‘Castle Rock’ Episode 7 Recap: “The Queen”

Behold, and I will tell you a mystery: the kid is Father Matthew Deaver. Whether he’s a vessel carrying the spirit that left the reverend’s body in ’91 or somehow literally a younger Matthew in soul and unaging body, and if he understands, we just don’t know. With scientific what-ifs for almost all Castle Rock‘s apparent supernaturalities—Odin Branch’s “schisma,” Henry’s tinnitus, Molly’s “mirror neurons,” Zalewski’s mental health—we shouldn’t get too mired in the metaphysical/unholy logistics yet. The show’s been laying all this mythological groundwork so in its most dazzling hour we can step completely into Ruth’s bathwater-filled shoes, our hearts so broken and minds so scrambled that words like “Reddit” and “multiverse” are momentarily meaningless.

So if you’re not weeping by the time Ruth and Alan (rest in peace, you fantastic man) have their coda on the porch, you might be doing it wrong. And if you’re hellbent on a craven shock-twist to undermine what we’ve been given here, you definitely are.

In “Filter,” Ruth broke down for Wendell why, as the kid told Alan, time is her enemy. Her grandson’s response in “The Queen” is equally key: Ruth is a “timewalker,” a concept from an augmented reality smartphone game that summons evil specters into your actual surroundings. (Wry stuff in a town where “every inch is stained with someone’s sin.”) “Timewalkers are the most powerful, ’cause they’re the only avatars that can actually kill the dead,” Wendell tells her. “They’re pissed off, because we’re alive and they’re not. You gotta stay sharp, ’cause they can change their skin, and sometimes even look like your allies.” Nobody stays dead in the game unless a timewalker intervenes. “Theoretically,” Wendell tells her, “you could just kill your nemesis and fix the whole timeline.”

Yes, Ruth has a nemesis, and it makes so much sense he’s been kept from us except a glance at his portrait and a couple quick appearances in bandages. Without the surname, “Matthew” might not have even rung a bell as recently as one episode ago. His toxic character is unveiled in tandem with the slow surprise that he’s still walking the earth, his personality steadily bubbling up in the kid. His face isn’t a dead ringer for Skarsgård’s, but they feel virtually identical, each with the countenance of an off-kilter sketchball, equal parts lost little boy and violent sufferer, nothing good behind those eyes. (The kid’s shy smiles and that one big, broad one are horror incarnate.)

We revisit a selection of scenes to see how Ruth was, before and after, being privately whisked through time to relive the searing pain of her marriage and the enduring sweetness of loving Alan and her son. (A bath-time game of Norse mythology guess-who between giggly young Henry and his Viking literature professor mom opens, “Are you living or dead?” “Oh, long dead. Ancient history.”) Strategically placed Lewis chessmen snap Ruth back to the present, but the boundaries vanish when we return to the shot of the kid entering her kitchen after his Juniper Hill breakout. Now it’s Matthew who’s taking off his coat and shoes, telling Ruth to go to bed—until he brushes past her and has become the kid, looking ready to fix his favorite sandwich, white bread on white bread. Ruth stumbles into the living room to see the kid’s mug on the news. She eyes the cross on the wall and says it, flat out: “Matthew.” Now where are the bullets that bastard hid from her way once upon a wretched time?

Molly shows up frantically seeking Henry, who always seems to be missing in the woods. Ruth says she saw Molly kill Matthew—we did spy her shifting conspicuously under the covers—but won’t pause to hear an apology. “No, you did right,” Ruth says, petrified. “But it didn’t take. He’s back. In the present, not the past. But I’m going to fix it.”

She shuts Molly out and finds the kid has re-hung a shattered family photo and put on a record of “Blue Moon,” asking her vacantly, “Remember this?” Ruth cannot…fucking…believe it: “What?” The kid prods: “You don’t know?” In Ruth’s answer we get the shell-shocked approach to this entire reveal: “I want to know if you know.” (“You knew,” Elvis sings, “just what I was there for.”)

The kid either doesn’t, fully or partially, or is playing a perverse game: “Your husband. They played it at your wedding.” Your, your, sure, but who’s the couple swaying grimly to it now, again? Who’s pulling Ruth to his chest, resting his chin on his head and soaking it in, folding the past onto the present? Who knows the safe combination is Ruth’s birthday, and shares it without hesitation, because he never feared his wife?

“You don’t know what he was capable of,” Ruth once told Alan. Matthew did things like poison Puck the family dog (a tactic favored by mentally ill heels in It and Mr. Mercedes) and stick a pistol in his ear at a family picnic to demonstrate how he tuned into God’s voice. “I think we should call Dr. Pierce,” Ruth whispers with remarkable evenness. Matthew says he “scraped all that out of me, I’m healthy.” He had a glioma, the same type of brain tumor that drove yet another King villain violently insane, in Under the Dome. SK’s career-long preoccupation with the line between sanity and the other side is well-represented on this show.

Young Ruth appears in almost none of her flashbacks-that-aren’t-just-flashbacks. Her 60-something self is there instead, mirroring the idea that Matthew might look like some young dude in 2018, but he is Matthew, and the things that festered in that head were never laid to rest. Spacek herself has been a sort of timewalker this whole series, one of the most iconic faces in the Kingverse, drawing and re-drawing a line between Carrie and Castle Rock. It’s wise to have her handle these scenes, and the only real way to show the constantly renewed agony of not leaving Matthew, of failing Henry, of missing out on 30 good years with Alan.

So many King adaptations dilute or bastardize his essence, and a few hew to it with The Green Mile/Stand by Me/Gerald’s Game-ish success. Castle Rock chose to unwrap this secret in a way only television could, looping us through moments that seem cryptic or straightforward, then back through, again and again until the truth is suddenly an inescapable noose. All kinds of remarks now seem to have unspoken follow-ups: The kid asking Henry’s age at Shawshank? My son has grown so big. (“The Queen” reminds us Henry is older than Matthew lived to be.) Terrifying the warden’s sidekick with that Bible verse? I used to be a pro. “Why would you leave me in that trunk, sheriff?” Yeah, I remember when you were sheriff, and screwing my wife. The neurologist who wants to fight the kid’s amnesia by returning him to his home and possessions? Nice, do you guys still have my sermon tapes, home movies, and poorly fitting suits?

For the thing we absolutely need the second half of, we’ll have to wait. “Do you remember,” Warden Lacy asked the caged kid, “that crazy story you told me the night I found you?”

ONE GREAT CONSTANT READER EASTER EGG

Alan shows Ruth some sleight of hand magic in bed. (“Why do these all sound pornographic?” “They were invented by virgins.”) At the climax of Needful Things, Pangborn realizes he can use his magician skills to vanquish the monster Leland Gaunt, even bellowing, “ABRACADABRA, YOU LYING FUCK!”

ONE THRILLING THEORY

“You think burying one dog pays a debt on the other.” Something about Alan’s comment is sticking, along with the idea of Lacy’s suicide-Lincoln being brought back to town. Is the kid, or someone else, getting stuffed in that trunk to complete a ritual and correct some of this madness?

Zach Dionne is a Mainer who owes a life debt to the 75 or so King books shelved directly next to him as he writes this.

Watch Castle Rock Episode 7 ("The Queen") on Hulu