I want Dr. Eli Adler to solve the case. I really do. I’m rooting for him! And Before makes it pretty easy to do so. Billy Crystal makes Eli more an absent-minded (if grief-stricken) professor type than a dogged investigator of the root of evil. In terms of Apple TV+ dramas alone, picture Colin Farrell investigating this same case in Sugar and you can just see and hear how much intense and heart-on-sleeve that performance would be. Crystal, by contrast, makes Eli seem like a humanities adjunct who just stumbled across the key to the Voynich Manuscript, or has unearthed possible proof that Christopher Marlowe was William Shakespeare. It’s an endearing vibe.

Slicing into a child’s forehead without any prep or permission in order to unearth a supernatural worm only you and he can see, though? People are gonna find that…less endearing.

This is the dilemma in which Eli finds himself at the end of the episode. In its compact runtime (around 25 minutes minus the credits) he has another session with Noah, this time bringing along the picture drawn by his wife Lynn that reminds him of some of the drawings Eli has done. He also brings along his picture of the farmhouse, so similar to the one Noah has repeatedly drawn. Of course he wants to know if Noah has ever somehow met Lynn, or if he got the idea for the farmhouse from Eli’s photo during some kind of undetected break-in.

But the most intriguing lead is how strongly responds to Lynn’s drawing. Noah refers to the two little boys in the drawing as being Eli and himself, “looking for our friend,” who’s trapped in Lynn’s sketchy, swirling black vortex. Then the boy seizes and is rushed from the ward — though not before Eli notices some kind of worm wriggling in his forehead.

It gets worse from there, though. As Noah is wheeled through the ward, one by one, the children he passes collapse, each of them diagnosed with a different ailment explaining the episode. Jane (Hope Davis), the doctor overseeing the cases, feels certain there has to be an environmental source for the disturbance. Eli’s counter-theory is that Lynn’s drawing triggered such a full-fledged conversion-disorder brain malfunction in Eli that it effectively became contagious in the pediatric psych ward’s sensitive population. If he can figure out what’s in the drawing that Noah found so scary, he theorizes, he has a shot of curing what ails him; since Noah is Patient Zero for this psychogenic epidemic, healing him could heal all the other kids too.

Most of the episode that follows is just simple detective work on Eli’s part, smartly written by Emmy Grinwis. With the help of his assistant Cleo, his dementia-stricken mother Ruth (Barbara Bain), and his own instincts, he starts putting it together. Visibly kicking himself for not having thought of it sooner, he follows Cleo’s suggestions and looks for sketches and earlier drafts from the unfinished, scary book project Lynn was working on in lieu of completed pages. He comes up with a whole cache of them, and Cleo notices something written on the back of one of them about “Benjamin’s nightmare.”

Benjamin, Eli realizes, is Lynn’s ex, a guy named…Benjamin Walker, matching the “B.W.” initials on the mysterious farmhouse photo. Additional notes on the sketches suggest that Lynn has a cache of tapes about Benjamin’s problem somewhere, from back when she used to record notes on cassette. Eli digs them up at Ruth’s house — she does her best to help him, when she’s not the umpteenth person on the show to accuse Eli of killing Lynn himself, that is — and discovers that Benjamin had a terrifying dream about being infested with, you guessed it, worms. 

So Eli goes back to the hospital, whips out a scalpel, and cuts into his paralytic patient’s forehead to pull out the worm he can see wriggling around under the skin — all in front of his horrified foster mom Denise, who watches screaming through the observation window. Still,  finding the worm has got to be validating for Noah and Eli alike…or it would be, if they weren’t the only two people who could see the worm. When Eli realizes he’s got a whole bunch of nothing trapped in his tweezers, he himself collapses. Cut to black.

There’s more to the story too, or at least I think there is. Throughout the show, Eli has had unnerving subway experiences — a woman laughing at him for no reason, a cancer patient whose illness reminds him of his wife’s own. The latter shows up in this episode in the same hospital elevator as Eli, her chemo unit bearing a bumper sticker featuring a tree and the words “Don’t be AFRAID to branch out.” Back at home, he finds the exact same sticker on Lynn’s equipment. There’s no such thing as a coincidence, or at least not on this show. Again, I’m intrigued.

Part of the problem with Before’s barely-half-an-hour run time and the resulting pacing of the storytelling is that you feel like you might have covered just this much ground in, like, an episode and a half of an hour-long drama about the exact same topic. However, now that we’ve got enough of the show under our belt, the vision is becoming more apparent. I still can’t say Before is scary, and that’s the biggest knock on it; horror TV shows should frighten you, full stop. But I do find the supernatural mystery becoming more compelling as the wriggly, wormy shape of it comes into focus. 

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.