‘Castle Rock’ Episode 6 Recap: “Filter”

What. An. Episode. But before we let Henry’s series-shifting 12 minutes in the woods swallow us up all over again, let’s hit the only-slightly-less-important stuff from Castle Rock Episode 6, “Filter.”

After his first night in the storage room above the Deaver garage, the kid tells Pangborn he needs something from Syracuse in order to help Ruth but “can’t explain in words you’d understand.” TBD whether he actually just wants Alan out of his way—is he enacting a layered plan or improvising?

Either way, he finds a new way to be silently unsettling, wearing one of Father Deaver’s boxy, askew suits and letting himself into the house while Ruth’s at the brain doctor he just visited. He puts on an old record about the emptiness of living without love, an isolation he, a kidnappee, and Henry, a pariah, have both known for 27 years. (Henry’s one blood tie in the world will barely meet his eye getting off the bus from Boston, tending closely to a game on his phone.) The kid regards his reflection in Ruth’s mirror a little too long before lying on her bed in bare feet, convincing plenty of viewers he’s truly Satan just for that. Is he trying to customize his toxic touch into something more John Coffey–esque for her? Why does it feel so subtly terrifying, then?

Shortly after, Ruth freezes seeing the kid for the first time, a demonic wax figure outside her kitchen window, and she’s certain they buried her husband in that suit. (At that morning’s reinterring, Rev. Ken Cosgrove continues the Corinthians verse begun in Molly’s nightmare: “For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal must put on immortality.”) Wendell offers a simple “whoa,” and having Skarsgård and his Losers’ Club foe Chosen Jacobs encounter each other literally three minutes after Wendell’s introduction is a spectacular flex.

Henry can’t even finish a sentence explaining who the creep is before he’s on the phone with Juniper Hill, abandoning the savior story out of concern for his family. The deal’s sealed when he finds the kid has been trawling through the reverend’s sermon cassettes and watching old tapes of Henry and his dad’s mystery hikes. Last week it wasn’t clear if the kid caused a family to erupt in violence or just sensed impending tragedy; getting dumped at the psychiatric hospital, he definitely makes a bird torpedo itself into the ground. Then he engineers a fire that kills 14 and allows four patients to escape. The way he turns back up at Ruth’s, taking off his coat and shoes without a word, is only outdone in ominousness by the blood dripping down his hand at the end.

Ruth’s conversation with her grandson makes it hard to believe she’s a goner yet, if only because she’s got more to reveal. “If I tell you something, can you keep your mouth shut?” she asks Wendell, dead serious after returning from a reverie. “We’ve been here before. This conversation. We’ll be here again. Life used to go in one direction, forward, like one of those people-movers at the airport. But somehow I got off it. It’s like I just brought your father home from foster care, he was half your size. Now here you are. For all I know, my father’s outside taking care of his roses, younger than me, and I never know when I’m going next.”

Which brings us to the chess pieces—when Ruth gets “lost in the past,” they’re her “breadcrumbs.” If she finds one around the house, as Henry did in the fridge, “well, I know it’s now, not then. Then I can find my way out of the woods.” And what then was she in when Wendell first greeted her, standing behind her bedroom door with a blank look, eerily evoking Piper Laurie at the end of Carrie? Did she know an intruder had been there?

Failing again to get any info from his mom, Henry tries Molly, still being haunted by the reverend’s gauzy ghost. Did she ever sense what they were doing out among the trees, why his dad sounded like he was losing his mind? He falters asking the heavier question: why would he have tried shoving to his death the virtuous man who gave him a home?

“You hated him, Henry,” Molly answers; Henry never said so, but he never had to. “You were in the woods, and I was a part of you and you were a part of me. We—we were the same, she says, adding she felt his fear, then his relief. “Why, because I thought he was gone?” Henry asks, indignantly trying to force a love that wasn’t there. (Child Henry: “He’s not my real dad.” Adult Henry, to his son’s curiosity about his biological parents: “Grandma and grandpa are my real parents.” End of discussion.)

“You wanted him dead,” Molly says, finally sharing her burden of 27 years. “That’s why I went to your parents’ room.” She didn’t know how she got there, and for some time convinced herself it hadn’t been real. Hearing exactly how she did it, learning his dad didn’t die of the injuries he himself got blamed for, Henry is appalled. Molly: “He died because of me, because it was what you wanted. … We did it together. When I looked down at my hand, it was like it was your hand. You did it through me.” Henry leaves with a brutal “You…are fucking crazy.” Shoutout to Molly for once again keeping it together despite a nearly debilitating power and the weight of the town’s past and future on her shoulders.

Henry continues leaving his son to fend for himself and takes to the woods, brilliantly (and to rad cinematic effect) using the old camcorder’s display to retrace a decades-old walk with his dad. When the batteries die along with the sun, he stumbles upon the game-changers Odin Branch (Baby Driver standout CJ Jones) and Willie (Rory Culkin). The men were watching Henry at Pangborn’s event and Father Deaver’s zero-other-attendees funeral, leaving in an RV calling to mind the vampiric True Knot in The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep.

Across a campfire, Willie interprets Branch’s sign language with few contributions of his own. “Honestly, I was surprised you didn’t hold your father’s service out here,” Branch signs, adding almost exactly what we’ve heard about woodsy Warden Lacy: “This place was his church.”

Branch and Rev. Deaver, stunningly, knew each other well, sharing “certain interests—spirituality, philosophy, physics.” The men are in the forest “to listen, of course—just like you.” To what Deaver, once again like Lacy, called the voice of God. “The ancients called it ‘the music of the spheres,'” Branch signs. “Of course, I have a more scientific view of the nature of the schisma; that’s the preferred nomenclature now.”

So…not God’s voice? “Henry, I have advanced degrees in bio- and psychoacoustics. Best I can tell, schisma is actually nanoscale turbulences, caused by cochlear quantum totalities abrading in parallel. Other heres, other nows. All possible pasts, all possible presents. Schisma is the sound of the universe trying to reconcile them.” King concepts like thinnies, todash chimes, and the levels of the Dark Tower are springing to mind.

For some it presents as ringing in the ears. “You ever had that, Henry?” Branch signs with a knowing look. His tinnitus, linked in some schools of thought to things like divine messages, prophecies, and psychic hearing, has been a constant since Zalewski’s mass shooting. (Incredible sound design across the board, and we’re starting to see why.) “See, the sound may come and go,” he signs, “but the schisma, it’s eternal, it’s eternal and everywhere, underlying all space time. But it has been getting louder again, Henry. It hasn’t risen to these levels in…decades.” There are “geographic variations” to the volume, again singling out Castle Rock as an unholy place rather than just a destination for monsters.

But even when it’s loud, the schisma competes with the world’s unceasing noise. So even the “lucky” ones who hear it “have to clarify, amplify,” Branch signs. “And of course the most committed of us…do more.”

He goes on, with Holland hitting a new level with these quiet reactions he’s always being tasked with: “During the last amplitude crest, your father conceived a device.” He compared it to God’s instructions for Noah, exactly the type of ark-talk Lacy was spewing last week. “He called it ‘the filter,'” Branch signs. “Of course he never got the chance to build it. Fortunately I did.”

We’ve plunged into a new level of awesomeness. The filter is housed in the RV, a pretty ordinary-looking soundproof chamber with “certain modifications.” What’s the point of it, if Henry already hears the schisma? “What you hear now is just a rumor,” Branch signs. “What you’ll hear in the filter is truth.”

Henry’s not into it, and Odin understands, but sees he’s suffering, searching. And how can Henry’s son know him if he doesn’t know himself? “Schisma’s all I hear now,” Branch signs. “That’s why I corrected myself. And after tonight, young Willie will be corrected too.” Like…made deaf? “Not deaf,” Branch says aloud. “Perfect!”

Henry gets shoved and locked in, launching through dazzling, spastic mental wormholes that will hopefully be interpreted clearly for us soon. Because even after all this, the only new thing we can really catch is an instant of Henry wearing sunglasses inside, possibly right after his rescue.

The dessert to that wild feast is Pangborn’s return to Castle Rock. Mission accomplished, he tells the kid: Lacy’s suicide-mobile will be delivered in the morning. “What do we do then?”

“There will be a monument,” the kid rasps, confounding Alan again. “To Warden Lacy. To everyone who helped put me in that cage.”

“You said you’d fucking help her,” Pangborn seethes. “Why would you say that?” The kid’s answer comes with a scary new vulnerability as Alan spots his bloody, quivering hand: “Why would you leave me in that trunk, sheriff?”

In the house a record’s skipping, there’s been a struggle, the pan’s smoking on the stove (as Henry found it earlier, because time is clearly a flat circle), and bloody handprints streak the wall. Well, shit.

ONE GREAT CONSTANT READER EASTER EGG

For those who have never experienced the intense pull and magic of a journey into the woods (of Maine, in autumn), an illustrative Dreamcatcher excerpt, as Jonesy sits in a tree stand: “After the first day, he stopped listening to the Walkman, discovering that he liked the music of the woods better—the silk of the wind in the pines, the rust of the crows. … It was only out here, up here, that he realized the attractions of silence were still real, still strong. It was like meeting an old friend after a long absence.”

ONE THRILLING THEORY

Late realization! Last week the kid left a tiny soap carving of himself on the bridge in Molly’s model town. In the first episode, ’91 Henry was palming a similar figure after Pangborn rescued him.

Were Henry and the kid imprisoned together at first? The flashbacks have shown Henry playing with a toy car; maybe the non-aging entity carved the figure as a gift to a frightened boy?

Zach Dionne is a Mainer whose only unfinished King novel is Dreamcatcher because he maxed out his library renewals.

Watch Castle Rock Episode 6 ("Filter") on Hulu