Castle Rock Review: The Queen (Season 1 Episode 7)
Castle Rock Season 1 Episode 7, “The Queen,” is the perfect chaser to the shot of last week’s “Filter.”
Whereas Castle Rock Season 1 Episode 6, “Filter,” dealt heavily in the mythos of this season that will no doubt factor into the overall arc of Henry and The Kid, “The Queen” is much more content to take a quieter, more all-out disturbing path centered entirely on Ruth (Sissy Spacek).
“The Queen” has been referred to as something analogous to “The Constant” on Lost and that’s probably the most apt description for it, and the two episodes have quite a bit in common. Throughout the episode, we see Ruth vividly reliving some of the memories of her past.
Ruth believes that she has become somewhat unstuck in time, not simply moving along a linear timeline anymore, but bouncing back and forth along disparate events from her life. To combat this, she starts setting chess pieces that Alan got her in different rooms in the house to remind herself that she’s already been there.
The episode uses this to great effect, not simply content to be a flashback episode for Ruth, and also not one that exists to explore her progressing dementia, but instead one that can explore Ruth herself by somehow combining the two elegantly.
Unlike other episodes of Castle Rock, “The Queen” is a full hour long, as opposed to the other episodes that sit at a standard forty-plus minutes. This isn’t some arbitrary padding out; every single moment is taken advantage of and none of it feels extraneous.
Each trip back into Ruth’s memories feels important and significant, much in the same way that the memories that your brain cycles through feels important to the person you are today.
One of the most crucial things that “The Queen” does is have it be completely Sissy Spacek, from front to back. It’s so essential to this kind of episode that it’s telling that it makes this conscious decision to have her feature in these “flashback” scenes instead of her younger version (Schuyler Fisk, who is Spacek’s daughter in real life).
Having Spacek gives the right context for this episode, not that she’s simply remembering these events, but that she’s reliving them in the truest sense. This is an episode that lives and dies on the strength of that one performance, and in that regard, Spacek completely nails it.
For this hour, Spacek finds herself trapped in what is ostensibly a home invasion story, a framework that is already historically viewed as a precarious situation for a woman, but further compounds it by being borderline elderly and mentally deficient.
Spacek walks this delicate line throughout the episode of playing the addled old woman for The Kid’s benefit and then switching seamlessly to one that is trying to find the upper-hand. She navigates that tricky line so masterfully and easily that you almost forget that it actually is a performance and not Spacek as she is.
Castle Rock has managed to get better and better with each passing week (for the most part), but “The Queen” is almost bad for the series, because this is the peak. There’s no getting better than this. Anything that after will feel like an afterthought and, actually, that’s okay. This is really all you can need from a show.
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.