Castle Rock Season 2: Brilliant Crossover or Glorified Fan Fiction

It’s always interesting to see a lot of the characters seen beforehand in King’s other works brought together. Some of the characters have been transformed in ways not necessarily expected, in a good way. A great example of this is with our main character, Annie. In her other appearances, she’s a deceiving, crazy woman with a dark obsession. Here, there’s a sadness to her. She’s portrayed not as a crazy woman but as someone with serious issues who’s trying to cope with them. She’s arguably the protagonist of the show, which I think is to the series’ benefit.

Furthermore, the first four episodes are—mainly—well written. There’s some dialogue in the show, particularly in the character of Annie Wilkes, that’s incredible. There’s a great amount of emotional impact with a lot of her lines. The show has a knack for being able to develop small characters really easily, and a lot of the characters are really emotionally complex and likable. But, some of the writing is excessively on the nose. A certain message may be screamed in your face. In writing, you’re supposed to show and not tell. Oftentimes, the writers of the show very much told.

As far as the actual story goes, so far, I’m interested. Annie Wilkes as a character is transformed in a spectacular way. Here, she’s a protagonist, but still has a lot of the traits she had in the other work she’s heavily featured in: Misery. Particularly, they effectively use Annie’s replacing of swear words with other, childish words. For example, she replaces “Christmas” with “Christ”. In Misery, it’s deemed odd, if not a little unnerving. In the TV show, however, the way they use it is less unnerving and more sad. Here, Annie has a daughter, and so there’s an implication that the lack of cursing is partially for her. She may want to protect her daughter from it. Coupled with this, the audience sees both a woman who’s trying to protect her daughter even though she’s obviously unable to, and a woman who’s trying too hard to control her. This makes it all the more heartbreaking when conflict does arise between them.

With the story line of Annie Wilkes, which is superb, there’s also the family dynamic with the Merril family, which presents a fairly abnormal family in a way that’s interesting. Each character in the family has their own well developed personalities and character traits. Even the characters that don’t have large roles are still very well defined and relatable. Unfortunately, this story line isn’t perfect, and there are admittedly a large amount of cliches involved. For example, the reveal in the fourth episode with the father character, Reginald, or “Pop”, as he is called, is underwhelming.

CASTLE ROCK — “New Jerusalem” – Episode 202 — The Merrills search for answers. Pop (Tim Robbins), shown. (Photo by: Dana Starbard/Hulu)

This next part is a spoiler for the fourth episode, so if you don’t want spoilers, skip to the next paragraph. “Pop” killed his adopted children’s birth mother. They meant for it to be a big reveal in the show, something meant to be shocking. For better or for worse, this exact story line has been played out a million times. And, it doesn’t seem that Castle Rock is going to do it any differently. Furthermore, for some reason, Pop decides to awkwardly talk about it while it’s being revealed to the audience through another character. He never mentioned or alluded to it anywhere before, but now, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it just happened to come to mind.

Also, the camera work has a lot of issues. They very much tried to do different things with it, and oftentimes it’s very unique.There are some incredible shots in the show. But, the uniqueness sometimes isn’t to their benefit. There are some very strange shots that take away from certain scenes due to it being distracting.

So far, the show hasn’t been terribly scary. I do expect there to be more scary moments down the line, but in the first few episodes there isn’t much. However, the scary moments are poignant and effective. There was one scene in particular where I jumped back in my seat out of pure fear; it was so brutal yet so effective.

One thing the show does well is the fight scenes. There’s a lot of fighting, but it goes on for a fairly long time and isn’t one-sided like most fight scenes. Sometimes, one person will be dominant, sometimes another person. And this goes on for just long enough to be effective in building suspense without being too drawn out.

One of the greatest feats of this show is the acting; Castle Rock contains some of the best I’ve seen in a long time. Lizzy Caplan is one of the greatest examples. Her performance is practically perfect. If her performance wasn’t stellar, her character wouldn’t make me sympathize with her whatsoever. But it is. She portrays this individual with a level of great care given towards every single detail. Another great example is Barkhad Abdi. Although he plays more of a minor role, his performance is nonetheless outstanding. The way he says all of his lines makes a character that would otherwise not be anyone significant a character that’s likable.