli is yet to be fully treated. While his theory about past lives may have worked, it could very well have been a placebo. It is possible that all that happened was inside Noah’s mind, which is why the whole farmhouse thing had to be done to convince his mind of the stories it had concocted for itself. But now, Eli is also caught up in a hallucination. His mind is convinced of the past lives theory, which has led him to construct other things about it, which is why the worms seem real to him, even when they are not. Clearly, it shows that Eli hasn’t completely healed yet and must go through a Noah-like journey to face his demons and save himself.
Read More: Where is Apple TV+’s Before Filmed?
