Castle Rock Review: Filter (Season 1 Episode 6)
Castle Rock Season 1 Episode 6, “Filter,” gets down to what this series might actually be about.
Since Castle Rock comes from the JJ Abrams camp and that style of storytelling, it’s difficult at times not to speculate on the “mystery box” aspect of it all.
You don’t want this to become something that Lost became guilty of at times — and that has certainly been the case for Westworld — where the mystery is all and this becomes a show not reliant on its overall storytelling or characters, but on cracking the mythos of the series.
“Filter,” for better or worse, stands right on that precipice of providing answers and overpowering the rest of the show, like a bad ingredient in a recipe.
This comes into clear perspective when Henry, trying to find answers about where and why his adoptive father used to take him into the woods, stumbles upon a deaf man and his interpreter. The deaf man, Odin (Cj Jones), knew Henry’s father, and both believed in a certain universal truth.
Odin then lays out what may or may not be the entire crux of the series: the schisma. The two believed that this is a kind of cosmic sound that reverberates through time and space. “Other heres and other nows,” as Odin puts it at one point.
On the one hand, this is an explanation that could very well clarify a lot about the series. It would provide an explanation for why Lacy locked The Kid in the cage under Shawshank: The voice he thought of as God was in fact this schisma. It could also explain Henry’s tinnitus. His ears are just attuned to the frequency of the schisma.
On the other hand, this could be a case of confirmation bias for the audience. It seems like this explanation could make sense for a Stephen King story, therefore it does. It’s difficult to say one way or another at this point, but it seems as likely as The Kid never aging, which is just an established fact now.
If this is true, it does open a great many doors. For one, this brings a lot of The Dark Tower into the fold in a way that many of us weren’t expecting at this point.
In Stephen King lore, The Dark Tower serves as the great unifying theory of his universe. In it, doorways exist that can take you to “other heres and other nows” (essentially alternate, yet similar, realities). This concept is very similar to what the schisma is being described as here: whispers from another reality.
If the schisma does truly exist within this world, then the possibilities for the most outlandish theories become more and more of a reality. It opens the (mystery) box in a way that would have been absurd before.
You couldn’t seriously talk about the inter-dimensional sounds when discussing Shawshank Redemption, but you reasonably can with this development now. There’s currently no theory that could be off-limits, and that’s somewhat worrisome.
“Filter” opens the sandbox to such a wild extent that you have to wonder how it will be able to manage what’s unleashed going forward.
What did you think of this episode of Castle Rock? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Castle Rock airs Wednesdays on Hulu.
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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.