1x08 Past Perfect

[5.8/10] When we opened on the couple whom Molly had marketed a house to, my first thought was that it was a little late in the game to be introducing new focus characters. But then Castle Rock switched from its scattershot mystery box plotting, which it is, at best, very hit or miss at, into its best self – smaller character-focused stories.

Getting to see the tension in the trials and tribulations of a couple trying to get over infidelity, their odd but frankly smart efforts to try to put together a Bed & Breakfast themed with the town’s macabre history, and the heightened moments when, through a combination of The Kid’s leftover essence and his own issues, the husband can’t take it anymore and brutally murders his young lodgers, I thought this was going to be an unusual but possibly excelsior episode of the show.

And during the cold open, and a little bit after, it was. The episode held the tension in these scenes, combining the unease of the couple after their personal problems with the unease of the past horrors that occurred under that roof to create a positively eerie atmosphere. Far from the plodding pacing the show usually employs to poor effect, the cold open let that eeriness build gradually enough, but the tight timeframe forced it to be more focused and purposeful in that. And after the husband does the grisly deed, there’s even some effective thematic work from his wife saying “it never happened” in the same terms as she talked about her cheating, and some additional tenseness when Jackie stops by. It was all poised for success.

But then their story gets bogged down in the main plot, and basically becomes dramatically inert and even kind of stupid. Jackie having her suspicions is interesting enough, but the two of them not only attacking Henry, but getting wounded themselves in the process is some convenient slasher movie crap. The same’s true for Jackie saving the day, where the irony of her killing the husband with the same ax he tried to put on display from another murder coming off as cheesy rather than neat. (And hey, is that a shoutout to The Shining while we’re at it? Obviously Jack Torrance wasn’t the first person in history to go after someone with an ax, but who knows.) When that couple was telling their own story, even a heightened one, they were interesting, but when they had to be crammed into this endless, pretty dull story about the Deavers, they become much flatter, less interesting, and ultimately disposed of.

The rest of the episode is spent with the show spinning its wheels, rededicating itself to its glacial pacing, and telling the audience things it already knows. It continues to hint strongly that The Kid is a reincarnation or spiritual successor to Henry’s father, and hey, I don’t need the show to fully pull the trigger on that idea just yet, but it’s a little tired after that was all but confirmed in the last episode. By the same token, the big event for Henry in this one (aside from the slasher movie escape) is discovering that dates on Warden Lacey’s paintings and realizing that The Kid hasn’t aged. Now obviously the show needs to let Henry in on that info sooner or later, but we the audience already know that from Lacey and Pangborn’s own comments, so why does Castle Rock have to belabor the point for so long?

There’s also a lot of character choices that don’t make much sense. It was already kind of weird in the last episode that young Wendell just left his grandmother in the company of that creepy dude and didn’t come back until the next morning. Maybe that motivates him getting off the bus and returning to Castle Rock despite Henry trying to send him home, but it mostly feels like an excuse to make Wendell a pawn for The Kid to antagonize in some way and for Henry to have to defend. At the same time, while teenagers can’t certainly be unreasonable, it seems pretty odd that Wendell gives his dad crap for not coming home right this instant given what happens, and it seems even odder that Henry doesn’t say something along the lines of “I will come home, but first I have to look after your grandmother until we can figure out what needs to happen there.” Instead, it’s portrayed as another moment of absentee fatherism with on-the-nose dialogue to drive the point home rather than a real human interaction.

The one bit I did appreciate as well-crafted in the episode is when the new sheriff gave Henry a rough time when questioning him after Pangborn’s body was found. There’s a real Get Out quality to their conversation, where the new sheriff is resentful of Henry after what happened in 1991, and seems poised to pin Pangborn’s murder on him too. The sense of in-universe bias against Henry in Castle Rock, with the subtext that comes from a black man being questioned by police in a lily white small town in Maine is one of the strongest threads in the show, and it really gives the episode a sense of place.

That just makes it all the more disappointing when Henry gets involved in a generic slasher situation which feels too contrived as a setup for more suspicion and accusations of being a murderer in a way that doesn’t feel natural or earned.

(My crazy theory: Henry will do whatever he needs to do in order to defeat The Kid, but in the process, he’ll be arrested and accused of murder for it, as an echo of what happened in 1991, with the irony that he does it to save the town and then gets pilloried by it.

Overall, this is an episode that has some good elements in it, particularly the little short story it tells in the cold open, but its weighed down by a lot of useless time spent reinforcing things the show’s already conveyed to the audience, and devolving into standard-issue horror movie tropes.