There’s a lot to unpack in this stretch of episodes of the second season of Castle Rock (Hulu, 2018-2019), so we’ll be taking these next couple as single-episode discussions. Episode 6, “The Mother” offers a range of ways to read that title and its significance, as well as the complicated truths engaged by the maternal throughout the series. 

Looking back at the first season, Henry Deaver’s (André Holland) relationship with his mother Ruth (Sissy Spacek) was complicated, both in her role as his adoptive mother and in his heartbreaking loss of her as her dementia progressed, at times erasing Henry from her mind. She did everything she could to protect Henry, but couldn’t escape from some of her regrets and what-ifs. 

Here in the second season, the most explosive maternal relationship(s) is the triangle of truth and lies between Annie (Lizzy Caplan), Joy (Elsie Fisher), and Rita (Sarah Gadon). When Joy begins putting together the clues and reaches out to Rita, it isn’t long before Rita comes to Castle Rock looking for her daughter, and the whole traumatic truth comes out. While Joy is shocked, she seems to maintain a loyalty to Annie, insisting that Rita not refer to Annie as her “sister,” even as she personally wrestles with reconfiguring those relationships she thought she understood. There is a pivotal scene in “The Mother” that cuts between scenes of Annie, Joy, and Rita—each alone—as they struggle to figure out how their worlds are changing, how they have to rethink their relationships, and what comes next. As Joy tries to figure out who she is and who she wants to be, in some ways, she seems to be a bit of a cipher for both Annie and Rita, who hang their dreams, happiness, and even personal well-being on Joy, through Annie’s management of her psychosis and through Rita’s alcoholism. Joy’s response raises a world of questions about nature versus nurture, one that comes to a head when she saves Annie from Rita and Annie claims responsibility for the accidental gunshot that hits Rita when the three of them are fighting. 

The complicated maternal relationships ripple throughout Castle Rock. Annie finds herself reluctantly following in her mother’s (Robin Weigert) footsteps on the night she nearly kills baby Joy/Evangeline and herself, and when she goes to the Mellow Tiger for a drink in her despair over losing Joy, Annie orders a vodka, mumbling to herself that it’s “mama’s drink” (Episode 5, “The Laughing Place”). Then there’s Nadia (Yusra Warsama) and Abdi’s (Barkhad Abdi) mother, a traumatic loss that is reopened for Nadia when she learns the truth about Pop (Tim Robbins) and his motivation for adopting the two of them. 

In each of these cases, the influence and impact of a mother and what it means to care for a child are at the heart of these tensions: Annie has cared for Joy for sixteen years and while she hasn’t done so perfectly by any means, she knows Joy better than anyone else and has her best interests at heart. Rita has a strong biological connection with Evangeline and is willing to do anything for her, even through the time and space that have separated them. Annie struggles to break out of the cycle of mental instability she has inherited from her mother, but finds herself in danger of repeating these patterns. When Nadia learns the truth about her mother’s death, this realization steals her mother from her all over again, and costs her the love and faith she had in Pop as well, losing both her mother and a surrogate father. 

The other central theme in “The Mother”—and one which echoes through the entire series—is the significance and role of storytelling. After all, that’s what Castle Rock is doing: telling new stories that allow us to reconsider people and places we know. In the opening scene of “The Mother,” when Rita is talking at an AA meeting, the role of storytelling is overtly addressed. As Rita tells the others in the meeting, she moved away from California in the years following her daughter’s kidnapping because “I didn’t want to be a part of that story anymore. And it’s funny because stories used to be my life, my job. I was gonna teach the classics, show young minds how stories shape our world. And then someone pulled me into her story … And shaped my world” (“The Mother”). The story Carl Wilkes (John Hoogenakker) tells in his book The Ravening Angel shapes all of their lives and when he dedicates that story to Rita rather than Annie, that usurpation of the story she thought was hers breaks something in Annie, setting into motion the series of events that end in her father’s death, her stabbing of Rita, and her kidnapping of Evangeline. 

Annie has told Joy stories her whole life to protect her, keep her safe, and keep secrets from her, while Rita has had to construct stories to reassure herself that her daughter is alive somewhere. While some of these stories present an idealized world, such as Annie telling Joy that Carl was a “good old guy,” others are almost impossible to endure, like when Rita tells Annie, “You know what the hardest part was? Hoping that you were a good mom … Because the other option was she’s dead.” This isn’t a story Rita wants to tell herself or one that she even feels confident in believing, but it is central to her survival, one she has to tell herself to get through each day and hold onto the hope of being reunited with Evangeline someday.

 When Joy and Annie speak after Joy has learned the truth, Annie tells another story, one that justifies what she did and elevates her love for Joy above all other considerations. When Rita finds Evangeline, she has a narrative of her own in mind, of what their shared story might look like moving forward, though once again, her story and the story that Annie (and later Joy) construct are at odds and mutually exclusive, with Rita’s story taking a darker turn. Even Chance (Abby Corrigan) tells Joy a story, about how they can leave town and run away to North Carolina, a story of queer potential and freedom. As Joy navigates the expectations that others’ stories set for her, we have to hold on to the hope that sometime, she’ll get to make her own choices and tell her own story. 

These conflicting stories jostle for supremacy and legitimacy, as each person tries to impose their own needs, desires, and vision on the world and people around them. But in the end, the story of Castle Rock goes much deeper than any of this, and none of them have the power to steer their course of action in the way they hope. That’s a story set in stone and one that can only be told by Amity (Mathilde Dehaye), when we fall further into Castle Rock’s history with the next episode, “The Angel.”