Have you guys seen Henry Deaver around? You know — tall skinny guy, floppy hair, big Gollum eyes, white as the Swedish snow? The renowned Alzheimer’s researcher who fled Castle Rock when his mother escaped his abusive preacher father? The guy who found a little boy locked in a cage in his old man’s basement, where the kid has apparently lived without aging for nearly three decades? The one who realizes that this little boy’s name is also Henry Deaver?
You have now.
Titled “Henry Deaver” after not one but two of its main characters, the penultimate episode of Castle Rock‘s first season takes the biggest storyline swerve the show has seen yet. It relocates us to a different version of the town, one that’s still marked by tragedies like helicopter crashes and schoolbus accidents but noticeably healthier and wealthier overall. (Best gentrification joke: That awful dive bar is now a “gastropub.”) Here, Molly Strand isn’t a pill-popping real-estate agent, but a member of the city council who’s got serious clout with folks like the police department — and their top cop, Dennis Zalewski.
Most importantly, Castle Rock 2.0 is the hometown of Henry Deaver — not the African-American defense attorney played by Andre Holland as an adult and Caleel Harris as a teen, but a white neurologist played by Bill Skarsgård, a.k.a. The Kid. You thought Lost had some wild timeline-shifting tricks up its sleeve? Hold Castle Rock‘s beer.
I wrote about episode nine of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. As narrative sleight-of-hand, and as a showcase for the surprisingly wide range of Bill Skarsgård as an actor, it worked. As horror? Not really, and that’s the show’s biggest problem.
Tags: castle rock, horror, reviews, Rolling Stone, Stephen King, TV, TV reviews