Before – Season 1 Episode 10 Recap, Review & Ending Explained

Before

Episode 10 of Before begins this finale with Eli and Noah driving out to the farmhouse. Jane radios through and pleads with him to turn the van around, as kidnapping a kid is not a good look. However, Eli is convinced that “radical exposure therapy” is the only solution, so he’s going to crack on with this regardless.

The pair eventually arrive at the farmhouse, where Noah seems to be right as rain. He’s no longer incapacitated and explains to Eli that something bad happened here, “when he was a little girl”. The pair hold hands and head on inside the farmhouse.

What is the connection with the little girl?

As they step through, Noah hides in the corner of the room, whimpering “no” repeatedly. Eli gets turned around when Noah races off, and despite it only being a small cabin, and eventually loses him. However, a dripping tap distracts Eli as he looks over and pushes through the front door. In doing so, he finds himself outside but in the presence of a little girl, who seems to be possessing Noah.

Eli realizes he’s been here before and charges through to a lake. There, he sees visions of a young Lynn, a younger version of himself and this girl. Noah ends up finding a bees nest and after poking it with a stick, runs away onto the thin ice, where Noah ends up falling through. As a result, she ended up dying.

How does Eli save Noah?

The only solution here is to repeat that same process again, and this time Eli jumps with Noah into the water. As they do, we cut back and see Lynn’s final moments. She’s done fighting now and she wants to let go. Eli doesn’t listen and heads out to get her some soup instead. When he returns, he finds Lynn in the bath. She doesn’t want an ambulance, or help, and Eli is torn up.

Lynn encourages him to help her, and that comes from pressing down on her chest so she drowns under the water.

Back in the present, Eli brings Noah up out the water and does CPR. Noah is miraculously saved and, even better, he’s no longer haunted either. How? Well apparently all of this was about Eli, it was never to do with Noah. Eli tells Noah that he’s proud of him, as the police show up.

How does Before end?

Denise is reunited with Noah and the pair go home, while Eli is arrested. At least, that’s what should have happened after kidnapping a kid. Instead, he’s allowed to go back home and just do psychiatric treatment. He narrates that the link they shared was a heightened case of delusions.

Noah gets better, while Eli faces his own problems in therapy and says all the right things. The trouble is, he’s still not 100%, as he notices worms crawling in his skin and almost cuts his forehead open to try and cut it out. He doesn’t, thankfully, as his bond with Sophie is strong and getting better, leading everyone to have a happy (kinda) ending after all.

The Episode Review

So Before comes to a pretty uninspiring conclusion, with a predictable and rather disappointing finale that sees all roads lead to the farmhouse. The trouble is, this all plays out in a perfunctory way, with obvious resolutions and a repetition of what we’ve already seen with Lynn’s flashbacks.

It turns out Noah was never really part of this, and the show flirts with the idea of there being a “before” and that Noah’s spirit is actually that of the other kid, but then apparently jumping in a lake resolves all of that. It doesn’t, however, explain some of the more frightening visions like squid tentacles, speaking Dutch or even some of those drawings, unless I’m missing something of course.

In the end, this one concludes with a pretty disappointing wrap-up. It’s certainly not bad per-se, but it is a bit of a shame that the show doesn’t follow through with a more bombastic conclusion to make the wait to reach this point more substantial. Either way, the actual final scenes are good, but is there enough here to make 8 weeks of waiting worth the ending we receive?