‘Castle Rock’ Episode 9 Recap: “Henry Deaver”

“Other heres, other nows. All possible pasts, all possible presents. Schisma is the sound of the universe trying to reconcile them.”—Willie, Castle Rock, Episode 6

“But two are better than one, because they have a good return on their labor. If either of them falls down, one can help the other up.”—Ecclesiastes 4:09-4:10, overheard in Castle Rock Episode 1

“Henry Deaver. Henry…Matthew…Deaver.”—Henry Deaver, asked for his name in Shawshank, Castle Rock Episode 1
Behold, and Castle Rock will tell you a mystery vaster than the kid being Matthew Deaver: he’s Henry Deaver, biological son edition, who jumped into our story’s version of 1991 from an alternate 2018, then lived 27 years in a cage without aging. Two Henrys, two timelines, three pounds of splattered gray matter where your mind just was.

“God turned his back on this place,” opens Matthew Deaver’s narration in Castle Rock Episode 9 (“Henry Deaver”), studiously recreating Lacy’s suicide letter verbatim at points. He dedicated his life to “fighting this great battle, to hearing his voice. Let me stand athwart the door, I told him. But God, he doesn’t take requests.” He duplicated the cage like he duplicated those words, except in his basement. Matthew—a former reverend here—at least has the sense to call the day God answered him “terrible,” not, as the warden numbly thought, “beautiful.”
Then the show’s most forcefully Lost-y moment strikes, the “psych!” transformation of the kid as presumably a fugitive from the Castle Rock police into…an average dude taking a run. In modern day Boston, where he has a chic-ass house and suit, some donuts (time is a raised, sugary circle), and a note signed “Love, M.” As in Maret, Henry’s ex, Wendell’s mom. In this Henry’s reality, the two aren’t long-separated, but happy and trying to conceive. The prospect of a baby gives this Henry a goal for next week’s finale, but it also summons our Henry’s answer for why Ruth and Matthew decided to adopt, now the explanation for this alternate timeline: “They lost a baby in labor. Guess they didn’t wanna go down that road again.” Matthew’s return from strangulation as an infant also gets us in a “what if he’d lived/died” frame of mind.
Giving a fancy presentation while we’re scrambling to adjust to this total change in body language and style and the way the world works, Henry reveals he’s a doctor working to eradicate Alzheimer’s. “Continuity: it’s hard work. We don’t notice we’re doing it, but we are placing events in sequence so that our lives make sense,” he says, stating the episode’s purpose. “When continuity is interrupted, everything starts to slide.” Reason, planning, problem-solving. “And ultimately, confusion with time and space. That is the story of Hulu’s Castle Rock Alzheimer’s disease.” They’ve given a cat—Puck, a.k.a. our Henry’s childhood dog—a brain implant that has him “finally in command of his arch-narrative again.”
A call from Alan Pangborn destroys the last chance that we’re witnessing some kind of near-future rebrand for “the kid,” one where he used those supposed evil powers to turn himself into an urbane gentleman practicing medicine. Ruth and Matthew Deaver’s biological son survived labor in this timeline, and his dad survived 1991 but has now shot himself. Henry hasn’t been to the Rock for many years, maybe since Alan successfully rerouted Ruth’s tragic existence by convincing her to leave Matthew sometime pre-’91. The series has been cagey about the kid’s eye color, and his return to town pointedly displays full heterochromia.

This edition of the Rock is flourishing the way our Molly—herself thriving as city council chair—imagined it, with businesses like Claiborne Creamery (as in Dolores), Sheldon Stationery (as in Misery‘s Paul), a sushi/ramen joint, the revived Emporium Galorium, and the Mellow Tiger Gastropub, née “Bar.” An annual harvest festival is underway and balloons are everywhere, not just on one sad mailbox at a dead guy’s bargain-priced house. It’s the latest especially large nod to Skarsgård’s other alternate existence, Pennywise, but the park’s gate is also numbered 19 on each side. Powerful in the Kingverse, the figure was also doubled up in last year’s Dark Tower movie several times. (And the film premiered at 19:19 p.m., and had a $19 million opener.)

Then it’s a surreal retracing of our Henry’s journey past Matthew’s church—same rolling suitcase and off-kilter camera angle, but no visit inside—and up North Prospect Street. The house is ridden with hoarder’s neglect, appearing to have been decorated by that weirdo in the woods, Desjardins. And guess who’s trapped in the mother-effing basement in the year of our lord 2018? CHILD HENRY, our Henry, eyes bloodshot, stare vacant—similarities and echoes between these two have been a constant, and now they became full-on samenesses, a true mirror between other heres and nows. Zalewski is still alive here, and takes part in the rescue like he did at Shawshank. He’s a cop now, another person living the ambition we previously saw him scrabbling toward. Little Henry tries bolting for the woods but gets carted off to Juniper Hill.
The artist formerly known as the kid keeps the déjà vu train chugging by parsing through his estranged dad’s old tapes in the storage room above the shed, a captor’s journal in weekly microcassettes rather than oil paintings. At the start, Matthew introduces someone we’ll soon spy across space and time: “Has there been a curse since the beginning? Since those original French settlers froze and starved 200 years ago, the only survivor a young girl reduced to cutting up and eating the corpses of her own family?”
We’ve been waiting four episodes for the “crazy story” the kid told Lacy upon capture, but our Henry’s tale gives a good idea what to expect. “Toward the end of the worst of it, the bad patch we had that spring,” Matthew recalls on the tape, he prayed in the woods for hours every night to hear God’s voice, having encountered it once before. (“What if it’s not just one voice but a choir?” he smartly wonders.)
Then an unfamiliar boy showed up at the door, looking “caught,” saying, “I heard it, dad, it was so loud, dad. It was all around us, in my head, and it was too much, then you were gone, and then I was gone, and I woke up in the forest, but suddenly there was no snow. And then I walked into town and it looked different—Castle Rock, but different. And not one person in town knew me.”

He told Matthew he’d adopted him, that they’d gone to pray in the forest, to listen. “And he heard it, he said he’d really heard it, no fooling this time, none of his mother’s trickery and deceit. And there, right there, he caught me, because who could know that, who could possibly know that that woman tried to trick me?” The boy was convincing, answering all Matthew’s personal questions right. “And it felt like redemption, like he’d been returned to me, changed but the same, restored. My sweet Henry, back to me at last. And it was then I realized what I’d done. I’d wished, not prayed, wished, desired for this. Just this. And here it was, like I’d ordered it off the damn TV.” He recognized the devil’s handiwork, and we again recognize why Ruth was right to leave him.
Thus began the 27-year captivity, confirmed by Matthew’s final tape being labeled Week 1,437. Many times he considered freeing the 11-year-old, swayed by “his story, his charms.” Still, he was a more involved captor than Lacy. “There were moments when I was weak. We shared Christmases in that basement, Red Sox victories. I taught him to carve perfect figurines from soap as I once did with my own boy.” What a guy. He kept the boy imprisoned, his vision of failure saying “tragedy after tragedy will pile up, men will turn on their own, blood will run in the streets.” This Henry will soon hear the same lunacy from Lacy for his own 27-year sentence.
There’s been a fire with multiple fatalities at Juniper Hill, making it feel like we’re on a set, fateful course. Molly and the new Henry manage to get into a room with the boy, leading to that shot of him in the sunglasses. The fact our Henry has seen it in previous flashes presumably means he’s started remembering, and it’s confirmation Molly has begun to “remember”/sense this other self when she touches his hand. (The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands explores something similar, where Jake feels his sanity fraying as he straddles the paradox of dying in one reality and living in another.)

Molly uses her stature to finagle a plan for the boy to sleep at her house, then ditches their police escort, Zalewski. “We have to help him,” she tells grown-up Henry. “We have to take him where he wants to go. Towards the sound.” They chase the boy into the trees and he stops, staring into the moonlight, and we snap, incredibly, to daytime, wobbly and shimmery. Someone from long ago stands there holding the umpteenth big-ol’-knife of the series, bloodied, surely the French settler who ate her frozen family. Molly touches him and shifts over too.

The girl dashes and they give chase. Molly pauses a moment, taking in the strange sky, and hears a faraway shout to stop (by Zalewski, who we heard exclaim this a full 30 seconds earlier). She jolts, and her stomach is suddenly soaked in blood. Zalewski says he only fired the one warning shot into the air, leaving us to wonder: did the interdimensional cannibal invisibly stab our beloved Mollz? Her dying words are a plea for this Henry to help our Henry, and he’s flipped to the same pearlescent realm.

Both H’s are surrounded by violent moments from across time—old-timey shackled prisoners chased by cops and dogs, a ’70s or ’80s girl slitting her wrists, the French child. Above them that otherworldly sky is covered in a flock of birds, and—click—it’s all gone and the artist soon to be known as the kid again is in the woods, now snowy. Boy Henry got zapped through, too, and he runs into the sequence that opened the show, Pangborn finding him on the frozen lake. We’ve been waiting for this resolution, and it’s chilling seeing it wrapped in this bow. The new Henry witnesses it all from a bluff as a sickeningly happy ending–ish score swoons, and we fade out, brain-breaking complete. But we come back to 2018, our 2018, to Molly’s old bedroom, where just before this episode the kid informed Molly she had once died in the woods. “I wandered around for days, I was trying to get back,” he says. “I couldn’t. Then Lacy found me. Took me to Shawshank. Said he heard ‘the call.’ Said I was the devil. You believe me, don’t you?”
Yeah. Unfortunately, we do.

ONE GREAT CONSTANT READER EASTER EGG

A thinny, which we’ve probably seen here, is described in The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass as a place “where the fabric of existence is almost entirely worn away.” It’s witnessed as a light green “quicksilver shimmer like bogwater” and a “sullen, silvery liquesence” that makes an “atonal squalling” like “a handful of sharp pebbles, squeezed and ground together in a strong hand.” It can manifest as a voice offering devilish temptations, one that “vibrated in the knot of nerves below the breastbone and seemed to eat at the damp and delicate tissue behind the eyes.” Thinnies aren’t often exactly identified as such, but their presence is possible in stories like “The Mist,” The Talisman, “The Langoliers,” and From a Buick 8.

ONE THRILLING THEORY

The differences between the two 2018 versions of the town call to mind 11/22/63, which sees an unexpectedly dystopic modern era shaped by decades-old butterfly effects. In that novel—itself a recent Hulu x J.J. Abrams miniseries—”the past doesn’t want to be changed. It fights back when you try. And the bigger the potential change, the harder it fights.” Is the Castle Rock universe revolting against two Henry Deavers existing in each other’s timelines by putting toxic, violent bubbles around them?
Zach Dionne is a Mainer who’s never experienced any of this shit in the woods.

Watch Castle Rock Episode 9 ("Henry Deaver") on Hulu