‘Castle Rock’ Episode 4 Recap: “The Box”

Everyone in “The Box” (Castle Rock Episode 4) wants to take what they’ve recently gone through—and in some cases relived—and move toward closure and hope, for themselves and Castle Rock. They can’t see far down the path to a brighter future, but they want to believe they’re on it. And as countless Stephen King characters have learned, this is the part of the story where reality, and whatever’s lurking on the other side, hobbles optimism with a sledgehammer.

Trying to sell Lacy’s house, Molly is forced to disclose the owner did commit suicide, but not on the premises. “I mean, a serial strangler died in my house”—The Dead Zone‘s Frank Dodd, who slit his throat on the toilet, naked except a raincoat—”and I sleep like a baby,” she assures the couple from out of state. Homes go for an unthinkable 40 percent less than one zipcode away, and this cheery realtor whose signs read “Live like a King!” (ha) is positive “property values are gonna shoot through the roof, which, by the way, was just reshingled last year.” Melanie Lynskey is the best, and Molly puts up a pretty damn good performance of her own, but the day when Castle Rock stops waving its awfulness in her face is far off.

Pangborn wants to forget Lacy’s suicide plea for him to play hero again. Alan already eradicated evil in the ’80s and ’90s with The Dark Half and Needful Things and suffered for both; he wants peace and to hold Ruth’s hand through her “sundowning” days, living on the ground he fought for and just “trying to keep this fuckin’ fence from falling down.” Instead, Henry’s talking about taking Alan’s love away to Texas, and the reverend whose bed he’s sleeping in is having his body disinterred and brought back to town.

The warden’s corporate errand boy thinks his goal is especially straightforward: threaten to feed the mute his teeth until he gives up his name. The suit finds himself literally backtracking in a panic as the prisoner drones a verse from Revelation, ending with, “He is clothed with a robe dipped in blood. And his name is called the word of God.” The cell wall’s etchings don’t seem especially meaningful, but that black spider web next to Skarsgård is a fun echo of Pennywise’s true arachnoid state.

Living more drawn-out setbacks this time are Zalewski and Henry, whose fractured 1991 dream opens the episode. Henry’s dad calls for him again in the woods, then he’s alone in a dirt-floor basement behind a chain link fence with a Bible and a toy car. A figure descends the stairs as real-life Henry is crept up on by a shadow holding what looks to be a knife. (In a town threatened by devils, he’s tucked into a Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil comforter.) He’s startled awake, and whoever was there has vanished, exactly like what Molly just experienced with Father Deaver’s ghost.

At the library Henry learns of Vince Desjardins, a con who was investigated and cleared in connection with his disappearance. He visits the man’s True Detective-y stone house in the woods, less than a mile from where he went missing. Nobody’s home, and from a kitchen with a collapsed ceiling vomiting a piano, Henry sees an old wooden box in the backyard big enough to hold a person. Busting it open with a shovel he finds nothing but a disused bowl and spoon inside.

Desjardins’ brother Joseph pulls up, a strangely mannered older man who cuts hair way out here. (“Cool murder barber shop,” Jackie Torrance might say.) Small moments like the slight jauntiness that comes over this guy when he learns Henry’s identity, or Sissy Spacek gutting those fish, are quietly weaving a deeply unsettling atmosphere. Joe leads Henry through a super-hoarder second floor labyrinth where his case file is stashed under a bed; Joe wanted to know what the cops wrote after they came poking around. At the moment some clarity might come, his eyes turn into those of a hardcore conspiracy theorist haunted by bomb tests, “carbon-14,” and “God’s perfect clock.”

Desjardins comes back to earth long enough to tell Henry, eye to eye, in the tone of a sincere confidant or a bullshitting hypnotist, “You know I never touched you.”

What theeeee hell is going on here? That box isn’t where Henry remembers being trapped, although he did pass a crappy basement bulkhead outside Desjardins’. We’ve now seen a cage hidden inside Shawshank, a moldering box in the woods, and a basement enclosure, each sort of fitting Lacy’s tale of divine instruction for trapping the devil masquerading as a boy. Did multiple folks intercept the same godly broadcast? Was Henry mistaken for the devil—or was the kid at Shawshank? Are other kids part of this?

Pangborn is tired of these bitter back-and-forths with Henry and lets loose. He “knows” Henry shoved his dad to that back-breaking, almost-froze-to-death fate. “He had that fuckin’ tube down his throat, so he wrote it out for me on a goddamn bank slip, all capital letters: Henry did it.” André Holland is being constantly tasked with strong reactions to slightly odd or deeply personal comments, and he’s handling it phenomenally.

“Maybe I did it,” Henry tells Molly, the only person he can go to, who’s overheard the fight using her species of the Shine. Her response is as much for herself as him: “Whatever happened, it wasn’t your fault. You were just a kid.” They sleep together, the type of early-in-the-game hookup King has favored since ‘Salem’s Lot. Alan’s reveal jettisons Henry’s plan to stick around a full week; he’s pushing his silent client to take the settlement and getting out of the Rock tomorrow.

Dennis Zalewski’s momentum reversal is the most severe, turning fatal with Henry’s choice to split. The C.O. has started feeling imprisoned along with his wards, now desperate to use the mute’s story to expose Shawshank’s violent corruption. He wants his baby to have a hero for a dad, and he spits on the town’s bad luck thesis just like Lacy. “Bad shit happens here ’cause bad people know they’re safe here. How many times can one fucking town look the other way?” he asks Henry. (Derry: “Hold my beer.”)

Zalewski’s so hopped up on justice he’s sliding his hand into the mute’s cell to offer a fist bump and a promise he’ll soon see there’s a “whole world beyond these walls.” No worries about the time this guy killed his cellmate with overnight cancer, or when he projected that massacre into Zalewski’s own mind, or onto his security TVs, which he’s about to cover with smiley faces and X’s.

Zalewski, who almost shot a coworker the first time Mutie got into his head, came in at the top of the hour to Tom Waits’ wobbly “Clap Hands,” and he goes down with a mass shooting set to Roy Orbison’s bright, lonesome “Crying.” “I was alright for awhile/I could smile for awhile,” the ballad goes, a perfect memo from Zalewski to the town that let him down. “But I saw you last night/You held my hand so tight/As you stopped to say, ‘Hello.'” And when Castle Rock grabs you to say hi that way, it might be your goodbye.

ONE GREAT CONSTANT READER EASTER EGG

Sissy Spacek talking about Desjardins is a treat: in the book, Carrie was rescued from the “plug it up!” mob by one Miss Desjardin. (The elusive Vince Desjardins rolled with Ace Merrill in “The Body”; the Merrill ties are stacking up.) She also invokes the famous bucket of pig’s blood, telling Henry a resident was called a Satanist “just because she slaughtered her own pigs.”

ONE THRILLING THEORY

Was Henry’s father just like Lacy, a “good man” who locked up a child like an animal as an alleged service to his god and town? That clear glimpse of Maple Street could be a hint: the Nightmares & Dreamscapes story bearing its name concerns a stepdad so shitty the kids lure him into their new house just as it finishes a weird transformation and blasts off like a rocket, freeing the family as swiftly as Molly relieved Henry of his adoptive, definitely imperfect pops. And did his wife know the truth of him, explaining that frozen look seeing his coffin come back, and why she might have seen Molly murder her him but said nothing?

Zach Dionne is a Mainer who just found out King is celebrating Halloween this year with a Castle Rock–set novella called Elevation.

Watch Castle Rock Episode 4 ("The Box") on Hulu