‘Castle Rock’ Episode 1 Recap: “Severance”

In 1991, Sheriff Alan Pangborn was poking around for something, literally, with a stick in his hand and a freshly loaded revolver on his hip. He found a dead deer packed in shallow snow, then walked to a bluff overlooking the frozen Castle Lake. A sort of moaning rumble reverberated all around, and Pangborn found himself staring at a missing local boy named Henry Deaver, across the lake, standing there alone on the ice. He rushed to him.

That’s all we get for the virtually wordless cold open to Hulu’s Castle Rock, a modern day, well-crafted-so-far show executive produced by its 11.22.63 miniseries partner/Stephen King superfan J.J. Abrams. Named after SK’s perennially visited fictional Maine town, west of the similarly afflicted Derry, Castle Rock will take a few hours to reveal itself as more Stranger Things or Needful Things, immediately coming across as both homage and canon-adjacent. (The King multiverse is a roomy place primed for connections galore.) Shortly after thrusting Pangborn, an established hero from several novels and films, into a wintry new mystery, we get one of the most gruesome deaths Uncle Stevie never wrote.

In 2018, Terry O’Quinn (Locke from the ultra King-y Lost) is a man called Dale Lacy, sitting in his idling car listening to opera on 100.3 (a station owned IRL by guess who) and ties a noose around his neck, the other end fastened to a tree. He regards a cute dog for a sec before speeding off a cliff, into that same lake (and in the same place), beheading himself and revealing, as his car sinks, a Shawshank bumper sticker. He’d been warden there for decades; this was his retirement celebration. Suddenly “Severance” is quite an episode title, and director/producer Michael Uppendahl (FX’s Fargo, a whole bunch of Mad Men and American Horror Story) has firmly established we’re in good hands for whatever’s to come.

The newly privatized prison (!) is nestled cozily into a small town this time, and the confidence to take the setting of such a hyper-famous film and plop it elsewhere bodes well. On her first day, the new warden dismisses her employee’s “trivia” about how Warden Norton shot himself on the job back in the day. She prefers answers as to why a cell block has been closed off for 30 years. (She’s played by Ann Cusack, who did the King series Mr. Mercedes last year and whose brother John did Stand by Me, 1408, and Cell.)

Staking it out, C.O. Zalewski find a ladder descending deep down to where a man has been caged, by Warden Lacy, in the sewer-ish dark for a very long time. He’s an emaciated, all-but-mute Bill Skarsgård, the new big-screen Pennywise, whose bulging eyes are our first (weak) jump-scare here. The guards haul him out (“If he wasn’t a psychopath before, he sure as shit is now,” one says) and clean him up, but all he’ll say is a name: Henry Matthew Deaver, the boy Pangborn found on the lake. The warden tells everyone to hush, fearing a day-one shitstorm.

Adult Henry is Moonlight‘s André Holland, a death row attorney in Texas. In court, he fails to get his client off the hook; they chat through a last meal and he witnesses her painfully botched execution. The show’s not here to play B-sides, purposefully calling to mind both The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption moments apart. The green tiles are just on the wall instead of the floor, and it’s lethal injection rather than the electric chair. An ill-fated Mr. Jingles lookalike mouses his way by Skarsgård’s cell a bit later.

One of the Shawshank C.O.’s ignores the mystery man’s tip and anonymously calls Henry back home to Castle Rock. It’s pretty run down by now, and being back makes Henry feel neither warm nor fuzzy. By now we’ve got an idea why: in ’91, everyone thought Henry ran away or got kidnapped; in the search, they found his adoptive dad, a beloved reverend, nearly frozen to death with a broken back. When Pangborn found Henry after 11 days gone, the kid’s memory was blank.

Henry’s mother is Sissy Spacek, star of the first-ever King adaptation, 1976’s Carrie. He finds her outdoors at home, more addled by early dementia than he realized. “I’m not like the others,” she says, trying to put at ease a stranger she doesn’t know is her child. “I adopted a black son.” Staying at her house and “enjoying her companionship” is Scott Glenn, playing—oh, cool!—Alan Pangborn, still kicking 27 years later. None of this makes Henry’s homecoming any warmer or fuzzier, and neither does the warden’s insistence that no inmate ever asked to see him, that it must be a prank.

Also kicking around town is Melanie Lynskey, a local named Molly Strand who scores pills at the high school. That night, she takes out a tiny hourglass, flips it, and…paws over a boy-size flannel and a poster from when Henry went missing? Hmm. (Lynskey’s yet another King veteran; ABC’s ’02 miniseries Rose Red. O’Quinn, too, via ’85’s SK-penned Silver Bullet, as well as EP Liz Glotzer, who produced Frank Darabont’s Shawshank and The Mist.)

Setting the hook for episode 2, Skarsgård has apparently slaughtered some folks in various parts of the prison and a restless Henry has trekked to Castle Lake in the middle of the night to make us wonder if his memory blanked during that excursion after all. In a fantastic closing flashback, Warden Lacy sparks a cigarette down in the Lost-like hatch hole and tells the caged Skarsgård that when someone ends up finding him down there, he needs to ask for Henry.

And is it just an unsettling trick of the light, or do Lacy’s pupils flicker white just then, in an ominously inhuman way?

ONE GREAT CONSTANT READER EASTER EGG

Henry’s client got the death penalty for killing abusive husband Richard Chambers, the given name of “Eyeball” Chambers, one of Ace Merrill’s asshole chums in Castle Rock–set “The Body”/Stand by Me. Suck a fat one in hell, you cheap dime store hood.

ONE THRILLING THEORY

The boarded-up business Henry passingly gazes at isn’t called Needful Things, and it’s unclear if the cataclysm that ended the ’91 novel—advertised as “The Last Castle Rock Story”—ever happened. Are we being lulled into a false sense of security that the monster Alan Pangborn vanquished, Leland Gaunt, isn’t creeping back into town for more mayhem?

Zach Dionne is a Mainer who’s pretty impressed with the accents and phrases so far.

Watch Castle Rock Episode 1 ("Severance") on Hulu