‘Castle Rock’ Episode 2 Recap: “Habeas Corpus”

Castle Rock‘s first hour carefully set things up and (re)introduced the town’s rot; this one taps into flickery-lights horror right off. C.O. Zalewski navigates a dark Shawshank in bloody chaos courtesy of the mute prisoner, only to find his mind’s been screwed with and nobody’s dead, including the coworker he nearly shot. Hmm.

Warden Lacy’s voiceover girds the episode, starting its tale “the fall after they found that boy’s body out by the train tracks,” when his cougar mascot brother hopped off the school’s roof during a football game. The suicide preceded Lacy’s own by six decades, during which he became a man who could point to any house in town and declare “every inch is stained with someone’s sin.” (His home—a dead ringer for any respectable mental image of ‘Salem’s Lot’s Marsten House—has its own Overlook-ish fatality history.) Castle Rock ain’t some dead hamlet struck by “a run of bad luck, worse judgment, broken promises.” Lacy knew it wasn’t luck but “a plan, and not God’s, either.” (As quick extratextual proof, he asks, “Remember the dog? The strangler? Sure you do.”)

Faithful Lacy craved God’s real blueprint, wondering “with all the guile of hell arrayed against this town, what can one decent man do?” After years of silence, the big man informed him, “one beautiful day,” how to save the town. George Bush announcing Operation Desert Storm on TV pins it as January ’91, a week into Henry Deaver’s disappearance.

Alan Pangborn fleshes this part out in the present: “The devil was a boy. And old Dale said he’d caught him, had locked the devil in a box. And from here on out it was blue skies and butterflies.” God explained where to find this devil and how to build his prison, insisting he never see daylight again. (Got some bad news for ya, God.)

“What he didn’t tell me was how full of doubt I would be about what we did. Or where I’d wind up, in the end,” Lacy concludes, his severed head being uncovered by the dog he shared a moment with before his inventive death. Is some weird body-doubling shit happening or did his head just fly super far and bury itself fairly deep? We did hear last time nobody could find the head, and Lacy’s eyes did that weird flicker before…

Some or all of the voiceover, we find, is a suicide note to Alan Pangborn, begging him to once more be Castle Rock’s “defender, even in the dead of night.” Al’s not psyched.

Henry is a beleaguered pariah, still bitterly blamed for his father’s death every direction he turns. Lacy’s blind wife (Frances Conroy, of Spike’s The Mist) invites him in for a chat, deduces who is, and lets him know “there’s a special place in hell.” You know, for all those middle schoolers who kill their dads. First, though, he spies the Lacys’ padlocked basement door and Dale’s newspaper clippings. One provides our second Cujo nod of the hour, but the biggie is “Shopkeeper Missing After Oddity Store Fire.” A.k.a. Needful Things, and yes, proprietor Leland Gaunt is name-checked, a whole other devil, the kind who bargains for souls.

Even admiring Henry’s death row lawyering, a young reverend has to slip in that it’s “nice to see redemption in the flesh.” (Cut to Shawshank, abutting an actual Redemption Road. Wow.) At the Mellow Tiger bar—a King-created establishment that’s outlasted another known local spot, Nan’s Luncheonette—Henry meets Jackie Torrance, whose name is a lot to take in and whose mandatory Shining connection should surface soon. She reveals the Rock “voted to unincorporate” a few years ago and is “literally no longer on the map,” then misguidedly tells Henry’s own dark legend to him. (He inspired Halloween costumes for years, till people realized blackface was its own evil.)

Jackie, like us, knows nothing of one Molly Strand’s role in Henry’s story, the across-the-street-neighbor who used to scrawl his name obsessively in notebooks. In a flashback, Pangborn’s deputy Norris Ridgewick (who ascends to sheriff in latter King novels) fruitlessly questioned her during Henry’s disappearance. In 2018, she’s a realtor taking those teenager-procured pills to “muffle other people’s noise,” something about mirror neurons “responsible for empathy.”

Henry smuggles himself into Shawshank with church volunteers to lay eyes on the prisoner whose existence the panicked warden won’t confirm. She’d hoped to make the problem disappear by throwing Mutie in a tiny cell with a crabby white power goon just trying to read Lord of the Flies (which gave King the name Castle Rock and bears an intro from him in its centenary edition). The lunk is dead in the morning, his body riddled with cancer, the type King villains adore giving to healthy middle-aged men with the touch of a finger.

Henry and Mutie almost romantically spot each other from across the yard (hey, it is Shawshank), Henry shouting he just needs to say the word and he’s got a lawyer. Hopefully Pangborn’s warning to the new warden makes its way to Henry soon: “Don’t let that fuckin’ kid out.”

ONE GREAT CONSTANT READER EASTER EGG

The title credits, scored by Shawshank/Green Mile composer Thomas Newman. We the see header of a Paul Sheldon–penned Misery chapter starts very Castle Rock–ishly if you dig it up: “The irritating thing about village life, he thought, was that there weren’t enough people for there to be any perfect strangers; instead, there were just enough to keep one from knowing immediately who many of the villagers were.”

ONE THRILLING THEORY

At least one person’s rising from the grave, presumably with Pet Sematary–ish results. (Remember Henry’s death row client wondering if “the tape” in our heads “gets erased” when we clock out?) This time we exhume a dog to ensure its deadness (ewwww), see that other pup unearth Lacy’s head, learn about Henry’s dad and the rest of the church cemetery being relocated across the state, and hear of a grave-desecrating convict. Even that “Habeas Corpus” title is a wink, Latin for “you have the body,” a phrase Angel modified for the zombie-themed episode “Habeas Corpses.”

Zach Dionne is a Mainer whose fifth grade Stephen King meet cute was Cujo; he’s digging the references.

Watch Castle Rock Episode 2 ("Habeas Corpus") on Hulu