Late in “The Word,” the seventh episode of Castle Rock’s (2018-2019) second season, erstwhile Ace Merrill (Paul Sparks) reflects how “someone once said every good story ends where it begins.” Time is circuitous in Castle Rock, from Ruth Deaver’s (Sissy Spacek) chronologically disrupted memories and the secrets of the past that continue to shape the present, to the series’ complex position within the larger Stephen King universe and established characters’ timelines. “The Word” takes us back to Castle Rock’s beginnings in more ways than one. 

First, the 400th anniversary of Castle Rock’s founding has been omnipresent throughout the series, going all the way back to the scarecrows that Annie (Lizzy Caplan) hit in the accident that stranded her and Joy (Elsie Fisher) in Castle Rock in the season’s first episode. In “The Word,” the anniversary celebration is just around the corner, raising some interesting questions about civic pride and how one commemorates such a milestone in a place where history is often violent and shrouded in secrecy. 

The Marsten House is also central to Castle Rock’s connection of the past and present. Hubie Marsten from King’s novel ’Salem’s Lot (1975) is name-checked pretty early in the second season, but as events continue to unfold, it is clear that the corruption of that particular place goes much deeper and far further back (reinforcing the novel’s notion that the Marsten House has a dark, alluring power to draw bad people toward itself). As the extensive flashback scenes of “The Word” reveal, in Castle Rock’s earliest days, the settlers turned their backs on their leaders to believe in and follow Amity (Mathilde Dehaye), who was exiled from their community but returned triumphantly with food and guidance from a mysterious angel. The settlement prospers, with Amity willingly following the Angel’s commands, until he demands the death of all the settlers. While Amity initially resists this sacrifice, she ultimately follows his guidance, promising the people that in four hundred years they will be resurrected in new bodies with a new purpose, placing an insect in each of their mouths before cutting their throats and entombing them beneath the land that would one day be home to the Marsten House. 

This pattern of resurrection and control deviates from the vampires of King’s ’Salem’s Lot, but there are distinct parallels: the individuals’ state is clearly undead, with many of the depicted murders leaving no question that those people’s bodies are (or at least temporarily were) clearly dead. The familiar becoming unfamiliar delves into the land of the uncanny: people are recognizable and known, but alien and disconcerting, as in Ace’s changed demeanor and sudden taste for good wine following his resurrection. And like the vampires of Jerusalem’s Lot, the infection quickly spreads from person to person, in dark shadows and isolated encounters between people who think they know one another. 

An important distinction, however, is that these reanimated Castle Rock-ers now share their bodies with Amity’s followers: Ace has been transformed and is the new corporeal embodiment of Amity’s lover Pere Augustine (David Alpay). As a result, there is a dualism at play here, with each individual having the knowledge of both of the people they have been, in the settlement 400 years ago and in contemporary Castle Rock, which can be leveraged and manipulated toward Amity’s purpose.

In addition to the story of Castle Rock’s earliest days, “The Word” also draws us back to the series’ first season. The story of the Kid (Bill Skarsgård) radiates through the episode, particularly with conversations about the reopening of Shawshank, and Molly Strand’s (Melanie Lynskey) experience in the woods, with the rip in the sky and the ominous reverberating sound is repeated in Amity’s time in the wilderness. In considering those hallucinatory encounters in the woods in Season One, we now have the frame of reference to recognize the knife-wielding woman Molly sees as Amity herself. Most importantly, however, is the revelation of Amity’s angel, which appears to be the Kid himself. Ace goes to Shawshank to see the cage, which is locked and empty, with a pile of neatly folded clothes left behind. There are a lot of unanswered questions: if the Kid and the angel are one and the same, why didn’t he use those powers to save himself or make his escape in the first season? Or if there’s a long-range plan that hinges on his imprisonment, what is it and what purpose does that serve? There’s more than meets the eye, something far more complex than a simple correlation that the Kid and the angel are one and the same, but the truth of that mystery remains out of reach. 

All in all, “The Word” makes it undeniably clear that everything is connected over the course of four centuries: the original settlement and the troubled town Castle Rock has become, the secrets individual people keep and the explosive ramifications of their revelation, the central mysteries of the series’ first season and the new horrors of the second.