As we hit the middle of the first season of Castle Rock—with Episode 4, “The Box” and Episode 5, “Harvest”—clear boundaries begin to break down and things REALLY start to get interesting. The first three episodes of the series set up a range of mysteries, including the Kid’s (Bill Skarsgård) identity, why Dale Lacy (Terry O’Quinn) locked the Kid in a cage, what happened to Henry Deaver (Andre Holland) when he went missing as a child, and whether or not Molly Strand’s (Melanie Lynskey) visions can be trusted. These are all really excellent questions and in a traditional mystery narrative structure, viewers can expect that while there may be lots of twists and turns along the way, those mysteries will eventually be solved and an incontrovertible truth will come out. But the beauty of Castle Rock is that the series is much more invested in the mysteries than in any singular version of the truth. 

Dennis Zalewski (Noel Fisher) takes center stage in “The Box” as his inability to resign himself to the reality of Shawshank Prison destroys him. When Zalewski talks with Henry about the horrifying things happening at the prison, he provides another layer to how we can understand Castle Rock and its position as a bad place, when he says “You know how they always say that Castle Rock has some kind of luck? Not really luck, though, is it? … Bad shit happens here ’cause bad people know they’re safe here. How many times can one fuckin’ town look the other way?” Now that he has seen it, he can’t unsee it, he can’t remain complacent, and he can’t live with things as they are. Throughout the episode, the lines between Zalewski and the Kid blur and power dynamics are in constant fluctuation: the Kid drives Reeves from his solitary cell (Josh Cooke) before locking himself back in, while Zalewski feels just as trapped as some of the men he guards, telling Henry “I didn’t even see it until I found that fuckin’ tank, but I’m a … I’m a prisoner in there too.” Zalewski’s deterioration could be traced to the physical contact between him and the Kid, as the guard reaches into the Kid’s cell to give him a fist bump, which would bolster our suspicions of the Kid’s dark power. Or it could stem from Zalewski’s rigid belief in doing the right thing, as evidenced by his risking his job to reach out to Henry Deaver following the discovery of the Kid—his moral compass is firm and when he can’t bend, all that’s left is for him to break. Or perhaps it’s a complex combination of the two. 

As Zalewski walks through the prison shooting his fellow guards, the viewer is taken outside of his subjective perceptions, watching this violence unfold on the surveillance camera screens (anachronistically and brilliantly paired with a soundtrack of Roy Orbison’s song “Crying”) as he methodically walks down corridors and through public areas of the prison, killing those who have abused their power and the prisoners. The surveillance camera footage promises viewers a kind of objective truth (as do other screens, like the cameras Henry sets up at his mother’s house), but still only tell part of the story. The veracity of these screens is further complicated by Zalewki’s earlier panic, when the screens seemed to show him the Kid walking a murderous path through the prison, one that Zalewski now follows himself, until he is stopped. 

Just as the lines between Zalewski and the Kid begin to break down in these episodes, so do those between the Kid and Henry Deaver: Henry begins to have visions or flashbacks of being kept in a cage of his own, potentially recovered memories of the days when he went missing as a child. Both Henry and the Kid are shown completing the same diagnostic test, repeating a series of words as they try to get to the truth of who they are and what’s going on with them. Just as the Kid’s past remains a mystery, Henry finds himself drawn back to his own childhood and the days he was missing. Neither man can be entirely certain of who he is, what he did, and what it means: after his conversation with Alan (Scott Glenn), Henry starts to wonder whether he really did kill his father and the Kid seems uncertain about whether he’s the devil Lacy has told him he is, telling Molly “I should still be in the hole” (“Harvest”). 

The Kid’s power remains undefined and the cause-and-effect relationship of bad things that happen around him is slippery and amorphous. For example, as he walks through Castle Rock at night, he stops and listens to a young boy’s birthday celebration taking place inside a house, which devolves into violence. Like the mouse in the prison infirmary, the connection here is unclear: is the Kid’s presence responsible for this violent turn? And if so, is it intentional or an indication that there is something unnatural or evil about him? Or maybe the violence has nothing to do with him at all and he is nothing more than a witness to the horrors that seem to define Castle Rock. The Kid’s role as a witness seems supported by Molly’s perceptions of him, as she tells Henry that “With him … it’s like I was listening to the pain of everyone in this town all at once.” The veracity of Molly’s perceptions seem to be verified in this conversation as well, as she effectively reads Henry’s unexpressed thoughts and emotions, which would seem to suggest that viewers can trust her read of the Kid as well, though her perceptions of him are complicated: she empathizes with him but still tells Henry that the Kid “feels wrong.” 

The closing scene of “Harvest” adds a new mystery to the Kid’s identity, as he and Alan face one another in the woods, with the revelation that the Kid has been imprisoned in the cage for twenty-seven years and hasn’t aged in all that time, suggesting a supernatural presence that takes us above and beyond the more human horrors of Castle Rock. Whoever (or whatever) the Kid is, he is tapped into the suffering of Castle Rock in a way that no one else seems to be. We’re no closer to solving the mysteries posed by Castle Rock and in these final moments, viewers are closely aligned with Alan, as the Kid asks him “You have no idea what’s happening here, do you?”