‘Castle Rock’ Episode 8 Recap: “Past Perfect”

The genius execution of “The Queen” forced us to leave Henry hanging in “the filter,” being blasted with schisma. Or into the schisma. Something. Despite Odin Branch’s pontificating, we still don’t know, and as with many things, we aren’t finding out tonight. In Castle Rock Episode 8 (“Past Perfect”), we aren’t even reuniting with our guy until we take in a 10-minute vignette about a man’s descent into madness, in many ways a miniaturization of The Shining.

A Lost-style boom, a thrumming bell, and a jarring swipe of the camera whoosh us to the face of an about-to-snap professor named Gordon. He’s barely familiar, half of the couple Molly briefly tried selling a house, and it’s discomfiting having no clue why we’re here. The show keeps injecting meaning anywhere it can, though, and the smug guy in the hot seat contends “repression is a crucial Darwinian tool. The human mind is expressly designed to forget much of its past suffering.” (The Shining‘s very first sentence fits, another cold open on an interview with a violent academic: “Jack Torrance thought: Officious little prick.”) The doofus is only in the room so the prof can assault him for sleeping with his wife.

Gordon and said wife buy Warden Lacy’s house to turn it into Castle Rock Historic B&B, with local murders recreated in “exquisite detail.” They’re planning to acquire more properties and help rebrand the town as what Jackie affectionately refers to as a “murder theme park.” Instead of typing the “all work and no play…” credo ad nauseum, Gordon walks sanity’s tightrope by prepping mannequin body parts for gory displays. But as the Overlook gave Jack the final push he needed, something about Lacy’s dozens of oil paintings of the kid (yikes) takes possession of the professor. Nor does it help that his first guests are married folks having an affair.

Wearing clear, blood-spatter-ready glasses Patrick Bateman might’ve tried at his age, Gordo nips upstairs to slash the adulterers to death under the watchful eye of the kid up there on the wall. He rises like he’s one of his death-mannequins and, relievingly revealed soon after, does not kill his wife. She gets an affair, he gets a double murder. Repression, baby.

Molly gets visions of plenty of what Henry has seen and maybe more. It’s again absorbing and unenlightening…but what in god’s name is that flash of the kid looking fancy with coiffed hair, shouting—shouting!—“no”?

Tough luck on the answer for that one; ditto dead Odin with a fire poker in his eye and no one to witness it. Unless the kid or a stabby unknown party visited the site, the suspects are Molly, Odin’s interpreter Willie, or Odin himself. None seem sensible or worth exploring; at this stage it’s starting to feel like we have to let some stuff go.

“They really just locked you in there and left?” Molly asks in the car after rescuing Henry. Is there something new he understands now, looking out her window? “I know it was only a few hours, but it felt like years,” he says. “Thought I knew how the world worked, what was real and what’s not.”

Henry finds his mother asleep and the house silent, and it’s time to have a faceoff with the entity who last week seemed a lock for a reincarnated Matthew Deaver; somehow that all-but-certain reveal is already fraying. He shows Pangborn’s body to Henry and suggests they hide him in the woods to protect Ruth. Then, echoing their first conversation as well as Henry’s father/son woods walks, the kid asks: “Do you hear it? You do, finally. We have to go. We have to go to the woods.” He gets angry for the first time before hobbling away as the cops pull up: “I waited for you. I waited for 27 years. I rescued you from that basement, and I didn’t ask for any of this.” Rescued him?!

Ruth isn’t arrested, allowing her to explain to Henry, “I don’t know how he came back, but he did. Only I stood up to him this time, like I should’ve before. I protected you, and your boy.” The fact she’s forgotten she actually killed Alan—while totally in line with her dementia—sadly feels like tampering with the evidence of Matthew being the kid. It’s hard to picture a more clever and emotionally resonant solution to the mystery, so hopefully Castle Rock isn’t planning an awkward twist or an out-of-the-blue explanation via King novel. The show hasn’t set itself up to pop out and say, “Surprise, he’s Leland Gaunt!”

Odin promised Henry self-knowledge abounded inside the filter, plus true closeness with his son. Given a chance to be honest, he keeps gives Wendell a BS “I had to do something” non-apology. Little champ had to sleep in the pews of his grandfather’s church after Ruth sent him away without explanation. “It’s fucked up, dad,” Wendell assesses. Then, in line to board the bus back to his mom: “Grandma’s got dementia, and she’s taught me more about you in one day than you have in my whole life.” Henry promises him a few weeks together soon. He only needs a couple more days in town. A bird smashes into the windshield before departure, and Wendell gets his first experience with the ol’ schisma, blaring in his ear. He gets off at the Jerusalem’s Lot bus station (!!) and starts walking to the Rock. (Derry and Chester’s Mill got their overt mentions last week, btw.)

To follow up on the kid’s basement tip, Henry sneaks into Lacy’s, which after all that cellar-ish teasing yields nothing. With nobody home and his car parked right in front, Henry creeps to the second floor. (Two questions: Why, and why?) André Holland throughout the series has had to quietly react to a lot of weird shit, but Henry seems different since the filter, and his reaction walking into the room with all the kid’s portraits is a new species of this cannot be happening, but of course it’s happening. He learns the kid doesn’t age, and a familiar shirt either gives him yet another secret piece of the puzzle or simply emphasizes the link between them.

Discovered by the wacko Gordon, Henry isn’t remotely prepared, weakly trying “I knocked” and “I’m a lawyer” as explanations. Wifey sneaks up and stab Henry in the side, much like the kid got stuck last week, only with gray sweatpants instead of a gray sweatshirt. The scuffle leads her to gash her own throat and Henry bolts. A fully feral Gordon catches him, and in a fantastic turn of events Jackie Torrance materializes to chop the prof in the head with an ax. Discriminating viewers previously noted her tale of that namesake uncle trying “to ax-murder his wife and kid at some fancy ski resort” was unfaithful to the roque mallet–featuring novel, but it’s underscored here as an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s film. Like the Bob Gunton photo in Shawshank, Jackie reminds aficionados of King adaptations they’re as welcome here as Constant Readers.

Waiting to talk to police for the second time that day, Henry gets a call saying Ruth showed up at the church asking if Pangborn was “alive or dead this time.” He flees the scene, and it’s unclear how that one’s gonna work out, with an asshole cop already calling Henry “the Black Death” that morning and noting the body count amassing  in and around his wake.

We end on what’s most important and withholding. Molly sees more visions—running in the forest, Henry as a kid in sunglasses again, herself bloody on the ground. She chomps an unusual amount of Oxy, throws on sunglasses at night, and manages to drive toward Henry’s house without incident. She stops at her childhood home, where the lights are on and the kid’s sitting inside on the stairs. Asked where Henry is, he answers, “I don’t think he’s ready yet.” He brushes past Molly’s confusion, only to double it: “But you can help me—because you know me.” And he knows her, what this house and her childhood were like. How does he have all these uncomfortable details? In her bedroom, snow falling out the window, always-captivating soundtrack skipping like a needle past the vinyl’s edge, he says:  “I was there. Out there, in the woods. That’s where you died.”

ONE GREAT CONSTANT READER EASTER EGG

“Gordon has always been interested in the macabre; he did his PhD on the BTK killer.” The matron of Castle Rock Historic B&B references the serial killer that inspired King’s 2010 novella “A Good Marriage.” He wrote it to “explore what might happen in such a case if the wife suddenly found out about her husband’s awful hobby,” which also happens here.

ONE THRILLING THEORY

With so little reinforcing the idea that Matthew is the kid, other alternatives are wide open for exploration again. One that didn’t seem worth noting last week but does now: Henry mentioned quickly to Wendell that Ruth and Matthew lost a baby before deciding to adopt. If the kid isn’t Henry’s father, is he his brother?

Zach Dionne is a Mainer who recommends André Holland’s Fresh Air interview.

Watch Castle Rock Episode 8 ("Past Perfect") on Hulu