Well, I’ve got to hand it to Before, and possibly kick myself in the ass: I did not see this coming!

Now it’s possible this is a red herring, and what Eli means by “I killed my wife” is just that it’s his fault she committed suicide because he drove her to blah blah blah, whatever. We’ll see. But assuming his confession is legit, all the signs are right there out in the open. Lynn’s presence in his visions has been uniformly ominous since he met his patient Noah, and often openly accusatory, speaking of “what you did.” The case has been an absolute transference splatterfest, and it stands to reason he’s projecting the idea of his own repressed memories onto his patient. And it took my wife to remind me, but there was even a shot of him strangling Lynn in the tub way back when, for crying out loud.

But there have been shots of a lot of things in this show — to quote Galadriel, things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be. The idea that can’t trust just about anything you see on this show is a recurring plot point, let alone theme, right down to Eli carving into a child’s forehead to pull out an invisible worm. At any rate, considering Eli’s overall savior complex, failing to prevent his wife’s suicide would feel like killing her himself. I didn’t take that shot literally at all.

But more than that, I forgot it even existed. I’d become so focused on, well, all the other shit going on. I wanted to know why Noah briefly spoke antiquated Dutch. I wanted to know why he showed up at Eli’s house. I wanted to know what was up with Lynn’s book. I wanted to know what was up with Lynn’s boyfriend. I wanted to know what was up with just about everything except Lynn’s death, which I’d ceased to question at all.

Maybe you’re a more perceptive viewer than I am, and if so, te salute. As a person who gets paid to watch a punishing amount of television, though, I have to come clean and say it got me good. So I have to give it up to creator Sarah Thorp for this extremely effective sleight-of-hand. (In this specific episode, it falls to writer Joseph Sousa drops the hammer down on our guy Eli.) She had me looking everywhere but the place I was supposed to.

But before we get to that moment, we have to get from Point A to Point B. Literally! In this ep, Eli — now officially pulled off Noah’s case by his colleague Jane, but still obsessively pursuing it — finally makes his way to the menacing farmhouse at the center of the story’s imagery. It’s the place he’s come to believe is the site of the trauma that drove Benjamin Walker to psychosis and death, and may be driving Noah, via some still mysterious connection in their past, to the same destination. 

Simple enough, right? But Sousa, aided by Jet Wilkinson’s capable direction, turns nearly the whole episode into a sort of big dreamy/nightmarish montage. Eli drifts from moment to moment, place to place, person to person, reality to surreality, with an almost metronomic rhythm established by cuts to black, eerie thrums on the soundtrack, and the show’s trademark drip-drop sound effect. By the time he shows up at Noah’s foster mom Denise’s place in the middle of the night, laughing and refusing to let her shut the door while dressed like Randall Patrick McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, this strange effect has made him seem genuinely deranged. (Not that they don’t still give him the occasional good joke: I guffawed when his assistant, Cleo, told him to see a doctor, prompting him to look in a mirror and say “done.”)

His telekinetic connection to Noah, who breaks Eli’s nose by breaking his own all the way in the hospital, is very real, though. And by the time he reaches that farmhouse, tracked down by the dogged but increasingly concerned Cleo, the show is, for the first time, actually scary. Kudos to whatever location scout found that place, but after hearing about it all this time, seeing it there in the distance like some dark version of “Christina’s World” is like seeing that house at the end of The Blair Witch Project. It feels like a dream snapping into focus.

There’s nothing quite that terrifying inside of it — more strange visions, this time revealing that Eli can’t swim despite his fixation on that pool, and explicitly connecting young, doomed Benjamin Walker (Will Hochman) to the briefly glimpsed Dutch girl from the previous episode. But eventually, the dream/vision Eli sees worms crawling around in his wounded hand…and the next thing you know he’s been hospitalized for tearing his hand open with a pen (the missing Mets pen?) to dig them out. That’s when he drops the bombshell on Cleo, who can only react with a dumbfounded “…what?” (I may have reacted similarly.)

It may have taken eight episodes, a shocking confession, an imaginative method of storytelling, a surfeit of eerie old photos (featuring a vanishing young Eli, notably), and a scary dream-farmhouse to get it there, but Before has some real dark energy to it now. Let’s hope that energy keeps building.

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.