Castle Rock: The Complete First Season (2018) Review
Castle Rock: The Complete First Season (2018) Review
The first season of Castle Rock follows Henry Deaver (André Holland, American Horror Story), a Death Row attorney who returns to Castle Rock, Maine, his hometown, after he receives an anonymous phone call from the infamous Shawshank State Penitentiary. The call is about a nameless young man (Bill Skarsgård, IT) who is found locked in an underground cage that’s located in a long-abandoned cell block beneath the prison. Upon his discovery, the mysterious young man, with a sinister and unnerving presence, whispers Henry’s name. Curious about how and why someone left this boy imprisoned, Henry is drawn into the case and attempts to help him. But there are reasons why ‘The Kid’ was imprisoned. And reasons why he should never be set free.
Permeated with a sense of foreboding and dread, the haunting small town of Castle Rock is not willing to let Henry leave. Aside from now having to deal with the strange young man found in the prison, Henry is faced with the fact that his adoptive mother (Sissy Spacek, Carrie), who lives in Castle Rock with retired Sheriff Alan Pangborn (special guest star Scott Glenn), is struggling with the onset of dementia. Reluctantly, Henry stays to figure out just who ‘The Kid’ is and how he wound up imprisoned under such appalling circumstances.
TV series Castle Rock was created by Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason and based on characters and places from the written works of Stephen King. Executive produced by J.J. Abrams and Stephen King the series original screened on TV network Hulu and it proved such a hit with audiences and critics that a second season premieres on October 23rd 2019. Castle Rock combines “the mythological scale and intimate character storytelling of King’s best-loved works, weaving an epic saga of darkness and light, played out on a few square miles of Maine woodland.”
Although this first season was met with generally positive responses from critics I found myself left wanting just a couple of episodes in. There wasn’t enough of a hook to pin my interest on and subsequently my interest waned. It adhered to the same old format of teasing bits of information, having very little happen of interest before closing an episode with something REALLY interesting before dropping the baton again at the start of the next episode. It’s also one note in tone. This is TV-series-by-numbers, there’s no envelope pushing here. It’s safe and formulaic when it should have really wowed!
The production has a smug feel to it, like it feels safe in the knowledge that by merely coasting along on the reputations of the known names involved that it doesn’t really need to try, and subsequently it doesn’t. It didn’t really help matters that I felt there was nothing new here; sure Stephen King fans will get a buzz out of the stunt castings and constant referencing to the great author’s work but from where I was sitting it felt lazy. In episode two it is alluded to that The Kid is actually the devil and that is why he was kept hidden, locked away in the bowels of Shawshank State Penitentiary. This would have been a marvellously twisted plot development if it wasn’t for the fact that the recent film I Trapped the Devil, a much tighter and more sinister piece of work, covered that very same ground better.
