Julie Matthews tried to use a bookmark to find her way back to the night of Jim’s death in FROM Season 4 Episode 4, and the plan fell apart. What she learned instead was that storywalking can take her to a specific point in a story — not just dump her into the past blind — but the attempt left her shaken and still no closer to saving her father.
The move came after Julie teamed up again with Randall and studied storywalking through Ethan’s books. Hannah Cheramy, who plays Julie, said the character had “all of 45 minutes to figure her shit out” before she was on the road, and described the younger Julie from Season 1, Episode 1 as “a wounded bird” who felt stuck and trapped before entering the town. In Cheramy’s view, the town changed her. Julie “gained her wings a bit through this town,” she said, even if that growth has been built on pain.
That pain is now part of the show’s larger mythology, where storywalking has emerged as one of the most important tools — and dangers — in the town’s strange rules. Julie’s ability to travel back to specific moments in the town’s history gives her a rare chance to interact with events already set in motion, but it also makes every attempt a gamble. She is not simply searching history. She is trying to force her way toward one exact night and one exact loss.
That is why the bookmark mattered. Julie made it after realizing she could travel to a precise point in a story instead of heading into the past blind, and she hoped that detail would help her reach the night Jim died. It did not work the way she wanted. The adventure went off course, leaving her distressed and still clueless about how to save him. For a character who entered the town as a frightened teenager, the setback shows how much power she may have and how little control she still has over it.
Randall remains the other half of that equation. Cheramy said the two share “a shared trauma bond” because they went through what they went through together in the chambers, and that shared experience has made them unusually trustworthy in a town where trust is scarce. “I know what your screams sound like, you know what my screams sound like. Let’s frickin’ be friends,” she said of their connection. In practical terms, that means Julie is not working alone, even if her mission is deeply personal.
The question now is not whether Julie cares enough to keep trying. She does. The question is whether storywalking, for all its promise, can actually be used to change the past she is chasing. For now, the answer remains no, and that may be the point: Julie has the ability to reach into FROM’s history, but not yet the control to rescue her father from it.
