“The Queen” is a brilliant, beautiful, and heartbreaking episode that invites viewers into Ruth Deaver’s (Sissy Spacek) perspective, experiences, and larger story. The fragmented nature of the story and its non-linear presentation echo Ruth’s dementia, visually and narratively privileging her complicated subjective experience of the world around her. 

While we have seen Henry (Andre Holland) trying to understand who his mother has become and who he himself was as a boy, with “The Queen” we get an intimate glimpse of the things that Henry didn’t know about or doesn’t remember, including his father’s (Adam Rothenberg) controlling nature and mental instability. While these memories pull Ruth out of the present, her chess pieces guide her home, anchoring her in the here and now. Whether she’s taking a bath while talking to young Henry, in the woods with her family, or sitting in her husband’s church listening to a sermon, when she sees one of those chess pieces, she can mentally grab onto it and return to the present moment. Her relationship with her husband and her memories of Henry’s childhood are ones of fear, confusion, and stress, as she tried to figure out the best way to care for family and protect Henry in the face of her husband’s growing instability. But there’s also joy in those past memories, in conversations with Henry and her relationship with Alan (Scott Glenn), as well as strength, when she stands up to her husband and in doing so, remembers where she put the bullets for the gun. She sees things differently than anyone else, but that doesn’t mean that what she sees doesn’t matter or isn’t true. 

Ruth’s subjective experience of time also protects her in a way: she is devastated when she shoots Alan, mistaking him for her dead husband. But after she goes inside and gets cleaned up, her mind takes her back to the moment Alan returned to Castle Rock and turned up on her doorstep, as they were joyfully reunited and she asked him not to leave. She glimpses a chess piece, one that would return her to the present day, and she actively chooses to stay in this memory, in this happy moment with Alan. Her choice to stay in this when (at least temporarily) doesn’t undo his death, but in her mind and in her heart, he’s alive again. This moment also points to the temporal slipperiness of Castle Rock: Alan has turned up to check on her because someone reported hearing gunshots and with the gun and bullets packed away, the only gunshots at the Deaver house are presumably those that killed Alan, which now overlap and echo into that past moment of happiness and return, a dark combination of possibility and foreshadowing. 

Finally, the replaying of moments from earlier in the series remind viewers that the story we have seen (and the story we may think we know) is not the whole story, a reality that has a ripple effect throughout the series and implications for Henry, the Kid (Bill Skargård), and others.