“I will help you.” Eli, the widower therapist who’s trying to help a strange little boy named Noah in Before, repeats this phrase to him over and over, in what I assume is clumsy but very obviously heartfelt archaic Dutch. Now that he’s identified the language in which the usually mute boy cried for help during a seizure last episode, perhaps he can reach him. Perhaps he can help him.

“I want to go home,” the confused kid replies in perfect English. 

It’s not a laugh line per se — it’s the first thing he’s said in weeks, and his foster mom Denise is overjoyed — but if you’ve ever had or worked with kids, it’s a very funny moment. Here’s a guy who reached out to a linguistics professor or semiotician or something (played by violinist Itzahk Perlman for some reason) to get his hands on cutting-edge technology able to identify virtually any language ever spoken. He deciphers the cryptic phrase uttered by a boy with an ODD diagnosis and a penchant for breaking into his house. Despite having no idea why the kid is drawn to him or why he’s speaking in a dead dialect, this guy, who no doubt agonized over the right thing to say in response, memorizes a phrase in that same dialect and repeats it over and over in hopes of piercing through the boy’s psychogenic fog. The response? “I wanna go home.” Kids, am I right?

But this isn’t a simple request to go back to Denise’s place. Indeed, Noah later refers to Denise as mean because she won’t take him home either, though where “home” is he can’t say. In the moment, this explanation for why he thinks Denise is mean is a bit of a relief. Despite being played by one of the most lovable actors of the past thirty-odd years, you really can’t make out a lot in her dark eyes. She’s also the kind of person who agrees to an in-home interview with her troubled child’s therapist, then pours herself a Big Gulp full of cabernet while they chat. That’s the kind of move you might think of as concerning, so it’s good to hear Noah’s complaints against her aren’t any worse.

When asked, Denise tells Eli she suspects Noah is really “afraid of himself,” not some external thing; she cites his screaming fits and his slow loss of language upon moving in with her. If I were her I might pay a little more attention to his reams of creepy drawings, all of which contain an image of that farmhouse from Eli’s fridge in some way shape or form. I’d also wonder a little harder why my son seems to have psychically located his future therapist and broken into his house, but that really only seems to trouble Eli.

A lot of things are troubling Eli, of course. Last episode he trashed his apartment when he stepped in his dog’s poop, the straw that broke the camel’s back. This episode, his panicked daughter Barb shows up at his work; having seen the state of the place and learned from his service that he was at the hospital, she naturally put two and two together. The fact that he’s physically healthy but still more interested in his patients than her is one of those good news, bad news situations for Barb, who’s clearly struggling with issues of her own. However, she’s the one who pushes Eli to actually talk to her about her mom’s suicide; he puts it off with a “yeah yeah, we’ll do lunch” kind of response.

This, however, leads to another funny bit, in which the show allows us to believe Eli’s wife or some other supernatural entity has magically tidied his trashed house, only for him to find a note from Barb about the cleaning service she hired. Later, Eli receives a visit from an attractive woman named Sue-Ann, who seems to be after something from Eli that he’s not quite ready to give; it seems like she’s trying to move in on him with romantic designs now that his wife is dead, but she’s actually just a real estate agent trying to convince him to finally sell the place. Writer-creator Sarah Thorp has peppered both episodes so far with these little “Huh! Not what I expected!” moments, which go a long way to livening (and lightening) things up.

But the focal point of the episode remains Eli’s attempts to figure out what’s going on with his patient. A harrowing MRI goes awry when the boy hallucinates one of those black-goop tentacle-worm things, a tiny one this time, extruding from the top of the chamber and slithering into his IV wound. I so wish they’d taken the time to use practical effects for an image that inherently squirmy and uncomfortable; the CGI just doesn’t feel viscerally frightening and gross the way it needs to. (Being more creepy than actually scary is a consistent problem for the show.)

Later, in a one-on-one session, Eli teaches Noah something he calls “the mad game,” using blocks to help the boy articulate the things he’s angry about. (He was inspired to do so when Noah asked him “Are you mad?”; since he sometimes speaks like he’s from the 17th century I thought he was asking Eli if he was insane in an old-fashioned/European way.) Just when it seems Eli is making a breakthrough, with Noah revealing the thing that makes him the most mad of all is “people who hurt other people…bad people who do bad things,” the kid’s nose starts to bleed just like Lynn’s did in one of Eli’s hallucinations of her. “You know!” the boy growls. “You know what you did!”, again echoing Lynn. Finally, he says to Eli “I can’t take much more of this”…in Eli’s own voice, just as Eli had said to the specter of Lynn. 

Does this mean that Noah’s plight is connected to Lynn’s suicide in some way? What’s the link to the mysterious farmhouse, or to Noah’s photographic memory of the exterior of Eli and Lynn’s Manhattan home? Is his use of old-fashioned Dutch have something to do with time when New York City was known as New Amsterdam? What about the initials on the back of the farmhouse photo, “B.W.”? Is it all tied together, or is working through the supernatural just a coincidental way to help Eli work through his own demons? The fact that there are eight episodes to go indicates that there’s a lot we don’t yet know, same as Eli. 

In the meantime, the show is most artistically successful in Eli’s dreams. Whatever else you think of what is going on, and whatever you think of Crystal’s performance (I like it but I don’t feel he’s had the chance to do much nuanced work with this material yet), the man repeatedly dreams of being maimed and killed — by Noah, by Lynn, by himself. That’s the depth of desperation and darkness beneath the surface-level warmth everyone seems drawn to in Eli. I wonder how much Noah and the phenomena surrounding him will drag up to the light.

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.