Castle Rock S01E01-E03 Review

So the first three episodes of Castle Rock dropped this week on Hulu. To recap: it's set in Stephen King's Castle Rock, a small town in Maine where several of his earlier stories are set in or near. After he supposedly destroyed it in 1991, he's moved onto other locales for his stories, both other small towns in Maine, and small towns in other places like Iowa. As well as kind of bringing back Castle Rock in one of his 1993 short stories, although that was probably written before and takes place prior to Needful Things.

King himself is purportedly not involved much in the new series. They draw on a lot of his stories for Easter Eggs: one character (Jane Levy) is named Jackie Torrance and another one has psychic ability, tying in with The Shining and Dr. Sleep. Cujo and The Body and a number of other King short stories and novels get a nod. There's a Merrill, possibly related to Pop in The Sun Dog, and Ace in The Body and Needful Things.

The actual plot is that the local warden (Terry O'Quinn) at Shawshank Prison (i.e., novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption or The Shawshank Redemption if you're movie-only) kills himself when a private prison corporation buys out Shawshank and forces him into retirement. After the warden's death, a prisoner is discovered locked up in a cage. The prisoner (Bill Skarsgård), nicknamed "The Kid", only says that the name "Henry Deaver" and doesn't seem to recognize things like phones and showers.

Henry (Andre Holland) is the adopted son of a minister and his wife, who disappeared in 1991 after his father Matthew was badly beaten. Local sheriff Alan Pangborn (The Dark Half, Needful Things), played by Scott Glenn, finds Henry in the dead winter, with no signs of frostbite. As we'll find out in the third episode via flashback, local /Shining user Molly Strand (Melanie Lynskey) actually killed Matthew when he was recuperating.

The townspeople thought and still think that Henry killed Matthew and then staged his own disappearance. How they think that a relatively frail 11-year-old boy beat a grown man, is not clear. Henry has moved away from Castle Rock and now represents Death Row inmates. As we'll find out via yet another flashback, the previous warden told the Kid to ask for Henry. Why has yet to be revealed.

Also as we find out via flashback, Matthew seemed to think that Henry could "hear" something, and took the boy out into the woods on the night that Matthew was beaten.

So far, the plot seems to be an extended version of the "Howling Man" episodes of the original Twilight Zone. Someone has captured the source of all evil, or at least all evil in Castle Rock. And it's escaping. The Kid may be King character Randall Flagg, since he gives immediately-fatal cancer to one cellmate with a touch. Otherwise, the Kid just stares off into space, and gives one guard a vision of the Kid slaughtering all of the guards in Shawshank.

Why the warden killed himself (stress from guarding the Kid and his forced retirement?), and why he advised the Kid to ask for Henry, has yet to be revealed.

Castle Rock is pretty cold, humorless, and unrelenting. Molly Strand is so far the only character who brings any humor to the show. Henry has become a bit more light-hearted since he entered into a semi-bantering relationship with the new corporate Shawshank warden while convincing her to let him see the Kid.

The first two episodes mostly set the stage. After the warden kills himself, the Kid gets discovered and a prison guard calls Henry after the Kid mentions Henry's name. Henry spent the first two episodes trying to find out who his client is, because the current prison administration doesn't want to admit that a prisoner was locked up off-the-books for decades.

Molly is a real estate agent who is trying to "renovate" Castle Rock to bring back business. She's also taking painkillers to dull the voices in her head, but she has a connection to Henry. Which is probably why she killed Matthew when she was a teenager: on Young Henry's behalf.

Henry's adoptive mother Ruth (Sissy Spacek) has Alzheimer's and is shacking up with the town's former sheriff, Alan Pangborn. And Alan apparently knows about the Kid via the warden and is hiding a secret or two there.

The third episode, "Local Color", is when things finally get moving. Henry meets the Kid face-to-face for the first time. We get backstory on Molly, her Shining connection to Henry, and how she killed Matthew. She's haunted by Shining-visions of Matthew's ghost, and has a weird unexplained encounter with some masked children at a motor court, staging a mock trial and finding Molly "guilty".

Castle Rock is a slow burn, but at least it seems to be going somewhere. Maybe several somewheres. We have the mystery of the Kid, the mystery of what happened to Henry and Matthew back in 1991, the mystery of what the warden and Alan know about the Kid, the mystery of Henry's connection to the Kid. And what is going to happen now that the Kid, supposedly the source of all evil in the town, has been freed from imprisonment. Whether we get answers to questions like why the Kid only "haunted" Castle Rock, who knows?

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?