Which leaves us to wonder: What, exactly, was the point?

It’s not just that you can find more compelling (and bewildering) horror-tinged alternate-reality dramas without breaking a sweat, from Lost to Twin Peaks to The Leftovers. It’s not even that the ending cribs so hard from The Shining (and, from non-King country, The Babadook) that you feel déjà vu. It’s that Castle Rock undermined its own big twist — the introduction of the whole parallel-world concept and the idea that the Kid might be a hero rather than a monster — almost immediately after introducing it.

As a drama, the show boasted intelligent, understated performances from Holland, Skarsgård, Spacek, Melanie Lynskey, Scott Glenn and more. As a Stephen King riff, it understood and updated his concept of everyday American evil better than any adaptation of his work in recent memory. But as a horror story of its own, the series made promises then all but went out of its way to avoid delivering in the end. A finale that seemed destined for dark magic was just a bait and switch. The show has been renewed and a new tale will be told. Let’s hope our next visit to this terrible Maine town lives up to its potential.

I reviewed the final episode of Castle Rock’s first season/storyline for Rolling Stone. The bottom line is that it never really got scary for more than a moment or two, and it doesn’t amount to much as a head-scratcher either. The acting is there, and the attention to American evil too, and both were handled with smarts and restraint, but it was pretty much exactly the sum of its parts.

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.

Saying this episode continues the show’s hot streak isn’t telling the whole story. It doesn’t rely on the introduction of world-building sci-fi/fantasy concepts like “The Schisma” and “The Filter,” nor is it carried on the back of an Academy Award winner given an entire hour to herself. It simply expresses the horror of sublimated violence and the ability of the supernatural to unleash it — the stuff that drives so much of the Master’s work — in its own voice.

If you’ve ever watched a show like Boardwalk Empire or The Americans, you might recognize the vibe. Like the Prohibition-era mob in the former and Cold War espionage in the latter, the particular strain of horror on display here is the mannequin that writer Mark Lafferty and director Ana Lily Amirpour (of the modern horror classic A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), as well as showrunners Dustin Thomason and Sam Shaw, can position into new shapes of their own devising.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It was my favorite to date.

The most striking thing about the performance is, well, that it isn’t that striking at all. Eschewing straight-up tear-down-the-sky “tour-de-force” emoting, the veteran actor keeps Ruth’s reactions well within the range of normal human experience. When she’s sad, she cries rather than wails. When she’s angry, she yells rather than screams. When she’s frightened, she’s furtive and trembling rather than panicked and flailing.

It’s a rewarding approach. By rooting her performance in recognizable everyday reactions and emotions, Spacek avoids playing Ruth’s dementia as a source of horror itself. What’s happening to her brain isn’t treated as somehow creepy or gross, the way mental illness often comes across in projects like these. She is still a “normal” person, just one who’s no longer in control of how her mind processes space and time. Sure, it’s a frightening condition to suffer from. But both series co-creator Sam Shaw’s writing and the acting emphasize that it’s mainly emotionally exhausting.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It’s a straight-up showcase for Sissy Spacek that she underplays beautifully. I remain at arm’s length from the show as a whole for reasons I get into later in the review, but across the board the performances are thoughtful and quiet.

Castle Rock has just leveled up.

That’s the big takeaway from this week’s episode (“Filter”). From the start, the show had a baseline level of quality — talented cast, understated writing, a keen eye for everyday American evil and a willingness to aim for “eerie” rather than “over the top” — that’s a step up from most Stephen King adaptations (and also several prestige dramas in their shaky early episodes). Yet it’s never quite gelled into anything more transcendent than the sum of its competent parts. This installment was the first time it felt like you could see the series as something closer to a cohesive whole.

I reviewed this week’s Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It’s getting there.

Castle Rock is burning. Not just because of the wildfires raging across the hills that surround the town, either, although their hazy orange glow, reflected in the skies above, gives this new episode — “Harvest” — an appropriately infernal vibe. Consider the opening flashback, in which Henry Deaver seeks treatment for the unexplained ringing in his ears that’s plagued him on and off since he was a teenager. “I guess everyone thinks they grew up in the worst place in the world, huh?” the doc asks with a smile. In the lawyer’s case, of course, the answer is a resounding yes. But the implication, via a smart script from Lila Byock, the dreamy direction of Andrew Bernstein and the inclusion of real-life, ripped-from-the-headlines horror that’s become part of this show’s dramatic schematic, is clear: Everyone did grow up in the worst place in the world. The world is not a nice place to grow up in at all.

I reviewed episode five of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. There’s a lot I think is admirable about this show—it handles the Everyday All-American Evil that’s King’s specialty in a way that feels current and urgent rather than nostalgic and corny, and the cast of fine actors is taking the material seriously. But in the end, it comes down to what kind of villain the Skarsgård character is, doesn’t it? And we don’t know that yet.

SPOILER WARNING

This leads directly to the show’s most disturbing sequence to date. Trapped in his hellish prison job for the foreseeable future, helpless as his fellow guards beat and dehumanize the prisoners — and quite possibly tainted by the touch of the Kid — Dennis Zalewski snaps. Grabbing his gun, he methodically marches through Shawshank, murdering every officer and official he finds. When he finally reaches the warden’s office, he finds Deaver there. “I wanna testify,” he says … before a flashbang grenade drops them both to the ground and a shotgun-wielding bull blows him away.

It’s a gorgeously fucked-up sequence, in large part because it’s just so very Stephen King-ish — and not in a way we’ve really seen before on screen. This kind of killing spree is a staple of the Master’s work: Seemingly ordinary men just lose it one day. They pick up a rifle or an ax, slaughtering their way through as many people as possible, offering one final deadpan non sequitur before someone puts them down like a rabid dog. (The town history of Derry, where It takes place, is full of rampages like this.)

And there’s nothing about Zalewski’s affect here to suggest that if he’d gotten away clean, he wouldn’t have just gone down to the bar for a drink, complaining about a rough day at work. It’s not quite the banality of evil, but there’s a workmanlike quality to it that gets right under your skin. Murder is so routine it barely registers.

Isn’t that what Zalewski himself tells Deaver? “Bad things happen here because bad people know they’re safe here,” the guard warned the lawyer when he tried to downplay the potential to open a prison-wide investigation. “How many times can one fuckin’ town look the other way?” In his desperation to expose Shawshank’s horrors, the man turned himself into one of those horrors. He had to become the prison in order to destroy it.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. The ending was impressive.

During another flashback, we see Molly invite young Henry up to her room to hang out. Her neighbor leads a sheltered life, most likely an abusive one. So he’s baffled by her meticulously curated posters for period-appropriate college-rock bands. (“What are ‘Violent Femmes’?”)

He’s even more flustered when Molly drops this bomb on him: “I know what you do in your room. Touching your thing. It feels like fireworks.” The moment is cut short when Daddy Dearest starts hollering for Henry to come home, but this sudden and relatively explicit swerve into adolescent sexuality is a welcome sign that Castle Rock will take that element of Stephen King’s work seriously. (The recent It adaptation excised the book’s infamous orgy scene entirely, but replaced it with a weird scene of a bunch of guys leering at a girl in her underwear instead … as if that’s somehow an improvement.) Carnal knowledge is a huge driver of the author’s character development and horror craftsmanship alike. Kudos to the show for having the courage to even try to tackle what can be a danger zone onscreen.

I reviewed the third and final episode of Castle Rock that Hulu launched all at once last week for Rolling Stone. This was the weirdest and best.

The bigger question facing Castle Rock is how much it wants to tap dance between the Master’s raindrops. Strong performances by the cast in general, and by the remarkable, dead-serious Andre Holland in particular, make the show watchable if you don’t know your Randall Flagg from your Kurt Barlow. But if you’re a fan, hearing Lacey talk about “the dog” and “the strangler” most likely gave you a bigger thrill than anything else narrative-wise. And when you think back through the King mythos, it’s not hard to come up with another character who had the ability to inflict disease and cause death with a just glance of his own dark, intense eyes. Is the show content to be a superhero-comic-style nostalgia act, where the main dramatic drive is figuring out when your favorite villains are about to return? Or does its portrayal of an economically devastated small town where the biggest source of jobs is a privatized prison provide fertile enough ground to grow evils all its own?

I reviewed episode two of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It’s still a show finding its sea legs.

If the premiere is any indication, it’s not the diverse strands of the Stephen King Extended Universe that’s holding this thing together: It’s Moonlight veteran André Holland. His character Henry Deaver is a just a black American from a lily-white small town, raised with a heaping helping of old-time religion and unexamined trauma. He’s not dreading an encounter with a demonic clown – the lawyer just wants to make sure that his client gets the legal representation the Constitution guarantees. He’s a careworn man trying his best, not a hero undertaking a quest. This is Mr. Holland’s opus: He acts like doesn’t know he’s in a highly anticipated television event from the creators of Lost and The Shining. He makes Castle Rock feel like a drama, not the haunted-house ride at the county fair.

And while Holland gets the meatiest material this time around, he’s surrounded by actors capable of moral and emotional seriousness. His mom is played by Carrie herself, Sissy Spacek. Pangborn is played by Scott Glenn, who’s brought grizzled gravitas to everything from The Silence of the Lambs to The Leftovers. Molly Strand, the suburbanite pill-popper who briefly shows up? That’s Melanie Lynskey, who hasn’t met a role she couldn’t crush since Heavenly Creatures. Frances Conroy, a solid player in both prestige dramas (Six Feet Under) and guilty genre pleasures (American Horror Story), cameos as Warden Lacy’s blind wife. And the Kid? It’s Bill Skarsgard, dialing his performance as Pennywise from It down several notches but still weird and wall-eyed as ever.

Finally, there’s the not-so-good Warden Lacy, played by Terry O’Quinn. All the emphasis on Lost‘s unanswered questions makes it easy to forget all these years later, but the actor was an absolute godsend for that show — an MVP who could play a wily survivalist, a Wolverinesque badass, a failed hero, a bitter old man and an embodiment of pure evil with equal nuance and skill. Yes, the Warden commits suicide by driving off a cliff with a noose around his neck (“guillotining himself with a Lincoln,” as Henry puts it). But we’re in King Country now, and even if you discount supernatural shenanigans, the flashback toward the episode’s end indicates we haven’t seen the last of him.

I’m covering Castle Rock, the new “songs in the key of King” series on Hulu, for Rolling Stone, starting with my review of the series premiere. It’s not sit-up-and-take-notice stuff like The Terror was, but it’s promising.