Castle Rock Review: Henry Deaver (Season 1 Episode 9)
Castle Rock Season 1 Episode 9, “Henry Deaver,” takes a walk on the other side as we get a drastically different viewpoint.
In theory, “Henry Deaver” should work really well as an episode and, to a certain extent, it does.
Most of the episodes preceding this one could very easily be broken down in a Lost-esque way of centering around a specific character. Whether that’s “Local Color,” which focused on Molly (Melanie Lynskey), or “The Queen,” where it’s purely in Ruth’s (Sissy Spacek) headspace, the season’s been rather good about focusing on a certain perspective each episode.
It makes sense, then, that Castle Rock would devote an entire episode to its most enigmatic character, The Kid (Bill Skarsgard), as we see what his life looked like before Dale Lacy found him and locked him in a cage at Shawshank Prison.
A big problem that the episode runs into, though, is that this is not a story that truly required an entire episode to tell — especially since there is only one episode after this one to wrap up all of the disparate plot threads running through this season.
This becomes especially apparent when we get to the end, where it’s revealed that The Kid had been relaying this information to Molly after she finds him in her house. There’s little to no reason why this couldn’t be a condensed tale from The Kid that doesn’t take up an entire precious episode.
On its own, “Henry Deaver” is a perfectly fine installment. Viewed within the prism of the season’s structure, it becomes a little lesser. If this were a season with two or three more episodes, we might end up feeling differently about the episode and its overall impact.
In true Bad Robot fashion, it answers questions, but at the same time replaces them with even more questions.
“Henry Deaver” utilizes classic Stephen King concepts, such as thinnies, to propel its larger narrative without actually contextualizing what that means. For those that don’t know, a thinny is best described as a rip in the fabric of the universe that makes it theoretically possible to step through to another universe.
This connects back to the schisma that Odin told Henry about in the woods, when he described it as a cosmic noise bleeding through from different realities. The schisma comes from the thinnies, and that’s essentially what the entire season has been leading up to.
Again, the problem here is that King connoisseurs — and specifically fans of The Dark Tower — know what a thinny is, but the writers make no attempt to ensure that the show’s audience knows what it is or what it means, let alone tie it back to the schisma. It’s forcing the audience to connect dots it easily could on its own.
In the end, “Henry Deaver” is a completely serviceable episode, but we can’t help but wonder if there wasn’t another way to tell this story this late into the game.
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.