Season 1, Episode 7: ‘The Queen’

One of Stephen King’s best-known 1970s short stories is “Sometimes They Come Back,” which spawned a 1991 TV movie and two straight-to-video sequels. The story’s title alone is so evocative, so creepy … so Stephen King. Much of what the author has written in the past 40-odd years could carry that same name. From “Pet Sematary” to “It” to “The Dark Half,” if there’s one idea King keeps returning to, it’s that nothing stays buried forever.

The outstanding seventh episode of this “Castle Rock” season offers a particularly jazzy variation on that theme. In “The Queen,” we see the world through the eyes of Ruth Deaver, who recently told her grandson Wendell that she no longer experiences time in a straight line, moving in one direction. Sometimes, for example, she wakes up to find her dead dog Puck in her bed, having just deposited a squirrel’s remains on her pillow. And sometimes she walks into her kitchen and sees her late husband Matthew … a man she never really wanted to talk to again. Because Ruth can’t distinguish between memory and reality any more, for her, the dead are no longer staying dead.

“The Queen” picks up roughly where last week’s episode left off: “The Kid” has just escaped a mental institution and returned to the Deaver homestead, where he’s vaguely threatening Ruth. The previous episode ended with Alan Pangborn walking into a house that had been completely trashed. This week fills in some of what happened in the interim, between the moment when the Kid found Ruth kneeling on the floor surrounded by spilled medication, and Alan’s arrival.

Trying to pin down exactly where in the timeline this episode begins and ends isn’t easy. “The Queen” is a thrilling experiment in nonlinear narrative, slipping as casually between the past and present as Ruth does. It’s designed to make the audience feel as mixed-up as she does — not about what’s happening, but when.