It was a joy to sink back into Castle Rock (Hulu, 2018-2019) this week. We’ll cover more episodes per post moving forward but for this first one, I really allowed myself to savor the series’ first episode, “Severance.” 

First, as I already noted, it was good to be back. It has been a couple of years since I last rewatched the series and it’s always great to return and discover that it’s just as good as you remember (if not even better). This Castle Rock feels familiar to me and while part of that now is likely because of my visit to Orange, Massachusetts (where the series was filmed), but even more so, the Castle Rock series just feels like it belongs in King’s world. 

The series’ approach to adaptation is innovative and creative: rather than adapting a specific King story in the traditional sense, Castle Rock uses King’s established universe as a foundation and builds from there. There are plenty of familiar places and faces, but most of the characters and the stories themselves are new. It’s like the show’s creators, Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason, have brought their own toys to play in King’s sandbox, and they tackle this challenge with an aesthetic and attention to detail that makes it feel like a natural continuation of King’s world, while allowing for new directions and surprises. Fidelity-based approaches to adaptation (i.e. “that’s not how it was in the book”) are unnecessarily limiting and tedious, refusing the new ways that familiar stories can be imagined across transmedia experiences and platforms. The annoying question of fidelity perennially hovers over adaptation, but Castle Rock effectively sidesteps that conversation altogether by not actually adapting King at all, but drawing inspiration from his fiction to tell new stories, and it works amazingly well. For lack of a better word, Castle Rock feels right (and wrong, in the best Castle Rock-ian sense of the word). 

Another part of why Castle Rock may feel so much like home for King viewers is that the cast has a ton of actors who have previously appeared in King adaptations. Bill Skarsgård is Pennywise in IT Chapters One (2107) and Two (2019), which overlapped with Castle Rock’s series run (and raises the interesting question of whether his appearance in both may have shaped or influenced viewers’ interpretations of his character in Castle Rock). Sissy Spacek was Carrie (1976) and Melanie Lynskey was in the television miniseries Rose Red (2002). We don’t see Tim Robbins until Season Two, but one of his best-known roles is as Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Castle Rock draws upon a range of interconnections in King’s universe and fiction, and these familiar faces from other adaptations add another layer to that complexity of engagement. 

There are two key themes that resonate throughout the series and that are established in microcosm in “Severance”: perception and intent. First of all, while we often see the world of Castle Rock somewhat objectively, much of what we see throughout the series is filtered through the eyes and perceptions of individual characters, including the Kid (Skarsgård), Molly Strand (Lynskey), and Ruth Deaver (Spacek). In this opening episode, viewers’ sense of reality is disrupted through the subjective perceptions of prison guard Dennis Zalewski (Noel Fisher), when he looks at the prison monitors and appears to see the Kid wandering free of his infirmary cell, with a series of bloody bodies in his wake. After seeing these horrors on the monitors, Zalewski follows procedure and sounds the alarm, before arming himself and heading into the prison to contain the situation … only to find that none of it is real. There are no dead bodies and the Kid is secure in his infirmary cell. But Zalewski acts on what he sees, what his senses tell him, and what he believes to be real. And while we could dismiss it as a hallucination or a manipulation by the Kid and conclude that what Zalewski saw isn’t real, I would argue that the validity of other characters’ perceptions later in the series—even when they directly contradict objective “reality”—caution us against making such an unequivocal determination. 

Zalewski is arguably the most morally uncomplicated character in the series: he doesn’t have any dark secrets and he isn’t working a self-serving angle. He discovers the Kid in the cage and he overhears Warden Porter’s (Ann Cusack) plans to keep his existence a secret, and he knows that what has happened—and is continuing to happen—is wrong. He’s the only one to reach out to get help for the Kid and the only one to move forward with the Kid’s best interests at heart, even at great personal risk to himself. This situation and everything Zalewski has put on the line has put him under a great deal of stress. Maybe he saw exactly what he thinks he saw (though this begs the question of why the Kid would want to manipulate and terrorize the one person who has tried to help him so far) or maybe he doubts the choices he has made in the wake of others’ speculations about who the Kid is and what he may be capable of. Whatever the reason, what Zalewksi sees on the monitors is real to him and he acts accordingly. 

The other question—and one that carries throughout the series—is that of intent, including the power the Kid has, how he uses it, and his control over it. There are a couple of key moments in “Severance” that may provide a couple of clues to the Kid’s supernatural power: first, when he watches a mouse emerge from a hold in the wall and end up killed in a trap and later, when Zalewski sounds the alarms, which the Kid can hear ringing through the prison. Skarsgård does a remarkable amount with minimal facial and eye movements. The mouse emerges from the hole, the Kid looks at the mouse and at the trap that awaits it, and his eyes track the movement of the mouse as it makes its way around the edge of the room and into the trap. Maybe he’s just watching the mouse, maybe he’s empathizing with what it feels like to be fatalistically trapped, maybe his glance between mouse and trap acted as a compulsion or directive that drove the mouse to its death. The Kid’s intent here is open to interpretation, with arguments to be made for each of these possibilities, but insufficient evidence to support any definite conclusion. The same is true when the Kid acknowledges the sound of the alarms throughout the prison: he is aware of the noise and mayhem, but doesn’t react in any strong way. This lack of response could be because he’s the one who instigated it, but it could also be because he is still in the process of emerging from a near-catatonic response to trauma. Another possibility that complicates both of these events is that it’s possible that the Kid has these powers but after being imprisoned in the dark for such a long time, he doesn’t presently have complete control of them or of his ability to influence others (and if he did, why wouldn’t he use that to defend or save himself?). 

The Kid’s intent and abilities continue to be a source of influence and uncertainty throughout the first season of Castle Rock, along with the intents and abilities of other characters as well, not least of which is the departed Warden Lacy (Terry O’Quinn), who is central to the series’ next episode “Habeas Corpus.”