As we reach the midpoint of the second season of Hulu’s Castle Rock (2018-2019), a lot of buried secrets start rising to the surface, with disastrous results. We also start to learn a bit about the new and horrifying resurrection going on in Jerusalem’s Lot, but we’ll save that for another discussion. Episode 4, “Restore Hope” and Episode 5, “The Laughing Place” are all about the secrets of the past and the way those have shaped established King universe characters we thought we knew, in Pop Merrill (Tim Robbins) and Annie Wilkes (Lizzy Caplan).

In “Restore Hope,” Pop works to come to terms with his own mortality, after his latest round of chemotherapy proves unsuccessful. As he reflects on the life he has lived and the mistakes he has made, we see flashbacks of his time as soldier in Mogadishu, where his path first crossed with those of Nadia (Yusra Warsama) and Abdi (Barkhad Abdi) when he tragically shot their mother, who was holding a rifle she intended to return to a friend of Abdi’s to keep her son out of trouble. With this reframed understanding and this untold story brought to light, Pop’s adoption of Nadia and Abdi takes on a different significance: an act of atonement rather than selfless love, though the affection that has grown between Pop and Nadia in the intervening years is undeniable. As Pop cryptically reflects on his past mistakes, adopting Nadia and Abdi “wasn’t decency. It was just a debt. Just another goddamn debt to be settled. But it can’t be settled” (“Restore Hope”). Abdi knows the truth and when he and Pop argue, he threatens to tell Nadia, but has never used that leverage. Pop wrestles with whether he should confess to Nadia before he dies but when he goes looking for spiritual guidance, the local pastor asks Pop to consider what such a confession would cost the person he confesses to, and after some thought, Pop decides the truth would cost Nadia too much, intending to take this secret to the grave. However, while Pop has given up on further cancer treatment, Nadia is less complacent, going through his files to find the paperwork from his military service that she needs to get him into a VA trial, and she discovers the truth on her own, a revelation that breaks both her and Pop’s hearts and destroys the last loving relationship he had. 

“The Laughing Place” draws viewers into Annie’s backstory and past. Just as Castle Rock gives us a glimpse of a pre-Misery Annie, “The Laughing Place” shows us how Annie became the person she is when we see her in Castle Rock. Her father Carl (John Hoogenakker) and mother Crysilda (Robin Weigert) have a contentious relationship, as Crysilda supports the whole family while Carl tries to write a book. Young Annie (Madison Johnson) has plenty of troubles of her own, including trouble reading and violence against the peers who tease her, which the school principal worries has reached the point of “pathological behavior” (“The Laughing Place”). They pull Annie out of school and her father spends nearly a decade in control of Annie’s education, which seems to consist of having Annie read his still-in-progress book and tell him how wonderful it is as he strokes his own ego. While Carl sees himself as a complicated guy, Crysilda deals in moral absolutes and though Annie is devoted to her father, the way she sees the world aligns more closely with her mother’s views, as she tells her father “bad doesn’t make you interesting … It just makes you bad” (“The Laughing Place”). We’re never entirely certain just what kind of man Carl is: as Annie grows up, there seems to be a threat of potential sexual abuse, but this is sidestepped when Crysilda hires a tutor for Annie, Rita K. Green (Sarah Gadon), who forms a supportive bond with Annie and has a secret relationship with her father that results in Rita becoming pregnant and Carl leaving Annie and her mother. As difficult as her father’s desertion is for Annie, it’s still a step up from her relationship with her mother, who drives the two of them into a river in an attempted murder-suicide so they can “get away clean” from the “dirty” world (“The Laughing Place”). Annie learns the truth about Rita and her father and meets her new half-sister Evangeline, and they start trying to build a new family. But when Annie discovers that her father has dedicated his finally finished book to Rita, she pushes him down the stairs, inadvertently killing him, then she stabs Rita and takes Evangeline, prepared to follow in her mother’s footsteps and kill both herself and the baby. 

Just as the Mogadishu flashback scenes reframe Pop Merrill and his relationship with Nadia and Abdi, Annie’s walk through the woods with the box holding Evangeline reframes the same scenes presented in the season’s first episode. While non-diegetic music in that opening scene built the suspense and the lack of context was designed to keep viewers guessing, when we return to this same moment, we know how Annie got here, why she’s covered in blood, and what—or rather, who—is in the box. And without the non-diegetic music playing, we can hear Evangeline crying, creating a different tenor of suspense and unease from that of the opening scene. When Annie gets to the water and prepares to kill Evangeline, the baby laughs, which saves them both. 

As Annie draws Evangeline toward her in an embrace, we realize that everything Annie has told Joy is a lie: Joy’s name isn’t Joy and Annie isn’t her mother. They’re not on the run to stay ahead of a bad man trying to find them, but because Annie is wanted for murder, attempted murder, and kidnapping. And as we discover in the episode’s final moments, Rita is alive and desperately searching for her daughter. 

Both “Restore Hope” and “The Laughing Place” reveal secrets of the past that threaten to destroy the present and dramatically reframe characters, their relationships, and the lives and sense of self they have created. While we came to Castle Rock Season Two knowing that Pop and Annie are established King villains, we just may find ourselves hoping that redemption isn’t beyond their reach, even if we already know better.