1x02 Habeas Corpus

[6.2/10] Well, this is an improvement on the first episode, but still not great. I think my biggest complaints about the show so far are two-fold.

First, there’s just tons of overwritten monologues. Voiceover can be done well, but it’s often a trap for shows to trot out some overly florid, meaningless prose that’s meant to sound profound but is really just a heap of doubletalk. The bit with Warden Lacey’s letter to Alan Pangborn is that to a tee, meant to provide some thematic balance to the show but really just blowing hot air.

The same is true for most of the other dialogue in the show, whether it’s monologues from Lacey’s widow or the pastor or even Alan himself. Some of the actors on the show, like Scott Glenn, can pull it off, but there’s very little recognizable or authentic about the conversations or human interactions on Castle Rock, and I can accept that as a deliberate creative choice to try to capture Stephen King’s prose in some fashion, but I find it pretty offputting and something that makes it hard for me to connect to the characters of their world.

The other thing that’s frustrating at this point is how little incident there is. I’m willing to be patient with a show, to let it establish its world and do a slow burn so that when the writers pull the trigger, it means something. But there’s two issues that give me pause. 1. The pacing is just glacial. There’s hints of things that might happen or happened in the past and little bits of history parceled out, but the story in the present is barely moving forward. And 2. If you’re going to take that approach, you have to make things interesting moment-to-moment and scene-to-scene -- you have to want to spend time with these characters or find their interactions interesting even if not a lot’s happening -- and that is far too tall an order for Castle Rock at this point.

It’s a minor point, but I’m also not a big fan of the color grading on the show. Everything is washed out and muddy-looking which, again, seems to be a deliberate choice, one meant to make the town of Castle Rock seem dingy and forgotten. But something in the presentation feels fake, like they’re trying too hard to convey that using the color grading and lighting in the episode to where it becomes over the top.

But let’s hit some positive. I still like Andre Holland as Henry Dever, and we at least get a few more details about his life that makes his situation a little more interesting (even if they come from a kind of annoying character whose last name suggests she’s related to the characters from The Shining). I like the idea that Castle Rock blames Henry for his adoptive father’s death, and how that complicates the prejudice he already faces for the color of his skin in an “off-the-map” Maine town.

I also really like Bill Skarsgaard’s performance as the kid. He manages to convey otherwordliness and creepiness with very subtle movements and an assist from the makeup team. Him nigh-magically taking out his white supremacist cellmate (a bunk assignment from the corporate guy that was meant as a death sentence) is a little cheesy and predictable, but his presence helps sell it. I’m not sold on the whole “that boy is the devil” thing the show has going, but I’m willing to see where it goes.\

Last but not least, while I find the Molly Strand character a little trying so far, I do like the idea that she has some psychic connection to Henry, or at least did when she was a kid, to the point that she could exhale cold air in a warm room when Henry was presumably freezing out in the woods. The whole black sheep of the family bit is too much for me (and the same goes for the good-natured guard who warned Henry), but it’s at least an intriguing twist.

Overall, this is an improvement from the premiere, but there’s still some fundamental flaws in the episode that keep it from being good outright.