‘Before’ Episode 1 Recap: “The Imposter”

Weird kid. Dead wife. Bloody bathtub. Black goop. Creepy tentacles. Recurring nightmares. Scary drawings. Cursed cabin. The series premiere of Before, the new psychological-supernatural thriller from writer-creator Sarah Thorp, feels a little like it went into the horror store and said “I’ll take one of everything.” With nine half-hour-or-so episodes to go after this one, there’s only one question to ask: Will the whole add up to more than the some of its parts?

In a rare dramatic role — one of contemporary TV’s great benefits is providing actors of a certain age the opportunity to keep doing new and interesting things — Billy Crystal stars as Eli, a long-time therapist specializing in troubled children who’s lost his mojo since the suicide of his wife, Lynn (a spectral Judith Light). 

He has imaginary conversations with her, for one thing, which honestly isn’t so bad — I have them with my cat. When we first meet him, he’s having a recurring nightmare of hurling himself off a diving board into an empty pool, only to crawl back up with broken bones to do it again; the next time we see the dream, Lynn pushes him in. Most troubling to him, as he tells his friend and colleague Jackson (Robert Townsend) in so many words, is that he feels he can no longer help others because he couldn’t help his own wife. 

But maybe he just needs the right case to motivate him. That comes along in the form of Noah (Jacobi Jupe), a mostly mute little boy who shows up at his house unannounced one day, scratching an indecipherable message into his front door until his fingers are bloody. The boy bolts at first, only to return that night, sneaking in through the doggy door (Eli has an adorable pug named Larry) to surprise the older man as he sleeps. 

The strange child lures — that’s the word that comes to mind at the time, anyway — Eli to an apartment nearby, where by this point you fully expect some horrible entity to emerge from the shadows and attack. Instead, Rosie Perez emerges from the shadows and attacks. She’s Denise, Noah’s foster mother, and needless to say she’s as surprised by the whole situation as Eli is. 

Meanwhile, this same Noah turns out to be the difficult case referred to him by his case-worker colleague Gail (Sarkina Jaffrey) as a separate matter entirely that same day. Eli, a textbook capital-A Atheist type, has no time for any supernatural explanations for this, but it’s also enough to get him very invested in the boy’s case.

But it’s hard to imagine Eli will get to the bottom of it anytime soon — not when the kid only speaks in antiquated Dutch (“I’m scared, save me, please save me” he says in this inexplicable dialect during some kind of seizure) and is hallucinating black goop and tentacles every time he has one of his violent outbursts. He’s not attacking other people because he has oppositional defiant disorder, he’s doing it because he’s trying to defend those people from some kind of demonic Venom-kraken thing. I’m pretty sure that’s not in the DSM-5. 

Throughout all this, Eli feels increasingly detached from his life — an imposter, he says, somehow shoved by grief right out of reality to look at it from the outside in. It’s about to get even more surreal for him, though: Noah’s precocious drawing talent is indicated in part by a drawing of the creepy farmhouse Eli has had a photo of stuck to his refrigerator, for reasons he can’t quite explain. As a dismayed Eli himself puts it when he makes the connection: fuck.

That last line made me laugh out loud, and it was the second time this episode genuinely surprised me. The first was that fakeout where you assume Noah is leading Eli into some haunted house of horrors, when instead it’s just Rosie Perez’s place. Moments like these demonstrate that writer-creator Sarah Thorp knows what audiences expect from these kinds of stories enough to give them something different instead. 

But that doesn’t extend to the horror elements, which are pretty shopworn, or to the dialogue, which too often just marches the viewer through necessary information rather than allowing it to unfold: “You’ve had an incredibly long and successful career helping troubled kids,” his therapist says at one point, as if he’d be unaware — that kind of thing. It’s too locked in, too unambiguous, to give Crystal the chance he needs to really stretch his legs as a dramatic actor. Like, I’m sure we could have put together that he feels he can’t do his job because he didn’t save his wife’s life. We’re bright people, yeah? No need to underline it for us!

But that terminal “Fuck” keeps me intrigued. It fits so well with Eli’s earlier, peevish declaration that what he’s feeling at the front of his mind regarding his wife’s death isn’t sad or angry but inconvenienced, since he can now no longer bring himself to use the bathroom where she killed herself. That’s the kind of guy who’d take a look at fairly incontrovertible evidence of metal telepathy or clairvoyance or reincarnation or something and go “Goddammit.” And if that’s the kind of insight and intelligence Before has underneath the the clumsier stuff, then maybe this is a case worth digging into.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.