WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Castle Rock Season 2 Finale, "Clean," now streaming on Hulu.
In a vacuum, Hulu’s Castle Rock is consistently engaging. If you walked into it without any prior knowledge of the Stephen King stories that directly or indirectly connect to the titular fictional New England town, then the show is shocking and compulsively watchable. Of course, King newbies are probably not the show's intended audience, and because of this, Castle Rock has a huge identity crisis. Where the first season felt like a deleted chapter within the larger King canon, Season 2 was more of a remix of the author's characters and stories that curiously wound up acting as an origin tale for one of King’s most notorious villains.
The vast majority of Castle Rock Season 2 has been a wild rehash of the events of King’s sophomore novel ‘Salem’s Lot and an all new take on the character of Annie Wilkes, the antagonist of the 1990 novel Misery. The season did a rather solid job of shrugging off the burden of adhering to existing King stories. Instead, it used characters and settings as if they were action figures pulled from a toy box to create an entirely new tale. It’s like if a Star Wars fan's Anakin Skywalker action figure went on an adventure with their Poe Dameron body pillow (that has to exist, right?). It doesn't really make sense from an established narrative standpoint, but it's still kinda fun.
In the Season 2 finale, “Clean,” all the spliced together plot elements wrap up by the midway point. The ancient evil temping the very soul of Castle Rock is destroyed along with the majority of our villains. Our heroes escape with their lives and an uncertain destiny, and the town of Castle Rock (as well as Jerusalem's Lot) has suffered another horrific tragedy in a long line of horrific tragedies. The show then quickly shifts its focus to the characters the season originally followed: Annie Wilkes (Lizzy Caplan) and her surrogate daughter/half-sister, Joy (Elsie Fisher).
With Annie and Joy free of the body-snatching cult, they try to rekindle the relationship they once had. However, Joy is not terribly receptive, which leads Annie to question whether or not her would-be daughter is still under the Lovecraftian nightmare influence of the evil of Castle Rock. Annie tries to cope with this feeling by diving back into her first love, the written word. She finds a Misery Chastain novel by the fictional author, Paul Sheldon, who was the protagonist of Misery. Annie clearly loves Mr. Sheldon’s prose and dedicates a lot of her time to consuming his books with abandon, forming what will become a dangerous obsession.
When Annie’s suspicions about Joy’s state of mind lead to tragedy, Annie’s already shaky grasp of reality shatters. The implication is the chain of events leading to the final shot of “Clean” was nothing more than a lengthy prelude to the nightmare scenario suffered by Paul Sheldon in Misery. While something like this would have worked had the show actually focused on correcting inconsistencies in the larger timeline of Stephen King’s connected literary world, it instead comes off as a bit forced and pandering. This reveal is clearly not for those viewers uninitiated in the works of King, which makes its inclusion baffling.
The version of Annie Wilkes we followed throughout Season 2 of Castle Rock is far more tragic and sympathetic than the foot-lopping monster readers first met in the novel that spawned her. The character's sudden turn (if you could call it that) onscreen at the end of the season is a bit of a head-scratcher. It implies that Misery has yet to unfold, which begs the question, could someone with Paul Sheldon’s level of fame drop off the face of the map in the digital age?
Streaming now on Hulu, Castle Rock Season 2 stars Lizzy Caplan, Tim Robbins, Elsie Fisher, Paul Sparks, Barkhad Abdi, Yusra Warsama and Matthew Alan.