Castle Rock S02E01-E03 Review

So, Constant Reader, you want Stephen King? Did you think that the first season of Castle Rock didn't give you enough King, and tend to focus more on alternate worlds and thinnies and the stuff King brought into his writing when someone argued he lost it, after his van accident?

Well, the creative team of Castle Rock is going to give you King. They're going to cram King down your throat like Annie Wilkes (Misery) crams an ice cream scoop down Ace Merrill's (The Sun Dog, Needful Things) throat.

Why is Annie meeting Ace? And what does the Marsten House have to do with it all? And why are some teenagers looking for a corpse? That's what I mean about the creative team cramming King down the viewers' throats. We've got Misery, and Needful Things, and Salem's Lot, and The Sun Dog, and Pet Semetary, and The Body, and Sometimes They Come Back. If a decapitated woman gives birth to a baby in episode 5, or someone starts sprouting alien eyes on their chest, it wouldn't surprise me.

Why is all of this going on? Annie Wilkes (Lizzy Caplin) steals medicine from hospitals as she works as a temporary. She then travels across the country with her daughter, Joy (Elsie Fisher), fleeing a so-far-unspecified murder that Annie committed. However, their SUV crashes outside of Castle Rock, and we know that's not good. Eventually, Annie gets a job at the local hospital. A lot of episode 1 involves her trying to get into the keypad-locked pharma locker. Annie eventually breaks into the house of a hospital doctor, Nadia Howlwadaag (Yusra Warsama), to steal her master key.

Who is Nadia? She's a Somali refugee who has found a home in Castle Rock with her brother, Abdi (Barkhad Abdi). Castle Rock has a bustling Somali population, and Abdi is constructing a new mall to provide the Somalis with a market of their own. Currently they're using a warehouse, and are under the thumb of Pop Merrill (Tim Robbins) and his nephew, Ace (Paul Sparks).

Who are Pop and Ace? Pop runs the local criminal enterprises, and collects money from the merchants. He has Ace run the Somali warehouse "franchise". Pop also served in the Army in Somalia, and became a foster parent to Abdi and Nadia. He apparently adopted them eventually, mostly because he admires Abdi's business sense, and he seems to consider Abdi smarter than Ace. What Pop thinks of his other nephew, Ace's brother, Chris (Matthew Alan), isn't clear. Chris and Nadia were apparently involved at one time, based on a conversation he has with Nadia.

And yes, that's Tim Robbins from The Shawshank Redemption, Shawshank Prison getting a mention here and there, as it was a central point in season 1. Castle Rock is the same urban wasteland that we saw in season 1, although, so far, there's no sign of any of the characters from that season.

The lives of these characters intermingle. Nadia catches Annie stealing anti-psychotics, but takes pity on her and gives her the pills. Ace isn't happy with Abdi poaching his businesses and firebombs Abdi and Nadia's house. Joy sees Ace preparing the firebombs, and when Ace comes by the motor lodge cabin where Annie and Joy are staying and finds Annie alone, he threatens Annie and she crams an ice cream scoop down his throat, killing him.

Pop looks for the missing Ace and has noticed that Ace's dog acts strangely around Annie. When he questions her, she claims that she saw Abdi at the motor lodge going after Ace. Pop has his crooked cops bring Abdi to him for questioning, but then has a mini-stroke and Abdi takes him to the hospital. Since Pop has cancer, Nadia is tending to him.

Things really take off at the end of episode 1, when Annie buries Ace's body at the construction site where Abdi is building his mall. She falls into a sinkhole and finds herself in an old mausoleum. She eventually finds her way out... into the basement of the Marsten House. Which is where the vampire Barstow hung out in Salem's Lot. I guess Jerusalem's Lot is right next door to Castle Rock. There's a lot of talk about the Castle Rock Satanist, and those who have read Salem's Lot will remember that Barstow knew about the House's Satanic reputation.

A lot of the backstory above comes out in episode 2. Eventually we learn that Ace has "come back" and is stalking Annie. He's also up to no-good, inviting a real estate agent to show him the Marsten House. Ace creepily asks the female agent if she can still bear children, and apparently captures her in episode 3, along with a cop who tried to pull Ace over for speeding. And Abdi's henchman Hassan went up to the house, and now he's eating raw eggs and yelling incoherently in Somali.

Season 2 is also a coming-of-age story, as Joy cuts loose with three local kids. They go out looking for Ace's body, and the emancipated Chase gives Joy some marijuana-laced brownies. Joy enjoys her newfound freedom, and she and Chance have some romantic chemistry going. When Joy returns to her motor lodge cabin, she finds Annie ranting about Ace still being alive after she killed him. Joy engages Annie's "emergency plan", which involves sedating her, tying her up, and feeding her antipsychotics.

Annie secretly spits them out and cuts free with some broken glass, but not before Joy forces Annie to admit that she's lied to protect Joy. When Annie gets free, the ghost of the husband (??: he wears a hat like John Shooter in Secret Window, Secret Garden) she murdered pays her a visit and says that the story ends with Annie killing Joy.

That's the end of the first three episodes, which aired back-to-back on Hulu on one night, October 23, a week and change short of Halloween, which seems more appropriate. But time, tide, and Hulu wait for no man.

King fans, be warned that the show doesn't follow King's chronology or geography. Annie is a young woman, Pop and Ace are still alive, the Marsten House overlooks Castle Rock rather than Jerusalem's Lot.

To make the show more palatable, both Annie and Pop are more sympathetic rounded characters than their written-word counterparts. Annie is struggling with a murder charge and is haunted by the husband she killed, and trying to be a good mother to Joy. Pop apparently did something nasty in Somali (killed their mother, maybe?) and took in Abdi and Nadia to redeem himself. It helps that they're played by Caplan and Robbins.

Caplan conveys the... Annie-ness of Annie without going into full-blown caricature the way that Kathy Bates did in the movie version of Misery. She has the language down but doesn't go overboard. Sometimes Caplan does hit the mannerisms a bit hard, with Bates' tics and nervous stiff-kneed walking. Pop Merrill hasn't appeared in TV or movies as far as I can tell, but it's hard to imagine any major actor giving a well-rounded performance of the balding skinflint from The Sun Dog. The written Pop and Annie were basically cartoon bad guys.

It's hard to tell where Castle Rock is going at this point because it has so many balls in the air. Annie is dealing with the ghost of her dead husband, and her own mental issues. Pop is dying of cancer, and trying to negotiate something between Abdi and Ace. Ace is using the Marsten house for... something Satanic. Bask in the good performances and the King lore, and we'll see if/how it all works out.

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