In which Castle Rock asks quibbling viewers, “Aw, Christmas, what’s your plan, then?”
The first fifteen minutes of Castle Rock’s finale tick away like the timer on a homemade bomb. Not everything in the first act of “Clean” works—in a completely silent town, it shouldn’t take dozens of Satanist revenants even an hour to trace the racket of Abdi breaking through his own construction site’s foundation, and Père Augustin’s tepid exhortation to his followers makes for a limp scene when the show needs either a rousing or a dreadful one is—but the tension is strong and the objectives are clear, even if their intended results aren’t. “We still don’t know what will happen if we hit the statue.” Nadia reminds Annie, who shoots back a characteristically minced oath: “Aw, Christmas, what’s your plan, then?”
Even Annie’s knee-jerk hostility (to anyone outside her family, and specifically to Nadia, who knows her secrets) feels plausible, if gratuitously unpleasant. So does her willingness to jettison the plan, to rat out everyone who helped her, if there’s a chance of getting Joy out of the Marsten House. Annie Wilkes doesn’t care about saving Castle Rock, or its last human inhabitants, or the whole world. She only cares about Joy—about “saving” Joy. About getting Joy away clean.
With that goal in mind, this final episode of the second season could have a tragic inevitability to it, even a poetry. Sixteen years ago, after surviving her mother’s attempts to drown her, after accidentally killing her father and murdering his new wife, after starting to drown her half-sister, Annie Wilkes “saved” Joy, and was saved by her. And after sixteen years of confining Joy, of isolating and stunting her, Annie Wilkes finally returns to the water’s edge, and returns her baby sister there. It took Annie sixteen years to drown the baby she stole, but at last she’s done it.
The final fight between Annie and Joy—the attack Annie launches on her baby sister, first drugging her, then pouncing on her, and finally chasing her to the dock and forcing her under—has all the lickety-split speed of her attack on Ace, but (properly) none of its hellish comedy. It’s sickening, both because the camera wavers along with Annie’s grasp on reality and because it’s a cruel, reductive end for these characters who have been through so much, and taken us with them.
There’s a brutal efficiency to their last confrontation, to the clarity of Joy’s sullen withdrawal transforming to sudden terror, to Annie’s panic and fury, her stilted stagger back to land and into slow remorse, the sputtering unreality of Joy’s return. Elsie Fisher plays Joy’s last, illusory scenes with empty, uncanny ease, her smiles wide and blank, her eyes soft and vacantly agreeable. “I call shotgun!” is the most challenging thing Annie’s specter of Joy ever says to her.
It’s a shame that an opening so well-balanced in its direction, so tense in its action scenes and uneasily swimmy in its quieter moments, gets swamped by later action. Scenes like Chance’s infiltration of the crowd, her Body Snatchers-inspired discovery, and her clever attempt to trick the hive mind deserve to shine on their own instead of being swept aside in service of fake-out after fake-out. Pop’s dead! Wait, he’s taken control of his vessel! Augustin is dead! Wait, he’s alive! Oops, he got blowed up! Joy is alive! Wait, she’s possessed! Wait, she’s not possessed! But she is dead! Wait, she’s alive? … nope.
It’s exhausting and ultimately insulting, a chain of absurd switcheroos that belongs in a “Treehouse Of Horror” episode, not the crowning episode of a season’s slog through the informal catacombs under Castle Rock. It’s near-comic how frantically the revelations pour out, predictable as they are rapid. If Castle Rock’s second season had stuck to the frenzied comic horror of the premiere, some of these frenetic twists might land better. Instead, they’re bouncing around inside an episode that’s reaching for grandeur and falling far short.
“We will see this fight through to the end!” Augustin tells his followers in his uninspiring address, just before their fight ends in messy anticlimax. After all the murders, all the sacrifice, all the planted dynamite and hushed plans and urgent messages, after mesmerizing an entire town into a Satanic overthrow that schemes first to overtake first the town, then “this land” as a whole—after all that, we are left with this.
Four hundred years is a long time to wait for a big nothing, almost as long as ten weekly episodes in a medium leaning more and more toward streaming. “We waited 400 years, and now we know why,” Père Augustin blandly tells his assembled flock, and I guess we know why, too: because The Angel (The Kid, the prisoner, Henry Deaver) wants them to.
A few weeks ago, I warned readers that we’d be discussing the finer points of season one in these season-two reviews, but I was wrong, because Castle Rock’s never bothered to do more than nod at the much-teased significance of the lake, of “the noise,” of The Kid, and of his ability to step from world to world, from year to year, with the help of the schisma.
This isn’t even a bad season, but an indifferent and unfocused one. The writers could never settle on a tone, and the resulting swings from goofy pulp to faux-meditative cosmic horror cheapen both, and finally sully the private two-person horror of the very end. As Joy says in her letter, the problems between mother and daughter (between sisters) started long before Maine. The events leading up to Joy’s drowning—the events of the past nine episodes, and of the past sixteen years—become just so much backstory as the finale unwinds, showing Annie Wilkes on her way to becoming Annie Wilkes. Truly, this is a season finale that asks us, “Why did you bother watching the first nine episodes?”
None of this season is quite what Annie Wilkes would call “a dirty cheat.” I have to admit, if begrudgingly, that every piece of the finale makes a certain forced sense, from Pop regaining control over Étienne (it’s thoughtful of Père Augustin to have laid in a supply of big-and-tall frock coats for Étienne’s vessel) to Annie’s last break with reality. None of it quite violates the rule of “Can You?” established in Stephen King’s Misery, and in this season’s first episode. But it doesn’t feel quite clean, either.
It’s woefully appropriate that so much of Castle Rock’s second season takes place in Pop Merrill’s junk shop. Castle Rock has always been something of a rag-and-bone shop of the heart, trading in things we value without necessarily giving them full value. This isn’t Needful Things, where each item is curated with enticing, merciless care. It’s the Emporium Galorium, shelves crammed with treasures and trinkets and refuse, and in the jumble, they all seem to have the same resonance and value. There’s an enviable inventory strewn around here—Lizzie Caplan’s flat, angry fear and entitlement, Tim Robbins’ game, graceful performance as Stephen King’s faux-folksy “cracker-barrel philosopher,” Yusra Warsama’s crisp, layered inhabiting of Nadia’s competence and vulnerability—and some impressive scares. But ultimately, if you aim to bargain in the Emporium Galorium, you’ll walk away with less than you expected. Caveat emptor.
Stray observations
- This episode is dedicated to Castle Rock’s construction coordinator Ted Suchecki, who (like Pop Merrill) will be the guest of honor this week at “a big wake” commemorating his life.
- At the Backwater gas station where Annie sees her next job posting, there also hangs a missing person poster for Henry Deaver—this time, as an adult.
- There are glimmers of Dolores Claiborne in Annie’s last job, taking care of a bedridden patient in the privacy of a big, bright, waterfront home… and glimmers both of Dolores Claiborne and of Jessie Mahout in Annie’s wait outside the Marsten House, hearing her mother’s croaking words as the sun dims in the sky.
- That’s a wrap on coverage of Castle Rock’s second season! Thank you for joining me in this dusty old showroom. Now grab your Polaroid and let’s close up shop until next season.
44 Comments
I really enjoyed the first Joy fakeout. They played it well enough that you could see either reality – that she was possessed or it was all in Annie’s head – working out as the possible truth up until it was too late. The second fake out was a little too obvious sadly. That said I think this season still held together to be better than the first season as a whole. Nothing was as good as ‘The Queen’ but, for all both seasons fell prey to the flaws of Castle Rock, this one meshed better for me.
Yeah it definitely felt like it had *more* of a plan? There were still bumps (that mansion was not colonial era where did the mansion come from?) and the pacing felt weird, and hopefully they’re going to use the Kid in all seasons otherwise this will be anticlimactic, but it didn’t feel as much like it was trying to buy time as the first season.
I’m with you. I almost think this review is too harsh (as have been the last few reviews), while, at the same time, I can’t say I really *disagree* with anything stated in it.
In many ways I found last season more compelling, and it definitely had some better stand alone episodes (not just The Queen, but especially The Queen). But it was also maddening. I dig ambiguity, but there reaches a point…
In some ways this season’s back half disappointed me because it seemed to *mostly* be a bit too predictable, constantly going where I expected it to (even when at moments it seemed like it was going to zag in a different direction, it ultimately would go back to the zig). But there’s something to be said for that, and it really did feel much more like the writers were confident about where they were going with all of this.
As for the Joy fakeout at the end… I’m OK with it, even if it was predictable. I admit, for a bit I thought they were going to end Joy’s story with her drowned in the lake (I mean that is where her story ends, technically, but we then got the whole semi-fantasy stuff). Which I found deeply unsatisfying, but ending with Annie’s delusions, while ultimately what I expected, was much more satisfying.
Was the second fake out *supposed* to be a fake out?The first thing Joy says after Annie pulls her out of the water is “YOU SAVED ME!” which…uh…no. That was your first sign it was all wrong.And from there, the only real twist was leaving you wondering just how off from reality everything was.
Yeah, when Joey “revived” at the lake I rolled my eyes but thought “Ok, I’ll go with it.” But when Joey didn’t seem to remember anything since leaving Castle Rock, that was my first red flag that this was not what it appeared to be.
Ah, FFS…Really hoping they have something meaty for season three. This is the second season finale that just kinda fizzles out.Here, showrunners: dig into The Arrowhead Project. ANSWER shit.
I just wanted to goo cult to succeed so bad! Pretty convenient that Abdi had a bunch of explosives and detinators.
I mean some explosives makes sense given it was a construction site, but… Yeah.
This entire season, after ever major event that happened to Joy, I kept checking to see if she was really there or not. So, I was a little sad to see the last second twist coming. Joy just happens to forgive Annie for everything? Not likely.
It wasn’t supposed to be a twist. You were supposed to reject that portion of the ending because it was the contrived one Annie came up with. Just like she forced Sheldon to do when she didn’t like how he killed Misery.
“Joy just happens to forgive Annie for everything? Not likely.”It wasn’t that Joy forgave Annie. She forgot all about it. When Joey “revives” at the lake she doesn’t seem to remember anything since leaving Castle Rock, let alone that she planned on leaving Annie and that Annie drugged her and tried to drown her.
I enjoyed this season much more than the first. I hope it’s back for season 3. What I enjoyed about the finally was the uncertainty of Annie’s narration. Clearly her mental state was precarious at best, but the show managed to surprise me. Not that the season was perfect, but I was expecting things to go a different way in the last episode. I really felt bad for Annie when she read that letter from Joy. Edit: Who let the kid out of the prison cell? I mean this was (to me) clearly the same universe as the first season. Did I just miss something?
I mean clearly Henry is missing now (I’m surprised the reviewer didn’t make more of a mention of it?). I wonder if the Kid was never really trapped in the first place- it seems more like a trap for the guard. Can he even be killed? I do wish they’d have an actor or two actually show up for a cameo in the next season to make it feel like a consistent town. Or just make it clearly completely different- after all wasn’t the Emporium the fancy center project from the last season?
I think it was the bridge and the gazebo / Dead Zone reference.
Well we did get the return of the priest, and Frances Conroy’s five second cameo. But I agree with your point. That’s why the initial plan (I assume from the final scene last year) to move to the Overlook Hotel seemed to make sense, because then they wouldn’t have to worry as much about sharing characters between seasons besides Jane Levy. Why they didn’t go that direction, I have no idea (was there some sort of conflict from King himself with Dr. Sleep coming out this year? Was Jane Levy too busy with her new sitcom? Did they just have trouble finding a story?) And obviously going with Annie Wilkes this season was probably the best decision they made, but…
I think the show’s content to let the how of the Kid’s escape be a mystery. And that’s fine, we don’t have to see everything all of the time. The escape and Black Henry’s disappearance can be ominous things that we never learn the details about (for the best, probably, given that Andre Holland’s got a higher profile now). At the very least, it moves the overarching plot (if you could call it that) forward, because it clarifies that the Kid is out there, and he has evil plans for the world.The real problem with it all is that the first season’s denouement heavily relied on the ambiguity of the Kid’s situation. He had cancer / mind powers, and he smiled evilly at the very end, but we also had an episode all about the virtuous life he was leading in his own dimension. Now he is a full-on interdimensional satanic figure, unless the whole “meeting with the evil prophet” thing is a shell game, and it’s still not his fault he’s evil, and it was just his bad luck that a crazy frenchwoman projected her world domination plans (what were they, exactly?) onto him. I wouldn’t put it past this show, honestly. It is, after all, a Bad Robot production.This is the way an iteration of a series can be diminished by sequels. Does the tragedy of his origin still matter, at this point? Do the revelations of this season make the first season clearer, or more opaque?
I’d give it a lower grade, tbh. The most perfunctory end to the Castle Rock threads and then the show becomes all about its least interesting aspects, and really its least interesting characters, for the last half hour. What a mess. Lizzy Caplan does great work when she’s reading the note but her Arrested Development sad walk isn’t good and never was.
Yes, I really don’t understand how they thought they were all set with a conclusion story-wise for Abdi, Nadia, and Chance (and, well, the whole town?) but we definitely needed to spend a ton of time with Annie and Joy leading up to something we basically already knew.Though it was funny that Joy was watching Blue is the Warmest Color without subtitles.
The easy thing to do would be to compare it with
the most famous Bad Robot production, Lost, in that it has so many threads but in the end is really only concerned with a few of them. So if you care about things like, say, the town of the title, or any of the secondary characters, you won’t be satisfied, because in the end the season was “about” Annie and Joy. If you didn’t like their dramatic tension, thought it wasn’t earned or was too obvious, or just didn’t find them as interesting as other characters, the season flattens out in that home stretch. It’s honestly disheartening that in the end, Abdi and Nadia turned out to be just side players to Pop’s story, so when he died, their story ended too. The writers spent time on them, but they weren’t important to the show.We’re also 2 for 2 on endings that give their seasons ham-fisted and tacky pushes toward outright fan-fiction.
Although that “ham fisted” fan fiction ending for season 1 was not picked up for season 2.
Not that they needed to (and thank God). They were just sort of unnecessary HEY EVERYTHING’S CONNECTED IN THE KINGVERSE codas, as though everything else about Annie Wilkes didn’t already serve that purpose.The only thing that could have saved it for me would be the reveal that Paul Sheldon… Is The Kid!!!! Just go balls out
Remind me what that was? I’ve totally blocked it out somehow.
Jane Levy’s character, Diane “Jackie” Torrance, was… umm doing research or something into her namesake and then planned a trip to go check out the Overlook Hotel (I think that was it, anyway…)
In hindsight, I wonder if they had to go a different route because Doctor Sleep was in production?
I wondered that too…
I assumed they just assumed that that was what aired on daytime tv in crazy old Quebec. Explicit French movies. All the time.
Ha! Maybe, but I figured it was a bit of a reminder that Joy seemed to have Sapphic leanings (plus if Joy all of a sudden knows French, she may not be all Joy…)
“Though it was funny that Joy was watching Blue is the Warmest Color without subtitles.”I think that scene was supposed to make us (and Annie) think that Joy was now Amity, who is French. “Joy” was able to understand this French movie without subtitles.
Well put. You captured my disappointment and melancholy about how this story strung us along all these weeks only to amount to so little. I found your analogy apt that Castle Rock consists of bits and pieces of refuse from Stephen King’s multiverse that don’t add up to the master’s own work. And kudos to you for working in a little Yeats in your recap.
There was no way Joy was going to live. Annie wouldn’t become Misery Annie if Joy was still alive. The only way it would have worked was if her mother had managed to get her away from Annie, but that would have come with a completely different set of issues in forwarding the story of Annie Wilkes to the conclusion we all know so well. It was a sad end to a sad story. But I did love when Annie picked up her first Misery book.
Saw it. It was…okay.
Was there no money in the budget to offer Bill Skarsgard a speaking role?
Did you watch season 1? He barely talked at all.
Like any good King novel, the ending shits the bed!
fake-out after fake-out. Pop’s dead! Wait, he’s taken control of his vessel!
Augustin is dead! Wait, he’s alive! Oops, he got blowed up! Joy is
alive! Wait, she’s possessed! Wait, she’s not possessed! But she is
dead! Wait, she’s alive? … nope.
The previous episode made a big deal about the drug being a way to reverse the process temporarily.Meanwhile, not only did we see Pop take the drug in the previous episode, we saw him purposefully fiddle with the batteries after Nadia and her group left the building.I never assumed Augustin was dead, nor do I think he’s dead now. We see him walking towards the building…but is he ever shown in or around the explosion? Since the reveal that this *was* a continuation of Season 1, I would assume these are loose ends that’ll get brought in next season.The only real question was Joy. And you could have gone either way since we don’t know what happens to her from when Joy looses her to when we see her with Augustin. The recap *does* make a point of reminding us that he would be first and she would be last….so one could assume that Joy was still safe since Pop hadn’t been converted yet. Sure, it’s hazy, and the show sucked me in, but in retrospect the hints were there (and they were hints that we the audience had that the characters didn’t.)Hell, the characters weren’t even sure how being brought back works until Pop did it, and he never filled them in on it.As for the final fakeout. It wasn’t really. Once Annie kills Joy and reads the letter, the first thing Joy says upon being revived is “You saved me!” which is absolutely not something that she would have said after her mom just tried to murder her. Clearly some shit was up, and it was just a matter of how far from reality what we saw was from what was happening.That final one, that also makes sense. In Misery, Annie freaks out when Sheldon kills off Misery at the end of the final book. She hates the ending, and demands he rewrite it. That’s what this was. The final “fake out” was supposed to feel forced and nonsensical because it was supposed to reflect Annie’s perception of what a good ending was for her and Joy. That’s why it happens not when she reads the letter, but when she tries to revive Joy. Once reality sets in that she’s dead, Annie breaks and we get the bright happy lighting…big swelling song…and Joy thanking her mom for saving her life.I liked the idea of being torn back and forth on if Joy was converted or not because it fit with Annie’s mental state. We as the audience knew enough to tell us she was likely safe, but because of everything else we saw we doubted ourselves and, in some cases, saw the world how Annie did. Until you step back and realize the evidence was all there and we fucked up.
Great post, I loved this season! I just loved how propulsive this season was compared to the extreme slow burn of last season. I liked season 1 just fine but this season was bug nuts in all the ways I love.
Well, I’ll go ahead and be the only person that is walking away from this season feeling it was well done overall, and looking forward to season three.Now to be fair, I wil admit that at the beginning of “The Word” (Ep 8) I was thinking I wasn’t sure how much longer I was going to hang on, but the ending of that episode with it’s reveal that this season was in fact tied to the first, pulled me all the way in and i was on board right through to the end. At that point I was imagining that the story of Annie was the red herring for what was actually going on this season, and I’m not sure having seen it all if that is the case, or if it is the other way around. Will we see Augustin and the remains of his crew again? I don’t know. And regarding the “what happens to the town now??” sentiment, I mean — I haven’t read all or even many of Stephen King’s books, but ‘It’ and ‘Carrie’ are two fine examples of a town being left in ruin and chaos at the end, and in both instances I never wondered how they made out in the subsequent days or years or whatever, so I think that’s fine. I thought the ambiguity with Joy was well played. We had the knowledge of the fact that Annie’s meds had been switched (and of course the opening recaps always tie to whatever’s coming, so it was clearly a factor) without her knowing, and thus she had been off her meds for some time. But I think the little pieces of uncertainty we were given (the refusal to change her hair, the strange phone call; Joy watching a French film and seeming to understand it despite no indication she could understand French). As TRT-X pointed out, we know better and yet we’re being shown Annie’s persective, which gave me doubts.
And perhaps it was naive to think it, but I was actually so sure that Joy was dead (and kind of sad for her) that I felt a wave of relief when she gasped for air. I was so relieved that it wasn’t end for after after the insane amount of bullshit she’s had to deal with for 16 years all crashing down at once that it wasn’t until I was going “What seat was the dude trying to take?” that I questioned anything, but the *actual* reveal of there being no one in that seat felt both surprising, but not as sad as it would have felt if we never got the scene with Joy coming to at the lake.
I don’t have the time to do so, but it would be interesting to binge the seasons, I would think, to see how it all feels as a whole. Season one felt promising but ultimately felt underwhelming (exclusing Sissy Spacek who could *never* be called that, possibly at all, and definitely not for her work on this show) and I didn’t feel compelled to care about whatever Season two might be — I thought the last few episodes of S1 were disappointing the ending was underwhelming. But I think now that it’s established that the seasons were (are?) connected and that this isn’t (as yet) some AHS-type nonsense, I’m here for it, and I hope next season comes through.
I was a big fan of this season too they really got me with the satanic cult stuff and tying it to the kid was fun
Well, that was a terrible ending. It’s merely coincidence that Joy wasn’t acting like herself, lying to her mother about talking on the phone, watching a French movie without subtitles, and making scary drawings. And it’s just happenstance that we saw Pop wasn’t actually possessed, so we would think they did a reverse and Joy actually was; and not to mention seeing Ace come back to life again so we would think fake Joy was talking to him on the phone. Come on, this was a sitcom level error of people for some reason not talking to each other and clearing an issue up—pitched as tragedy, but a very stupid one. Since this season took place in our present, and it looked like throughout the season that Annie might have a redemption arc from the original character, be retconned and be a hero, did we really need the show to try to very stupidly, again, make her the character from the book, and have an origin story of how she became Paul Sheldon’s biggest fan? Why not just provide a happy ending with mother and daughter?Basically, the narrative, dramatic engine of the entire season was for naught. A cheap, cynical ending.
“And it’s just happenstance that we saw Pop wasn’t actually possessed” It wasn’t happenstance – this was shown to us in the previous episode. Pop and his group learned that Haldol (?) temporarily prevented the possession, and we saw him injecting himself before Ace shot him. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone that Pop wasn’t possessed after he was revived. And he *was* possessed – he said that he coulf feel “that Frenchman” in the back of his head. Again, the possession took place, otherwise pop would have stayed dead, but the Haldol temporarily prevents the “spirit” from taking over the “host”.“Why not just provide a happy ending with mother and daughter?” Because even though this series is set in the present, this is a younger version of Annie that will later in life live out the events of “Misery”. There was no way Joy was going to survive this season – at the least she would leave Annie with Annie never able to find her.
Kind of a necropost, but…She was (very intently) watching a French movie without subtitles because it was Blue is the Warmest Color and she’s a teenage lesbian. I thought that was a good joke, actually. Annie interprets all the mundane signs of Joy being a teenager pulling away from her as possession, because she’s unknowingly off her meds. I figured she hallucinated the drawings.
Is there any chance they did a triple fake out.
Like maybe Joy is alive and never went to Canada to begin with?
I feel like everything that happened after she found her daughter was questionable. How is a Canadian lawyer going to help a foreigner get emancipated? Wouldn’t bringing a lawyer into things reveal the fact that your mom isn’t your mom? Did Chance just fall out of the picture? Did Joy throw away her cellphone?
Since I wasn’t in the mood for such a depressing ending, my head cannon is just going to pretend that Joy and Chance are chilling somewhere safe and far away and Annie had just moved on with her crazy- Maybe the letter she read was real, but given to her before they went separate ways.
Seeing Annie pick up a copy of a Paul Sheldon book was a nice Easter egg…and then she reads it, which was okay. Then she keeps commenting on how good it is. Then she ends at one of his readings and says she’s his number one fan. WE GET IT. This heavy-handedness spoiled it for me, as was the swerve after 20 minutes back into Annie Wilkes Adventures. Leaving Castle Rock made sense for her, but not us, the audience. What happened there in the week after she left???I’ll admit I didn’t realise it was a fake-out at the end until the guy wanted the seat..I thought “When is Joy going to remember that her mum’s mental AND her sister?” so well done show for tricking me there. Does anyone know if there will be a season 3? I hope we get more of a deep dive into the dimensional shenanigans, and more of an emphasis on the super/unnatural. It’d be pretty cool if Project Arrowhead makes an appearance…
Season 2 just launched on Prime Video in the U.K. this weekend – and I just finished a 10 episode binge and loved it. Didn’t watch season 1 (am just starting it now) but was drawn in by Lizzy Caplan as Annie Wilkes. Indeed, that was the highlight for me. The weird Satanaic cult stuff was a bit nutty. For me, everything with Caplan and Elsie Fisher, including that stellar 5th episode that AV Club seems not very impressed with was all superb. It was a tragic end for Annie, but given the events of Misery, she couldn’t really drive off and live happily ever after with Joy. The portrait of someone whose bipolar disorder was unfortunately accompanied by homicidal tendencies was fascinating throughout, and kind of heart breaking. Brilliant performance from Caplan, also Robin Wiegart – someone whose name on the guest star list always guarantees quality. For me, this whole season was excellent entertainment