“Who hurt you?” “You did.”

“He committed suicide. There was nothing I could do.” “Liar!”

Well, there it is, right? That’s it Before in five sentences. Eli asks his young accuser Noah the identity of the person who hurt him in his past and is told it was Eli himself. Finally, Eli walks his therapist (Julia Chan) through the events of the day of his wife Lynn’s suicide, only for his wife to show up and accuse him of lying when he says there was nothing he could have done to help her. save. Are all these true? Is Eli at the root of both Noah and Lynn’s trauma? Or is he, too, victimized somehow, by whatever dark force connects all these events?

He beats me! But they certainly seem connected, if only because the only person able to see what’s really going on with Noah’s violent outbursts is Eli and Lynn’s niece Sophie (Rebecca Ruane). Sophie, who appears to be on the spectrum, notices that in the drawing Noah created almost automatically, stabbing that boy at school in the premiere, he was actually “Stabbing the bad thing in the neck.” But this discovery leads to the line of questioning that prompts Noah to say Eli we hurt him so we’re back to not understanding anything.

We are certainly given no indication of the latest way in which Noah’s visions are manifested. Instead of menacing black extruding worm-like appendages, the ceiling of his room now turns into a block of ice, while his lips turn blue and his breath comes in frosty gasps. At one point, he nearly drowns, though the only water near him barely fills a glass. Because of this, he is treated as a suicidal risk and moved to a psychiatric ward.

However, we understand a lot more about what happened when Lynn killed herself. Ignoring his gentle “Wait, are you leaving?” on the day of the event, Eli went out to go to the pool, where he saw a woman swimming, and to take Chinese, where he saw a lobster swimming. When he got home, she was gone, having slashed her wrists and drowned in the bathtub. Lynn had been battling cancer, Eli notes, but there was no sign of giving up until it was too late.

All of this explains many of Eli’s fixations. He naturally feels haunted and guilty as he believes that choosing to come out against her wishes prevented her from preventing his death. His nightmares take place at an empty pool because he visited a pool that day. I’m surprised egg drop soup doesn’t play a bigger role in his trauma iconography, honestly.

So that’s all Lynn meant when she called him a liar? Or, as the last photo of Eli choking her indicates, could it have meant something worse? Eli seems unlikely to be a wife killer, but stranger things have happened.

One thing I realize is that keeping us guessing like this is an artifact of the length of the show. An unusual half hour drama – I don’t think Apple TV+ will submit this one for best comedy, Bear–style — is also a more unusual half-hour supernatural mystery thriller. What this means is that every thirty minutes or so, it has to end with a cliffhanger that raises more questions than it answers in order to keep us moving through all ten episodes, instead of doing so at each sixty minutes or so to move through the same number of episodes or less.

In other words, writer-creator Sarah Thorp almost designed Before to refuse our answers. Mysteries pile on top of each other until it appears next week, same Before-time, the same Before-channel. For a while, anyway, we’ll be as dark as Eli.

Director Jet Wilkinson, however, does more than plunge us into darkness. I quite enjoyed the random well-lit moments, like Eli pouring milk in his kitchen or zombies standing outside his apartment while the EMTs carry his wife’s body up the stairs. But the episode also delivers the nastiest, most gruesome, and most effective of the series scare however: in a dream, Eli worries at a spot on his neck until it opens up into a gash, which he proceeds to rip open, peeling off chunks of skin. It’s disgusting! And it’s good horror, in a show that needs it.

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