Castle Rock’s second season brings Annie Wilkes and Salem’s Lot into the fold and delivers a tense, satisfying season of psychological horror.
“She has crazy in her eyes. Even her daughter looks afraid of her.”
Castle Rock premiered as a show with a lot of promise that initially grabbed people, but seemed to have lost audiences by the end of the season. This year of the show course corrects in some regards while narrowing the series’ scope in important ways. It also just has more interesting characters in play this season, which makes Castle Rock’s sophomore year more cohesive and satisfying as a whole than its debut. Castle Rock’s second season absorbs texts like Misery and Salem’s Lot into its universe and it crafts a very emotional story that at its core is all about family.
This season also expands Castle Rock’s scope to beyond Shawshank Prison and incorporates other notable Stephen King locales like Jerusalem’s Lot and the Marsten House into its orbit. Castle Rock is very interested in the dark secrets that are buried figuratively and literally under Castle Rock and how they may finally be ready to come to the surface. In that sense, don’t go into this season expecting many—or any—connections to season one. Castle Rock truly embraces the anthology angle. While it’s not a completely new slate this year, this season is about passing the torch and extending this universe, not catching up with threads from last season (although that’s not to say that this could never happen).
The season’s premiere kicks off to a slow pace that informs the speed for the rest of the season, but this is far from a deterrent. It allows characters to get proper introductions that do them justice. A very big part of the season is the cultural and racial divide that’s growing to a boiling point in Salem’s Lot over the construction of new land. This work and progress is beginning to infect everything. This also brings in a slew of unexpected supernatural elements and the appearance of undead entities that add an interesting wrinkle to all of the personal drama. It’s the perfect ingredient to throw everything into chaos.
The central characters to this season are Annie Wilkes and her daughter, Joy, and the season’s premiere does exceptional work with Lizzie Caplan‘s take on the iconic Stephen King character. The premiere—but also the season as a whole—are incredibly efficient in regards to how they show you the insular, nomadic life that Annie’s led with her child. Suddenly, that’s all about to explode and come to a head during their stay in Castle Rock.
Castle Rock’s portrayal of Annie paints her as a worn-down addict who uses her RN gig as a ruse of sorts to re-up on meds more than a way for her to actually help others. This has created a very chaotic life for her. She and Joy get sidelined and held up in Castle Rock, but while they’re stuck there everyone begins to notice her eccentricities and wonder what she’s run away from. Included among those eccentricities are the severe hallucinations and other mental maladies that plague Annie. These also may or may not carry a supernatural connotation. It’s definitely not a good thing that she’s stuck in a place like Castle Rock right now. One of this season’s greatest strengths is how it excels at depicting Annie’s psychosis and paranoia in visually different and creative ways. It continually feels fresh and stressful.
A lot of this season is just watching Annie wander around in a bewildered fashion, but it’s consistently enthralling. You never want to take your eyes off of her and the never-ending breakdown that she’s caught in. Caplan does so much with just a detached stare here and it’s incredible to just watch her zone out and try to imagine what’s churning in her mind. It’s more than just the methodical drawl in the delivery of her lines. Annie simply doing menial tasks is fascinating due to what you know about this character. Alternatively, Annie’s bigger moments are also just as satisfying. Her rants about the dregs of Castle Rock rival Kathy Bates’ monologues in the Misery film. The camera hangs on Caplan’s face with uncomfortable close-ups where she looks increasingly unstable. The way she shifts into Annie’s blank, broken mode is also just as bone-chilling as Bates’ performance. Even in the first handful of episodes, she gives a season’s worth of range.
Digging into characters’ backstories and explaining their mystery can sometimes be a terrible idea. However, the details on Annie’s childhood and this expanded view on who she is and her youth is so damn good. I know this show is supposed to cover a whole community and connect many of King’s works together, but I’d have been very satisfied if this just focused on Annie and Joy trying to make it by. It shouldn’t be this satisfying to hear Caplan say “dirty bird,” her focus on her “laughing place,” and her mission to get her daughter there, but it so is. Much of this season is very much the Misery prequel that you never knew you wanted.
Caplan kills it as Annie, but Elsie Fisher as her conflicted daughter gives just as exciting and powerful of a performance. It’s horrifying to see Annie rope her young daughter into her mess. There’s a lot of focus on Joy getting pulled away by kids as she attempts to experience an actual life outside of her mother. Meanwhile, Annie struggles with all of this and tries to reclaim control. There’s an extremely complicated relationship and shifting power dynamic between the two of them, but it is one that is still based on love. However, that doesn’t make this situation any less volatile. This kind of story is usually disastrous for everyone involved, but with Wilkes, you know it will be worse. Annie Wilkes with an Internet connection is a particularly dangerous thing.
Outside of the Wilkes family, the other major stories that consume this season of Castle Rock involve Reginald “Pop” Merrill, a tired, dying junk shop owner played in a gleefully ornery fashion by Tim Robbins (the character originates in “The Sun Dog” from King’s Four Past Midnight). Pop tries to maintain the peace, cover up for past sins, as well as investigate the loss of his nephew. He becomes progressively suspicious of Annie Wilkes and her presence in the community and if anyone is going to catch or stop Annie, it seems like it will be him. He’s her biggest threat, other than herself, of course. In addition to Pop’s story, there is some very interesting material with the Somali population within Jerusalem’s Lot, their heritage, and how this is still currently causing stress in the form of family problems. The ownership of land and business starts to become increasingly important as construction on Jerusalem’s Lot moves forward.
To be fair, a lot of the actual “scares” in the season feel half-baked and pretty derivative. The season’s creepy, sure, but not explicitly scary at times. The triumphs are really in the acting and character work as opposed to visceral scares. This perhaps isn’t needed in this series, but it’s what some people are going to be looking for beyond the associations to King’s work. As the season goes on it does become more adept in constructing its terror. There may be plenty of human predators, but there are even more sinister, larger things bubbling underneath Castle Rock, as the first season showed us. There are some brutal, unexpected displays of violence that work especially well, but the moments of human conflict work even better than the supernatural ones. As King has proven countless times over, humans are the scariest monsters of all.
Castle Rock still expertly remixes and riffs on King’s iconic characters and their histories in reflexive ways that keeps all of this surprising and thrilling. The “remixing” aspect of Stephen King’s works is still successful more than it’s not and just the prospect of bringing characters like Annie Wilkes into haunted domains like the Marsten House from Salem’s Lot holds so much potential. Imagine how Randall Flagg would act in the Overlook. There’s just so much fun to be had here. All the while, gorgeous cinematography helps show off the town itself and highlights both the beauty and darkness of this haunted community.
Season two of Castle Rock weaves a more engaging story than its first season and crafts an impressive season that’s just as intimate as it is extravagant. This year approaches some high benchmarks from King’s universe, but it sticks the landing and succeeds in finding new, engaging takes on these characters. There are still areas to be improved upon, but this season of Castle Rock is an addictive, mind-bending assault that continues to refine its formula.
Editor’s Note: This review is based on the first five episodes of Castle Rock’s ten-episode second season.
Castle Rock’s second season debuts on October 23 on Hulu with the first three episodes. The remaining episodes will then air on a weekly basis.
