My Summer Lair Chapter #360: Are The Monsters Here To Terrify Or Here To Help?
Honestly, when you see that damn tree in the road, you know you’re home.
Which is Alanis-ironic, because the characters on From have spent four seasons trying to flee the hell-town and actually get back home.
Especially Jade.
Played by David Alpay, Jade is one of the few characters on From who refuses to simply survive the night. He needs to understand what’s happening even though nothing makes sense.
Or, as he framed it in an earlier season: he’s determined to solve the mystery of this terrifying escape room.
There has to be a way out.
There has to be a way home.
Right?
From is one of my current favourite TV shows. In the U.S. it streams on MGM+, and in Canada you can watch From on Paramount+ Canada. As always: #SetTheVCR.
But only after you plug in your Spider-Man nightlight. Oh, yo…this show is absolutely not for the weak.
From is set in a nightmarish town that traps everyone who enters. By day, the hopeless residents in Fromville try to hang on, seeking food and building a fraught community. By night, they barricade themselves against terrifying creatures that emerge from the forest.
Fromville so nicknamed by From Fans is packed with cryptic symbols, ghostly visions and generous Stephen King-level dread.
Now, another one of my favourite TV shows—and it’s way less eerie—is Pardon the Interruption a sports broadcast on ESPN. PTI’s hosts Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon have a charming recurring segment called Five Good Minutes. Where they’ll check in with an ESPN insider about the NBA Playoffs or ask a couple of questions about the current MLB season.
So, just like PTI, thanks to MGM+, I got my own Five Good Minutes with David Alpay to talk about From and Jade.
As you can recall, in Season 1, Jade was a wealthy software developer, with a black beard, a massive ego and approximately zero patience for this bizarre community. Four seasons later, Jade’s beard has gone noticeably grey and bushier and it covers up Jade’s haunted appearance. I joked to David during our Five Good Minutes both Jade and Boyd are rocking more white in their beards these days. It’s like the cursed town is stressing these men out.
And though David laughed, he revealed the grey contributes to Jade’s visual story. David said the grey is a visual cue for the audience to help track Jade’s inner life.
My silly joke turned out to be a crafty insight.
From is the kind of unsettling show that makes you question everything — reality, time, memory, whether your sanity would survive a town with no exits and actual monsters.
Because the grey isn’t just about getting older. It’s about what this place is doing to him.
The gray in the beard is there for sure—because Jade and even David are getting older but the grey is also there because there’s an emotional toll to living in Fromville.
After losing Tobey, enduring horrifying visions and charting a mushroom-fueled vision quest, Jade’s evolution seems to be moving beyond binary logic into a strange spiritual path.
In Season 4: does that open a literal door to a challenging now…spiritual journey for Jade?
While most of the characters on From just blindly react to their horrible circumstances, Jade is actively conducting detective work. He’s chasing clues, connecting symbols desperate to unlock the frustrating logic of this cursed town.
In Season 4 Jade finally realizes that the ghosts that have been haunting him and his visions are really saying: “We’re here to try to save you, not to terrify you.” For a character into tech and software…that means what he viewed as a bug…these ghosts are really the feature.
David’s Jade is brilliant, sarcastic, obsessive, and emotionally more fragile than he appears. It’s difficult to determine if Jade is unravelling Fromville’s core mystery — or just plain unravelling. You know how many times over 4 seasons he’s pitched Boyd a way home and after Boyd patiently listens to his outlandish theory, Boyd responds: I don’t understand what you’re saying.
In my Five Good Minutes with David Alpay, he shares where Jade is emotionally in Season 4, the visual storytelling behind his evolving look and what makes Jade’s relentless curiosity both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness.
David Alpay @ W• T • F
Host Sammy Younan
Recorded: Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 2:10 pm (EST)
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