From - Thoughts at the End of Season One (2025)

Speculative Recap – SPOILERS

Ethan (Simon Webster) wakes up in Episode 2 after having part of a chair removed from his leg. “I saw the Lake of Tears,” he tells his dad. “It was a drawing on the wall. There were so many drawings on the wall, like when I used to draw with crayons and you would put it on the fridge. And we were all there in the drawings, you and me, and Mom and Julie. But somebody screamed because the spider came down from the ceiling.”

In the sixth episode, Ethan compares the town’s storage room to the Cavern of the Lonely Dragon (from a story he has been reading). “When the Cromenockle was lost in the rainbow sky, she found a cavern where the lonely dragon lived, and it was full of stuff that nobody wanted. But for the lonely dragon, all the stuff was treasure. And guess what, in one of the big piles of stuff, there was the map of the rainbow sky. So, the lonely dragon gave it to the Cromenockle, and then she wasn’t lost anymore.”

In Episode 9, Ethan says that Victor’s drawings represent a story, not a puzzle. “They all fit together and tell a story. And once we figure out the story, we’ll know what to do next. That’s how it works. We can’t finish the quest unless we figure out the story.”

Jade (David Alpay) notices that the town’s electrical cords contain no wire, and that lamps continue to work when unplugged. This discovery leads to a practical power source for an attempt at radio communication with the outside world. It also leads Tabitha (Catalina Sandino Moreno) to conclude that the power must come from under the town, and that makes her start digging a hole in the basement.

Before that, while going through the storage area behind the diner, Tabitha discovered a bracelet that she made for her husband Jim (Eion Bailey) years previously. Jim lost the bracelet (also a long time ago) but Tabitha is sure it’s the same one because of a mistake she made in its construction, and that somehow that bracelet got to the town before Jim did.

After the voices in her head told her to kill Ethan, Sara (Avery Konrad) fled the town. She was caught by Father Khatri (Shaun Majumder) and imprisoned in the basement of the church. Father Khatri points out that there are no bibles to be found anywhere in town, and advances a theory: “People think the Bible’s a fixed object – something written and completed. But how can the story be finished if all the players remain on stage? We call it ‘the good book’, but did you know it’s actually comprised of 73 books?…What if we, the people of this town, are living the book that has yet to be written? What if this is book 74?” (Different bibles contain varying numbers of books. The Catholic Bible has 73.) Strange though it sounds, there is no obvious alternative to Father Khatri’s theory about the absence of bibles. Then Sara’s voices (through her) tell the priest something he has told no one, that he buried something in the cemetery the day he arrived in town.

Sara’s ability to communicate with something (we know not what) causes Boyd (Harold Perrineau) to ask Sara to join him on a trek into the woods to try to discover a way out. On their journey they encounter, among other things, spiders, a confederate soldier from the American Civil War., and bottles that contain documents from 1864 hanging from trees. (In Episode 6, Jade sees a soldier from the Union Army.)

Sheriff Stevens disappeared from the real world while en route from Petersburg, VA to Wilmington, NC. The Seige of Petersburg began in 1864. Jade disappeared somewhere between New York City and Miami, so he might have been passing through the same area.

Back in town, Tabitha’s dig breaks through into an underground cavern. She falls in, and encounters Victor (Scott McCord) who tells her “The Boy in White, he said that you would come. That I should wait. We have to go; it’s not safe here. This is where they sleep.” He points to the colourful cave paintings surrounding them, and continues: “You see, they make drawings too.” We are not told who “they” are, or where Victor might be taking Tabitha.

If only Boyd and Father Khatri had told Jim and the others about Sara and her voices. Then Jim might not have built the tower designed to transmit a mayday signal, and an unknown male voice would not have responded: “Your wife shouldn’t be digging that hole, Jim.” Does that same voice also speak to Sara? (Several voices speak to Sara, some male and some female. In Ethan’s story, the Cromenockle is female.)

Deep in the woods, Boyd and Sara climb to the top of a steep incline and from its summit they see what might be a lighthouse if it was associated with a body of water. Then the Boy in White (Vox Smith) appears to them and tells them to get inside one of those Farway Trees (which seem like entrances to something akin to The Ways from THE WHEEL OF TIME.) Boyd goes inside and almost immediately finds himself in what appears to be a chimney. Sara vanishes in the same way that Victor disappeared after the person he was with (Julie) went into a tree. One wonders if Sara will also turn up in the caverns beneath the town.

Just before the attack on Colony House in Episode 7, Julie goes to Victor’s room to find some peace and quiet. “It’s started,” Victor tells her when the attack begins, and seems to know exactly how the two of them should get to safety. He eventually tells Julie to. go into a Farway Tree, and after doing that she almost immediately finds herself inside a root cellar that looks like the one where Jade found a screaming dead body in Episode 3. While Jim is getting the scary radio message warning that Tabitha should not dig that hole, Victor is nowhere to be found. An old photo hidden in a book shows a very young Victor carrying his disco lunch pail.

What if something catastrophic happened to this town in the 1970s and Victor was the only survivor? Could he (consciously or unconsciously) be bringing people to this place to provide whatever it is that he needs? For instance, Victor collects license plates, which might explain the wide variety of locations from which folks have been hijacked.

In the season’s final scene, a bus labeled Grand Rapids Runners arrives at the already closed diner just before sunset, and the diner’s jukebox begins to play the Neil Young song “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere“: