Spoilers: The Ending of 'Before' Explained For Everyone Smart Enough To Quit

We often hear a phrase about streaming television shows these days: “That would have been better as a movie.” But with Billy Crystal’s Before—arguably the worst series in Apple TV+ history—even a movie couldn’t have saved it. Creator Sarah Thorpe (The Bounty Hunter, the Jacob’s Ladder remake) seems to have taken a bad idea for a movie and tried to dress it up as a series, perhaps hoping the format would lend it a patina of prestige. Spoiler: it didn’t.

Before feels like one of those old-school, moody, atmospheric duds with just enough material for a decent trailer for a January movie that flops, earns a D- CinemaScore, and promptly vanishes from memory. I’d name one as an example, but I’ve forgotten them all.

Here, for reasons beyond comprehension, Billy Crystal—a comedian known for being funny—is cast as a sullen, grief-stricken therapist seemingly forbidden from being Billy Crystal. His character, Eli, is assigned a foster kid, Noah (Jacobi Jupe), as a patient. Noah inexplicably has a psychic connection to Eli. Rosie Perez plays the foster mom, Hope Davis plays a fellow therapist tasked with separating Eli and Noah, and Judith Light plays Eli’s late wife, Lynn.

Lynn is the lynnchpin here (a Billy Crystal-like joke that Billy Crystal wasn’t allowed to make). There’s a mysterious connection between Lynn’s suicide and Noah, a connection that should have taken about 75 minutes to uncover in what still would’ve been a painfully slow movie but instead drags out across ten agonizing episodes.

I only endured this slog so I could write this post—helpful, I hope, to the many viewers who wisely quit after two or three episodes. Before is so mind-numbingly dull it somehow makes even background tasks unbearable. Television should make folding laundry tolerable, not feel like an endless chore.

Let me cut to the chase: the first nine episodes are largely Eli and Noah experiencing delusions that look like they were generated by ChatGPT running on low battery. Noah is mostly mute but inexplicably speaks Czech at one point. The story meanders through random drawings and tenuous links between the two, leading to Eli being committed and Noah near death in a hospital.

In the finale, Eli escapes the asylum and kidnaps Noah from his hospital room, convinced that radical exposure therapy will save the boy. He drives Noah to an old farmhouse from Eli’s childhood, where a repressed memory resurfaces. Noah is revealed to be the reincarnation of a girl from Eli’s past whom he accidentally pushed into an icy pond while fleeing bees. The girl drowned because Eli didn’t jump in to save her—a traumatic moment that occurred in the 1960s, yet the kids are inexplicably dressed like they’re Amish.

Adding to Eli’s guilt is his wife’s suicide. She initially attempted to end her life by slashing her wrists, but when death didn’t come quickly enough, she begged Eli to drown her in the bathtub. He did, and it understandably haunted him.

Eli’s grand solution? Take the 8-year-old Noah and jump into the icy pond, floating at the bottom for several minutes. When they resurface, Eli performs chest compressions on Noah, miraculously saving his life (after drowning him) curing him of his trauma. Hooray?

Before is an excruciating experience—one of the most unredeemable series I’ve ever seen. To its minor credit, the flashbacks of a naked, cancer-stricken Judith Light bleeding out in the bathtub and begging her husband to drown her are genuinely creepy, evoking the eerie Zelda scenes from the original Pet Sematary. But one unsettling sequence can’t salvage the misery of this series. It’s a torturous slog and a complete waste of a talented cast.