Castle Rock Review: Past Perfect (Season 1 Episode 8)
Coming off of a terrific episode in “The Queen,” Castle Rock Season 1 Episode 8 “Past Perfect” practically had no chance but to feel like a significant step-down.
It certainly doesn’t help that this episode is considerably less focused than previous ones in what is largely an oddly rambling Henry-centric outing. To be more accurate, it’s about how Henry affects the town — and his connection to it — much in the same way that The Kid does.
For many episodes, there has been this running idea throughout Castle Rock that there is an unsettling correlation between The Kid and bad things that happen when he is involved. This is something that has been further validated in this episode.
The biggest example of this is the scene in an earlier episode when The Kid enters a house during a boy’s birthday party and the parents quickly start to devolve into violent screaming and perhaps killing each other. The question becomes: Is this active malice or an unintended byproduct of his very existence in the town?
Regardless, horrific events have a tendency of following The Kid.
The same seems to be true for Henry, as a deputy points out to him that the same kind of magnetism to death applies to him. Wherever he goes, people have a tendency to end up dead. First with his adoptive father and now recently with Dennis Zalewsky and Alan Pangborn. Even Odin, the man who locked him in the room, ends up dead in the woods.
Inexplicably, The Kid and Henry appear to be linked with each other in a way that hasn’t quite revealed itself yet.
One of the more interesting and confounding things that “Past Perfect” does is to further complicate the inner mythology of this season.
This happens in a few ways, but the first and foremost comes when Henry breaks into Dale Lacy’s house and finds a hand-drawn portrait of The Kid from 1991 where he is, yes, still looking the then as he does today, but also is wearing the same sweater that Henry wore when he went missing that year.
A part of the reason why this episode is so much lesser than some that have come before it goes to some of the overall priorities of the show. It’s an episode that is so enraptured in the puzzle box aspect of it all that it seems to overpower anything else.
This is especially apparent after “The Queen,” which was firmly a character piece whereas this is so steeped in mystery and answers in the form of silhouettes. This is the way that it was always going to be, but the execution of it feels a bit sloppy.
Stray Thoughts:
- Henry’s son felt the same ringing that his father does but also takes a bus to Jerusalem’s Lot, the town that Salem’s Lot takes place in. Is it possible that vampires are coming?
- The Kid tells Molly that she died. This isn’t a weird purgatory, is it?
- RIP Alan Pangborn.
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.