This article contains spoilers.
“People around here, they forget. They forget the past. It’s written… in blood.”
There have been a few main storylines at play in the second season of Hulu’s “Castle Rock,“ the most compelling of which has focused on a young Annie Wilkes (Lizzy Caplan), the villain from Stephen King’s Misery. Another storyline brings Tim Robbins back into the King Universe as “Pop” Merrill, an important figure in the town of Castle Rock whose final days have been playing out in front of us. And yet another storyline focuses on Pop’s son Ace, killed by Annie but resurrected by mysterious forces deep beneath another iconic King town: Jerusalem’s Lot.
Ace hasn’t exactly been himself since Annie shoved an ice cream scoop down his gullet, but rather his body has been inhabited by a literal ghost from Salem’s Lot past. And this week’s “The Word” set about answering the question of precisely who is inhabiting the bodies of Ace and his murderous pals, taking us back 400 years into the town’s past. In 1619, to be precise, a young woman named Amity and her lover were cast out of New Jerusalem (the town that would later become Jerusalem’s Lot), her own father believing her to be a witch. Out in the woods beyond the town, however, Amity is encountered by a hooded “angel” who turns her life around. She returns to New Jerusalem and fast becomes the new leader of the town, mysteriously restoring New Jerusalem’s crops and saving those who cast her out.
But the good fortune comes with a price, and the so-called “angel” ultimately beckons Amity to kill herself (along with everyone in town) under the promise that they’ll all be resurrected on the 400th anniversary of both Castle Rock and Jerusalem’s Lot. They’ll be able to rule over a whole new world, they’re told. Turns out, Ace’s body has been inhabited by Amity’s lover these last several episodes, and the intended host for the reborn Amity is none other than Castle Rock’s newest inhabitant: the woman who unknowingly set this whole chain of events into motion by killing Ace Merrill and burying him beneath Jerusalem’s Lot, Annie Wilkes.
The possibilities are literally endless in the world of “Castle Rock,” a series that has given itself complete freedom to play around in Stephen King’s sandbox and has this season in particular proven itself to be a real treat for King fans. After all, where the hell else can you see the villain from Misery mashed together with the sordid history of Salem’s Lot? But where “Castle Rock” got really crazy this week was in playing with its own original storytelling from the previous season for a surprise twist you probably didn’t see coming – I sure didn’t.
We had been told that “Castle Rock” would be an anthology series of unconnected tales of King-inspired horror, and though season two has thus far referenced the first season’s events in passing a couple times, “The Word” firmly linked the two seasons together in a way that actually manages to retroactively improve the unsatisfying debut season. The big mystery at the center of the first season of “Castle Rock” was in regards to the identity of “The Kid” (Bill Skarsgård), a mysterious man who starts and ends the season locked up in the bowels of the Shawshank prison. We’re never quite sure who (or what) “The Kid” is throughout the first season – at one point, I was entirely convinced he was Pennywise – and even the season’s finale deliberately made us question whether what we were told about him was even true.
To make a long, convoluted story short, “The Kid” claimed that he was actually an alternate reality version of the season’s main character, Henry Deaver (André Holland); as he explained it, he traveled through a portal in the woods of Castle Rock and became trapped in the wrong timeline, thereby causing all kinds of chaos in the town. This was revealed to us in the season’s penultimate episode, but the finale once again took everything we thought we knew and tossed it out the window. André Holland’s version of Henry Deaver ultimately decided that “The Kid” needed to be locked up in Shawshank regardless of whether his story was true or he’s actually the Devil in the flesh (as many believe). And so he returned “The Kid” to the place where he was found at the start of the season, leaving us unsure of what was really going on.
But over one year later, “The Word” has now come along to finally provide us with an answer that the first season seemed content to only dangle in front of us like a carrot. As we find out in the surprising final moments of this week’s episode, the “angel” who guided Amity to wipe out New Jerusalem back in 1619 was none other than the man we know as “The Kid”! The episode came to a close by returning to the moment Amity and her “angel” met (an encounter briefly glimpsed earlier on), and this time the man removed his hood to reveal Bill Skarsgård underneath. In other words, “The Kid” truly is the Devil – or some form of the Devil, at least – and his master plan is to rule over Castle Rock and Jerusalem’s Lot with his devoted flock, asleep for 400 years and now reborn in the bodies of the present day townsfolk.
One of the episode’s final scenes saw Ace unveiling a statue of “The Kid” during the town’s 400th anniversary parade, with a horrified Pop Merrill looking on – Pop, after all, has been around Castle Rock for a long time, and he seems keenly aware of what’s coming. As for “The Kid,” we’ve been led to believe that Ace has set him free from Shawshank; and with just three episodes remaining, he’s sure to pop up soon to continue his reign of terror.
Unless “Castle Rock” throws another set of curveballs our way this season – and don’t be surprised if the writers do – it would seem we now have the answers we’ve been seeking from the very beginning. “The Kid” is the evil force we’ve always believed him to be – he’s not exactly “It” or “The Man in Black” but he might as well be – and it’s he who has been guiding the various horrific events that have been plaguing Castle Rock and Jerusalem’s Lot dating back to at least the 1600s. In a wild twist on Stephen King’s established world, the only person who may be able to stop him and the denizens of the Marsten House is… Annie Wilkes.
And speaking of which, the Marsten House is of course an iconic location from Salem’s Lot, and it’s certainly not lost on us that “The Kid” and Kurt Barlow aren’t actually all that different. The second season of “Castle Rock” has been brushing up against the storytelling of Salem’s Lot without ever outright delving into the world of vampires, and while the show isn’t likely to head down that path this season, it would seem safe at this point to at least speculate that “The Kid” is the show’s version of Barlow – and that’d make Ace, naturally, his Richard Straker.
Granted, this sort of speculation is probably as off base as my speculation last season that “The Kid” was the entity known as “It,” as “Castle Rock” has primarily been in the business of toying with iconic Stephen King elements rather than outright adapting his stories, but it’s certainly fun to imagine. After all, we still haven’t been provided with the character’s real name at this point in time, so it would seem that anything is very much still possible.
As we build towards a battle between Annie Wilkes and a sort of alternate version of the vampire Kurt Barlow, it’s pretty clear to me that the writers of “Castle Rock” have cracked the code and figured out what the show ought to be, remixing familiar elements from the Stephen King Universe and mashing them together in fresh, exciting new ways. Whereas the first season only lightly touched upon the potential for messing around in the King sandbox, the second season has proven to be a veritable buffet of treats for Constant Readers.
Oh and “The Word” totally brought Tim Robbins back to Shawshank. I rest my case.
