I’ve been sitting with the season finale of Castle Rock for the past five days trying to parse out my feelings about the controversial ending to the season. Like a lot of you I was disappointed, underwhelmed, and maybe a little angry over how the show closed this chapter of the Castle Rock universe. My views raced all over the place after my first viewing of the finale, so I watched it again to see if a second viewing changed my mind.

In a way, an ambiguous ending makes sense based on the source material. In most of the Stephen King novels I’ve read there’s an ending, but also a lot of unresolved questions about how the characters will move forward from what we’ve read, or in this case seen. Unlike a lot of people, I don’t think the explanation of the ending is as cut and dry as some would like you to believe. I have a lot of opposing thoughts on what happened this season, and I’ll try to lay out some of it here.

Perhaps Henry Deaver was the real monster all along? It’s true that ever since he arrived back in town, chaos and death followed closely behind. Some of this is definitely “The Kid’s” fault, but Henry ends up doing the unthinkable by the end of the episode and transforming into Warden Lacy. He spent the entire season trying to help free “The Kid” from wrongful imprisonment, only to put him right back where he was found. Just like Warden Lacy, Henry has his doubts about whether or not “The Kid” is evil, but instead of helping “The Kid” escape this world, he traps him in it. Henry now appears doomed to follow the same fate as Warden Lacy, hiding his terrible secret as it eats away at him for the rest of his life until he too feels so trapped and overwhelmed by what he’s done, that he also will likely kill himself rather than let “The Kid” go.

If the entire season is a court case, and Henry is the judge and jury over “The Kid’s” fate, than his decision harkens back to the same argument we saw him give in Texas: “How much (doubt) is reasonable? If I had to choose to take a person’s life, I don’t think any amount would seem reasonable. Now me, if I had to kill someone, I’d need it etched in gold and signed by God himself.” It’s Henry’s doubt about “The Kid’s” story of another dimension that makes Henry unable to make a choice other than to imprison “The Kid” once again. If he takes “The Kid” to the woods and helps him cross over, he believes someone will die. So instead, he postpones taking action of either freeing “The Kid” or killing him. That decision will be left up to another day, or like Warden Lacy, he’ll just pass on that decision to someone else. It’s possible based on the ending of the season that the person it gets passed to one day will be Wendell.

I personally don’t believe “The Kid” is the devil, or a demon, or any other kind of evil spirit despite the CG aging to his face Henry sees during their struggle in the woods. You have to remember that in the moments before their struggle for the gun, Henry had a flashback. Memories poured back in about how he pushed his own father off of the cliff at Castle Lake trying to kill him (a job Molly finished) because he was afraid Matthew was going to murder Ruth. Henry was emotional, confused, had the Schisma ringing in his ear, and a murder of crows flying overhead. The vision of “The Kid’s” face is subjective. It’s from Henry’s point of view, which makes it as unreliable and unprovable as “The Kid’s” story to Molly about the alternate dimension he comes from.

Molly wants Henry to help “The Kid” get back, because she believes him. She’s seen him nearly commit suicide earlier in the season and talked him back from the ledge, much like she does for Ruth as well, so for her as an empath to believe him, it says a lot. She doesn’t see any harm in helping “The Kid” leave this dimension, despite Henry pointing out someone always dies in the woods when dimensions are supposedly traversed. If he’s telling the truth, they will have returned balance to the Schisma and the universes, if they are wrong and “The Kid” is evil, the worst thing that seems to happen, is he’ll go wreak havoc on a different universe. It’s interesting that when we first met Molly she was trying to transform Castle Rock into the one we see in “The Kid’s” dimension, and though it’s possible he’s simply telling her what she wants to hear, I think he’s telling the truth. By the end of the season, she’s turned from a person trying to save and transform the town she grew up in, to being the happier Molly “The Kid” described after moving to Florida and putting it all behind her.

The argument against “The Kid” being the devil is the Twilight Zone easter egg planted early in the season playing on a television in Warden Lacy’s house. The episode is called “The Howling Man” and features a stranger taking refuge in a monastery, only to find the monks have a man imprisoned they say is the devil. The prisoners story is totally different, and convincing. But when he frees the prisoner, he finds out it really was the devil, and then tracks the devil down and captures him again. For the entire season of Castle Rock to completely mirror this Twilight Zone episode seems lazy, and I can’t believe a show that can have such moving and original episodes like “The Queen” and “Henry Deaver” wouldn’t have more up its sleeve than simply mirroring a 58-year-old television episode.

It’s clear the Castle Rock creators are trying to present the entire season as a court case, turning the viewers into a jury being shown both sides of the story and leaving the decision about what is true up to them. I see their intentions, but I just think they failed at crafting a satisfying ending to what they built up all season. Everything was so heightened going into the last several episodes that to pull off an ambiguous ending, no matter how well crafted, wasn’t going to sit well with an audience whose expectations had been groomed for loftier finales. I’m not saying I regret watching any of it, since several of the episodes were some of the finer hours of television I’ve seen all year, I’m just saying the story collapsed under its own weight right as they were approaching the finish line.

More thoughts:

Another frustrating aspect of the finale is all of the loose ends left hanging. Where was Henry for the 11 days after he tried to kill his father? Is Ruth capable of skipping back and forth through time, or is it just Alzheimer’s? Was Henry captured by his father in another dimension, or by the Desjardins? How did Henry suddenly appear in the middle of Castle Lake for Alan to find? What is the sound both Henry and Wendell can hear in the woods? There are so many ideas half explored and abandoned, that this season could have been an entire series instead of a stand-alone season.

If “The Kid” really is the devil, than the entirety of episode 9 was a pointless waste of time, which I don’t believe for a moment it was. I know some people may point at “The Kid’s” smile at the end to prove he is some kind of trickster, but I see it as ironic given the sick joke of finding himself back where he started.

Jackie was criminally underused this season, which judging by the mid credit sequence we saw of her, appears to suggest we may be following Jackie to the Overlook Hotel next season.