1x03 Local Color

[8.7/10] Well damn. I’ll admit, I was about ready to write Castle Rock off. Its first two episodes were a hodgepodge of horror and prestige T.V. clichés, as amorphous as they were dull. They had basically convinced me that this show was going to be a heap of scattershot throat-clearing, with a straightforward mystery box setup to try to drag the audience along.

And then it busts out an episode like “Local Color” which is vivid, affecting, frightening, poignant, and cohesive in a way that the series has otherwise struggled to be.

It just shows you the benefits of a little focus. I don’t want to turn Castle Rock into a referendum on prestige drama writ large, but there’s a tendency across these sorts of shows to try to throw a little bit of everything into a given episode, particularly when your show is wide-ranging and well-populated. If the quality of each individual part is really good, that can work, because you’re just happy to spend time in the world and see those performance. But if your show is middling, or inconsistent, it can make everything feel slight and undeveloped or make the whole show feel like it’s running in place.

But just zeroing in on a handful of characters, on one or two major throughlines or subplots, can work wonders for that kind of show. Suddenly, the character you can barely remember becomes a fleshed out, multi-dimensional person with wants and weaknesses and humanity. Suddenly the tangle of plots is swept aside to shine a spotlight on something that touches everything else in the show, but has clarity and force to the focus.

If every episode of Castle Rock takes this approach, the way that “Local Color” did, then it’ll turn me from a skeptic into a fan, and someone willing to write off the missteps of the first two installments as an exercise in throat-clearing while the show was trying to find its voice.

The great benefit of “Local Color” is channeling everything in the episode (if you’ll pardon the expression) on Melanie Lynskey as Molly Strand. We’ve only gotten glancing blows from the character so far, but this episode examines her in depth, and reveals a story far more interesting than almost anything else in Castle Rock thus far.

It’s a story that was hinted at previously, but which is fleshed out here. The meat of it is that Molly is an empath, someone who can feel what other people feel, and even hear their thoughts. What’s so compelling about this is how Castle Rock treats it like a curse. That’s not necessarily so novel an approach, but the way the show does it is superb.

For one thing, it sets up a clear but multi-tentacled conflict. Molly has sunk all her money into leasing a building downtown, and is banking on an appearance on a local T.V. show to promote her downtown revitalization idea and hopefully bring in investors and support to make it happen. It’s a simple goal, but one with stakes, and also complications.

The complications are four-fold. One, she has her psychic abilities, which are as debilitating as they are impressive. They make it impossible for Molly to focus, and thus leave her anxious and out of sorts when she needs to be on her game for the interview. What’s better and worse is that Henry Dever is in town, someone she has a special connection with, which exacerbates and deepens the psychic roar in her mind. On top of that, she’s out of oxycontin, the only thing that seems to dampen that noise, and her teenage dealer is fresh out. And if that weren’t enough, she’s hallucinating images of heavily bandaged dead people, while dealing with an apparent break-in at her house.

That’s a lot, but “Local Color” spoonfeeds it to the audience gradually. We see Molly trying to get this right. We see her trying to block out her distractions. We see her good intentions cross wires with her illness and spiral out of control. We see an instant bond and rapport between her and Henry, which adds some warmth to what’s been an especially cold show. We see her being determined and nervous and helpless and scared beyond words.

And we see her kill Henry’s adoptive father.

It’s a hell of a way to open the show, one that feels like an acceptable layer to add onto the show’s kind of annoying mystery box structure as regards what happened with Henry and his father when Henry was a kid. But there’s an implication there that, like the events in the present day, it came from a place of good intentions, that Molly could feel what Henry was experiencing, that it likely involved some kind of abuse or dark family secret, and that she wanted to end the suffering of someone she empathized with in a literal, painful way.

There’s presumably more to be revealed there, but it adds shape and form to the past in a way that the show’s only offered vague teases about previously. And what’s more, the young actress who places Molly as a child does a superb job of conveying how this child is affected, how she means well, but is experiencing this incredible thing at a time when she can’t quite make sense of it, and it’s almost as good as Lynskey’s layered performance as the adult Molly.

And man, what a performance. I think it’s easy to read too much into horror tropes as metaphor, but the way that Lynskey plays both Molly’s psychic malady and efforts to control it with shades of mental illness and addiction is tremendous here. The familiarity of those notes in her performance drive home the severity of the supernatural affliction her character’s suffering from, and make them palpable to the viewer.

That said, a big part of the success owes to the sound design team and the folks behind the visuals. The way that the music rises and a cacophony of whispers and voices emerges when Molly is particularly in the thick of things is not necessarily pioneering, but still very effective at communicating the disorientation and debilitating nature of these episodes for her. And at the same time, details like the hue of the lights brightening when she’s experiencing one, or the slow zoom of the camera when she’s having a nightmare, convey the overwhelming sensory overload of what she’s trying to combat.

Granted, some of it is just plain creepy. I didn’t love everything about her initial nightmare in the church, but it’s hard to deny that a bunch of bandaged creeps casting judgement on you is unnerving. The same goes for the visual echo of the paper mache-masked kids holding court in disturbing fashion. And while the final sequence feels like a bit too plain an homage to Halloween and other slasher flicks, it does what it needs to do.

The episode even manages to integrate other details and stories from its world quite well. Henry in particular is more of a supporting character in this one, but the way his crusade for “Nick” in Shawshank intersects with Molly’s story both adds to the instigating events that plague Molly and let’s Henry’s story advance. At the same time, we get a little more from Jackie, who’s still a little more of an archetype than a character, but at least has more of a place in this story now. Even the good-hearted guard and the new warden feel more genuine and compelling than they did before. It’s impressive as hell.

All I can hope is that Castle Rock learns from the creative success of “Local Color” and uses it as a blueprint. The first two episodes of the series introduced a pretty sprawling set of scenes and locales and time periods and characters, leaving pretty much everything feeling glancing and underdeveloped and more teasing that leading anywhere. “Local Color” has a clarity and focus -- on a compelling story, character, and performance -- that feels like a breath of fresh air, and a way for the show to take that 52-pickup of plots and people and deal them into something extraordinary.