“The Mother” is an improvement on Castle Rock’s recent slump. Even its previously on, recapping the events of “The Laughing Place,” improves on the original by stripping out flabby secondary character arcs, reducing that chapter to broad but tense plot points: an adult daughter learning of her father’s betrayal, and her brother’s secret; a teenage daughter bearing the burden of her sick mother’s care; a mother (sister) fighting for custody of her daughter (sister); a mother searching for the daughter stolen in infancy.
“I didn’t want to be part of that story anymore,” Rita tells her AA group, marking her four years sober. “Even people like us have to turn the page.” But if Rita has moved on (and the map on her apartment wall, tracking Annie’s possible movements over 16 years and 50 states, suggests otherwise), Joy’s phone call flips the page back, putting Rita squarely back in Annie’s story—and Evangeline’s.
Sarah Gadon, luminously lovely and radiantly young in her first Castle Rock episode, is shown in “The Mother” without elaborate aging makeup or wrinkled prosthetics. Instead, Rita is aged by lighting, by unkind angles, and especially by Gadon’s portrayal, by her pinched expressions and tired posture.
“Evangeline,” Rita calls Joy when they meet at the youth home, and “Evangeline!” she cries when Joy walks up behind her in the woods, jabbing her with a sedative. When “The Mother” focuses on the emotional rawness of these three women—one of whom is just learning her birth name at 16—it’s successful. In some moments, it soars. But the carelessness and faint cowardice that characterizes recent episodes still bleed through here.
Castle Rock keeps backing its characters away from their faults and their misdeeds. Pop was part of the military team that fatally shot Nadia’s mother—but Nadia’s mother was running toward them on a dark, dangerous street, holding a gun. Adbi knew and kept that secret from his sister—but only for five years, according to Pop’s voicemail. Even Rita blames the kidnapping of her daughter for eleven years lost to alcohol and drugs, with no hint that she claims any agency in those choices.
Used sparingly, a freak accident can be a fun plot twist, but Castle Rock has spent the whole season backing its characters away from responsibility, softening their guilt. Instead of challenging us to accept and sympathize with these people despite their actions—and challenging themselves to create portraits of characters worthy of sympathy despite their wrongs—“The Mother” writers Daria Polatin and Vince Calandra continue to chip away at their characters’ culpability. In the end, Rita is shot by her own gun as it falls from from her hand. The gunshot is no one’s choice and no one’s fault, but an unhappy result of circumstances they’ve all created together.
Annie ends the episode raising her blood hands toward the police spotlight, crying “I DID IT!” But a mother’s (sister’s) panicky attempt to take responsibility in-universe, to forestall a possibly trigger-happy cop and clear her daughter (sister) of any possible suspicion, isn’t the same as a story’s willingness to let its characters live in their remorse, and to let its audience live there with them.
I called Castle Rock’s season premiere “pulpy,” and there’s a fun, gruesome note of pulp-comic silliness to this season, harkening back to the EC Comics that inspired some of Stephen King’s broadest, goofiest work. But Castle Rock is reminiscent of the comics, and not of the stories themselves, because as broadly as King’s writing draws these most cartoonish of his characters, he lets them carry the full burden of their misdeeds, their greeds, their guilt. Castle Rock shies away from letting the characters earn their guilt, to its detriment.
“The Mother,” like previous episodes, is also like the comics in its carelessness about walk-on characters, its willingness to let them start as mere faces in the background and die as little more than those now-familiar faces. I had big hopes for Heather (Georgia Lyman), bartender at The Mellow Tiger, but her escape looks like one more dead end. Like those before her, Heather is summarily sacrificed to become part of Ace’s undead army, and her jaunt to the hospital is just a brief detour to alert Nadia to something stranger… and to demonstrate how psych meds interfere with “the weaving,” the supernatural process by which Ace’s victims become his disciples.
That bodes ill for Ace’s plan to transform Annie. Knowing her to be “a woman of highly particular spirit,” Pere Augustin (for this is who possesses Ace) intends her to be “the vessel” for Amity Lambert, whose corpse resides in a still-intact casket under Castle Rock. Whatever his plan is, it’s to happen 400 years “to the day” after the town’s founding. Amity is the third mother—in this case, mother of unknown but surely deadly destruction—to be found in “The Mother.” But if Heather’s Paxil and Zoloft stymied her “weaving,” Annie’s cocktail of meds could thwart it completely. (Mine, too, so there’s something to look forward to.) Annie Wilkes is a more highly particular spirit than even Pere Augustin expects.
So is Rita K. Green. She survived one potentially fatal gut wound, and it’s always possible she’ll survive another, even after the police shout for Annie to raise her hands from the wound she’s stanching. These two women share more than their intractable love for Joy (Evangeline!). Their resolution not to drink, the simultaneous crumbling of that resolve, the way each reaches for bullets and gun at the same time (though only one finds hers)—Rita and Annie aren’t just on the same page. They’re the flip side of each other’s pages, the counterpoint to each other’s stories.
Stray observations
- Chance’s full name is Georgia LaChance, as in Gordie LaChance; she even rocks the same haircut. Joy’s CPS worker is another in the law-enforcing Bannerman family.
- Prominently displayed on Nadia’s bookcase full of medical texts and family photos is Shooter’s Bible.
- Georgia Lyman appears briefly in Castle Rock’s series premiere, as a prison guard in Henry’s briefly seen Texas case, and not, as I hoped, pulling a shift at the then-functional Shawshank.
21 Comments
It would be really weird to bring Rita back into the picture only to immediately kill her off. Again.
The showrunners haven’t shown particularly sharp storytelling instincts otherwise, honestly. It’s definitely in the realm of possibility.
Well, because of the whole body-snatching thing, she might die and then be resurrected and was one of the 400-year old residents.
I will be shocked if that isn’t where this heads. I don’t think the show would actually let Annie die and come back, but Rita seems like a good fit.
Right? And if “Ace” is right and Annie really is the predestined vessel for Amity and they do use Rita instead, it could lead to their undoing.
And it sounds like there is a brewing conflict over if it has to be Annie or not. So you could see that leading to someone taking Rita over Annie just to fulfill the prophecy.Alternatively, they could try to use Annie and just be flat out wrong.
There is something sort of satisfying about the thought of poor Annie kicking Amity out of her head. I think we’ve seen enough of Annie to know we can’t really trust her in the long run, but I do still find her deeply sympathetic, murderous tendencies notwithstanding.But yeah, they’ve set up a conflict over the Amity vessel and who it will be pretty nicely. Wouldn’t be surprised if someone tries to put Rita in there instead.
Considering we’re dealing with beings that kill people to use their bodies as vessels for the souls of their friends…I’m guessing this isn’t over.Annie becoming Amnity’s vessel would be a hell of a thing, but Rita taking on that role would absolutely fit with where this season is heading.
At this point it feels like these reviews are just written to troll people.Trauma, how it shapes peoples lives and actions, and how they allow it to control them is such a recurring, in-no-imaginable-way-subtle theme in King’s work that it feels almost willfully obtuse to write things like this:
“Used sparingly, a freak accident can be a fun plot twist, but Castle Rock has spent the whole season backing its characters away from responsibility, softening their guilt. Instead of challenging us to accept and sympathize with these people despite their actions—and challenging themselves to create portraits of characters worthy of sympathy despite their wrongs—“The Mother” writers Daria Polatin and Vince Calandra continue to chip away at their characters’ culpability. In the end, Rita is shot by her own gun as it falls from from her hand. The gunshot is no one’s choice and no one’s fault, but an unhappy result of circumstances they’ve all created together.”
The inherent horror behind seemingly random, uncontrollable events that end up incredibly tragic and the meaninglessness and chaos of life that is implied by that is, again…pretty On-Brand King.Like, it’s fine not to like those things in general, but in the context of a review of a Stephen King adaptation, it’s the equivalent of reviewing a Star Wars movie and being like “loss of points for having space battle sounds in the vacuum of space, and why couldn’t any of the bad guys aim?”
It makes sense to have everybody in Annie’s world blame outside forces for their actions because that is pretty much what she does in Misery and showing her upbringing explains so much. A father who should be on meds but won’t take them, or let Annie take them, while keeping Annie from the outside world and the opportunity to socialize. The father also shows why Annie thinks that men leave or cheat and lie. Even Rita was a little sketchy by having an affair with her student’s parent and then moving in and taking over as the mother to a new child. Given everything, Annie really did not have a chance.
Yeah, I had my own reservations about this episode, but that entire paragraph you quote just had me shaking my head in puzzlement.
This post has more effort put into it than the story for season 2.
Yeah, I took from that history that circumstance can make monsters out of anyone. Is Annie evil? No, she’s unstable and sometimes myopically selfish. Is Rita evil? No, she’s deeply wounded and prone to lashing out at both herself and those who have hurt her. Is Annie’s dad evil? No, he’s just low-grade crappy, and prone to selfishness. Is Annie’s mom evil? No, she’s just got an extremely binary worldview that can’t accept any kind of failure, in herself or others. In some circumstances, we could see these people living normal lives without causing too much harm. However, the particular set of circumstances set all of these broken people on a collision course, and they’ve all caused one another intense damage.
“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.” – Stephen KingHe has never been shy about the underlying themes present in his work.
We’re not allowed to absorb entire bodies of work anymore.You must dissect every scene, shadow, and misplaced twig and ponder it’s weight on the universe and look for things that aren’t there.It’s a side effect of the Easter Egg-ing of modern storytelling.
I have a hard time imagining Rita staying dead. Either she survives, again, or she gets brought back. Glad my theory about drugs interfering with the conversion was correct though the results of mental health meds seem less destructive than whatever the addicts were taking.
Oooh. I didn’t think of that.They made a point of showing that drugs can affect the ability to take over a body.So we’ve got Rita who’s presumably dead…but also was shot full of drugs to knock her out.Which seems like it’d set her up to come back (either as a rando or as Ace’s beloved) but not perfect enough that she couldn’t still be reached by a combination of Joy and Annie.
Probably the first episode this season I really did not care for. Don’t know what this “slump” talk is, it’s been pretty damn engaging up until now.EDIT: also that’s not how guns work and I hate how movies/TV always pretend they do. Guns don’t go off when you drop them. Know how incredibly flawed such a design would be?
They made a point of showing Rita pull back the hammer though. I don’t know how guns work…but if the hammer is set in that fashion couldn’t it go off dropped?Like, the impact would cause the hammer to fire off the bullet?
Probably the first episode this season I really did not care for. Don’t know what this “slump” talk is, it’s been pretty damn engaging up until now.
If you’d asked me a few weeks ago what type of army Ace is building, “400 year old French Satanists” would not have been my top answer. Does this link in any way to what King has wrote about ‘Salems Lot, or is it a creation of the show? I mean, on the one hand vampires have been done to (un)death, but I’d like to have seen a new version of the Nosferatu-type used in this show (like in the book/movie), because as a kid that was damn creepy. Although, I guess ‘coffins full of goo’ is cheaper to show than ‘transform people into monsters’ haha