‘Castle Rock’ Episode 10 Recap: “Romans”

Let’s treat chronology with the same reverence Castle Rock has and say screw it. Here’s how we parted with the excellent characters and actors this anthology series may never show us again. Perpetual uncertainty is the hour’s theme, often frustrating but totally on-brand for a show that has walked the line between supernatural and earthly evils every step. And of course, Stephen King is almost as known for bad endings as he is for his many strengths.

Henry and the Other Henry

Both Henry Deavers find themselves behind bars in a basement again, only together. Our Henry is there to collect his son and winds up being interrogated about Odin Branch’s murder. The “kid” we’ll now call Dr. Henry—to reinforce his patently true identity/profession while keeping him creepy—is there because his counterpart had the cops scoop him up at Harmony Hill Cemetery, where he visited his own grave, “Deaver Boy,” who in this world was “born to Heaven.” (Harmony Hill’s a doppelganger, too, originating in Salem’s Lot.)

Henry tries his best to deny Molly’s revelation, via Dr. Henry, that there are other worlds than these. “She told you? Everything?” Dr. H asks, thinking they can finally do their forest trip. “If the sound stops…I think I could be stuck here. As long as I’m here, things will get worse, people will die. I can’t stop it. I’m not supposed to be here.”

“And you didn’t want any of this,” Henry says, presenting Dr. H’s soap figurine to silently say, You sure wanted the new warden dead just like the old one, though. Dr. Henry looks awkwardly aside; his voice and body language when Henry and Molly doubt him do make him seem like a devil failing at his tricks, but we’re not getting sucked down that road.

“Who are you?” Henry asks. Dr. H: “Same as you. A victim.” Henry dismisses this, but perhaps it’s just the latter portion. Henry learned to carve soap in the other Castle Rock, from the Matthew who never adopted him, and he brought one back with him through the thinny/”door.” Henry has independently remembered too many pieces of the story, thanks to Branch’s “filter” and its schisma-visions, to explain this all away with satanic mind tricks. Just too many logistical backflips for a fake story from Dr. Henry to be the real takeaway.

For the clincher, Henry asks Dr. H what his dad would’ve done, in this other timeline, if Ruth hadn’t split. “He would’ve killed her. He knew all about Alan and mom. She told me after we left,” he answers, citing the same Bible verse, Romans 6:23, Matthew told Henry along with his plan to get rid of Ruth.

The Henrys are thrown in the same cell to make room for the Shawshank cons whose bus just clobbered the new warden. (Dr. Henry entered her home and left a figurine modeled after her; “Warden Lacy was right,” was her verdict. “He’s the fucking devil.” Also, she mentioned chucking her predecessor under the metaphorical bus, and was threatened the same treatment by her own boss after Zalewski’s massacre, which ultimately led to the closure of Shawshank.) Dr. H is a magnet for bad shit as a result of being in the wrong dimension, but here Henry sees he’s also a generator, an active participant in chaos, carnage, and vengeance. That same ominous sound trick makes its swishing mark each time Dr. Henry’s eyes swivel between targets, and gory hell erupts. They’re quickly all dead or escaped, and upstairs, the police department is a mass grave. It’s the garish apex of a string of violence that began so small, when Dr. H influenced a mouse to kill itself. Standing over the dying Willie, Dr. H levels a pistol at Henry and forces him forest-ward, now violently desperate to get back to the world where his love had probably just gotten pregnant when he vanished.

The town is awash in sirens, explosions, and smoke, echoing the total destruction at the end of Needful Things, dubbed “the last Castle Rock story.” Matthew’s warning that “blood will run in the streets until he is back in a cage” wasn’t the exaggeration it seemed. In the woods, Henry’s flashback settles the great mystery of his life: to protect his mom, yes, he pushed his father to his near-death. Based on the strange swarming birds (“the sparrows are flying again”), the immediate sonic schisma blast after the shove, and the sudden camera cut, we can reasonably assume that’s the moment he was transported from the other 1991.

Then it’s time for the Henrys’ first physical touch, a tackle in the woods followed by that familiar earthy grumble and the most startling moment of the series. Why Dr. Henry face flashes the visage of decrepit Game of Thrones wight are yours for the pondering. You could even argue, while trusting Dr. H’s story, that Henry imagined it, needing to finally mark this enigma as a boogeyman. Maybe in being an evil-magnet, Dr. H absorbed the town’s ancient foulness and was contorted inside by it. Bear in mind both Henrys have lived 27 more years than their faces show, already confirming there’s more to them physically than meets the eye.

“Maybe something turned you into a monster, or maybe you were one all along. Doesn’t matter,” Henry says in his one-year-later narration. “You’re here now—this is who you are, this is where you live, this is where you’re from.”

“Truth doesn’t change, it’s just truth, pure,” is how Henry opens that kinda-happily-ever-after monologue. “But justice, well, that looks different depending on what side of that invisible line you’re on.” In the premiere, and this episode’s “previously on…” reel, Henry spoke to jury deciding a woman’s fate. “I had to kill someone, I’d need it etched in gold and signed by God himself. So I ask you: How much doubt are you folks comfortable with?” Now he’s only almost entirely convinced Dr. H is a deceptive creature from hell, but it’s irrelevant. It’s justice, not surety, that makes him re-quarantine his counterpart below the town he’s so capable of crippling.

The jailhouse violence made up Henry’s mind: this guy might not have deserved Lacy’s punishment, but in his quest to “build a monument” to “everyone who helped put me in that cage,” he damned himself. And it didn’t help it was Dr. H’s dad who held young Henry in cruel captivity; sons must sometimes pay for their father’s sins. Henry served 27 years immediately after trying to kill his father; no matter how innocent Dr. Henry was when Lacy caught him, he’s done enough in a few days to warrant another stretch alone in the dark. (Henry was actually kind of responsible for both Matthews’ deaths, if his touch/proximity is what caused his captor to commit suicide, a la Lacy.)

“I know you still have doubts, Henry,” Dr. H says inside the defunct Shawshank. “How long are we gonna do this?” Henry: “Dunno.” Dr. H: “After awhile you forget…which side of the bars you’re on. That’s what Warden Lacy used to say. Look how things turned out for him.” A life of secrecy and doubt, ending in madness, depression, or both.

It feels like he’s setting up for a big, Joker-ish laugh to fuel our nightmares. Instead we pan slowly across the bars in the gloom and get a subtle, lonely smile. Like Skarsgård’s other King character, Pennywise, he’s had a good feast after 27 years, and his damnation is complete. Maybe he’ll be back in another 27.

We go out on Dusty Springfield singing “Twenty Four Hours from Tulsa,” the song Henry ID’d way back in the pilot as his “first memory,” the one playing in Pangborn’s truck when he found Henry (and when they went to exhume Matthew). “Dearest darling, I had to write to say that I won’t be home anymore/’Cause something happened to me while I was driving home/And I’m not the same anymore.”

Wendell

After being blitzed with schisma for the first time and getting off the bus in ‘Salem’s Lot, Henry’s son made a beeline toward the dible sound. He found the RV, a dead Odin and dazed Willy, but made it out safe. At Henry’s request, Molly brought the boy back to his mother’s in Boston.

Less than a minute after Dr. H’s monster transformation moment, we’re spending Christmas 2019 with the Wendmeister and Henry at the Deaver homestead.

It’s sweet seeing them together and knowing they managed to come through the events of last fall with their frayed bond not broken but cemented. It’s a bit unfortunate they’re doing it in this cursed town rather than, say, Boston, or any place on earth except Derry. But as Henry narrates: “Some never leave, no matter how hard they try. Most of us are trapped here for a reason.”

Molly

At Henry’s jailhouse request, Molly whisks Wendell away from Castle Rock, and then herself. She winds up in Florida—the same place Alan and Ruth fled for peace in Dr. H’s world—and already has Molly Strand & Associates ads on TV heralding her as the “No. 1 new agent in the Keys!” Farewell, “Live like a king!” signs, and hello, redemptive “my goal is to help people stay in their own neighborhood” mission statement. She likes visiting her grandmother at a house that channels Big Pink, the protagonist’s Florida home in Duma Key.

Mollz really seemed like the one who was going to turn Castle Rock around, to beat the odds and get a gazebo and a gastropub on the map. It’s sad to see her submit, have a non-goodbye with Henry in an interrogation room, and finish up by doing more favors for the Deavers. (Killed Matthew, helped Ruth, saved Henry as a boy and an adult, brought Wendell to safety—wow.) But Molly just learned of another life, one where she died in the woods but enjoyed years of a thriving existence beforehand. “What was I like…over there?” she asks Dr. Henry. The simple answer: “Happier.” So she went for it.

Ruth

Molly finds Henry’s mom poised to jump off the bridge again, racked by guilt over murdering her true love. “But he’s also alive, other times,” Ruth says. “It’s just zigs and zags, forks in the river, always changing, always the same.” Mollz sees fit to tell the timewalker (one last shoutout to the total brilliance that was episode 7, “The Queen”) that she and Alan also once led a happier life. “One of those other times, you left Matthew. You went away. You already had a bag packed,” Molly says. And though Dr. H’s timeline isn’t a place she can hop to, Ruth learning she did have that courage somewhere inside, that she did care about her son’s safety more than anything, hopefully makes her final few months easier. It’s weak that she dies offscreen and isn’t spoken about in the epilogue, but with all her finale scenes riddled with sorrow, it’s a type of happy ending.

Alan

At rest next to Ruth. Wish his novel-based heroics against Leland Gaunt and George Stark could’ve been brought to the table for some help facing the supernatural, or that we could’ve seen him in Dr. Henry’s world, but alas. He’s dead. And in his experience, the dead aren’t particular.

ONE LAST GREAT CONSTANT READER EASTER EGG

After a few seconds of credits we get Jackie Torrance in the Mellow Tiger, tapping away on a laptop adorned with a sticker for King’s Bangor radio station WKIT, reliving the night she perfectly channeled her murderous uncle with flowery prose like “I heard the pop of a skull giving up its secrets, felt the root and stem of a cleft blade stopping the brain.” Dean Merrill resurfaces to ask, “What’s it like, a horror or whatever?” He pokes fun at the amazing title, Overlooked. “Backstory,” she explains. “You know, ancient history? It’s family history. I’m actually headed out west on a research trip next month. Best place to finish a book is where it started. I read that somewhere.”

It’s the last impeccable Shining reference in a season packed with them: its sequel, Doctor Sleep, features a cross-country journey from New England to the Colorado site of the burned-down Overlook for a climactic showdown.

NEXT TIME ON CASTLE ROCK…

Co-creators Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason just told EW they aim to “tell a new story each season, to see things we haven’t seen before from the point of view of characters we haven’t met before in any season.” Then Shaw reiterated what they showed us all season, that they’re certainly inspired by the overlapping nature of King’s multiverse. “The pleasure of finding your way back to stories or characters you’ve seen before in unexpected ways is a huge, exciting advantage of this series. I think it’s something that we can do, and allow it to be an anthology but still embrace stories and characters that we love. It just may not happen in the way that one might expect.”

Zach Dionne is a Mainer who owes a life debt to the 70 King books shelved next to his desk.

Watch Castle Rock Episode 10 ("Romans") on Hulu