The connection between Molly and Henry has been hinted at over the last two episodes of Castle Rock, but the exact nature of their connection comes into clearer focus now. This third episode is Molly-centric, which is perfect, because she’s an intriguing character, and Melanie Lynskey plays her so well. If you haven’t seen Melanie in I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore, do yourself a favor and track it down. She’s fantastic in it.

Molly is like a radio, picking up frequencies, and it seems for a large portion of her childhood, Henry was the only channel she received. We’ve already seen she can feel what he feels, since she’s emotionally dialed in to his states of emotion whether he is near or far. It’s hard to understand how this connection developed between them, but Molly’s sister did insinuate about her childhood obsession with Henry. Could it be the very act of focusing so intensely on Henry, combined with Molly’s empathic predilections, just locked in on him and created the connection?

She knows a lot more about Henry’s disappearance than almost anyone else, including Henry. When the cop comes to question her, it’s clear she’s feeling what Henry feels out in the woods at that very moment, wherever he is. Not only can she feel his emotions, but she can feel his physical feelings as well. She threw Henry off guard by mentioning she knows he masturbates in his room, and that it feels like fireworks, but she apparently also felt the same chill of the wintery night he experienced when the cop came and questioned her. Her breath had a fog to it as if she were out in the cold too.

Molly is defensive about Reverend Deaver not being Henry’s real father when talking to the cop. She knows something isn’t right between Henry and his father, and beyond the scene of Henry starting a VHS tape on fire and saying, “fuck you, dad,” she picks up on the resentment and fear Henry feels about him. Molly saw the two of them leave in the early morning on the day Henry went missing, so she knows Reverend Deaver had something to do with the disappearance, but what was his role?

Were Reverend Deaver, Warden Lacy, and Sheriff Pangborn all up to something together? If so, was Henry used to lure “The Kid” and capture him? Reverend Deaver would have survived whatever happened to him out in those woods, but we see Molly walk barefoot in the snow over to the Deaver house, almost like she’s in a trance. Once inside, she puts on Henry’s coat, the same one she keeps in her box of memento’s, and pulls the breathing tube out of Reverend Deaver, killing him. The question is, did Molly kill him herself, or was she channeling Henry when she did it? Could she have been channeling “The Kid” instead?

Since Henry arrived in Castle Rock, Molly has avoided him, even to the point of being dismissive and rude when he shows up at her office looking for help selling his mother’s house. She knows if she connects with him again she won’t be able to control herself, and we can see that when the two are talking together. Whatever Henry is saying to her is drowned out by voices of past conversations Henry’s had with others. It overwhelms Molly. It all comes rushing back and it scares her, especially on the cusp of her big opportunity of pitching her idea for the transformation of Castle Rock on the public access television show, “Local Color.”

By avoiding Henry, Molly seems to only find herself in more and more trouble, as if the fates are pushing her toward Henry no matter how hard she fights against it. She has nightmares of Reverend Deaver, covered in gauze, angry and accusing her. Those nightmares manifest themselves physically in her life when she finds her house trashed several times. The final time, Reverend Deaver appears while she inspects the damage to her house, and it scares the crap out of her. Molly is also out of the drugs that numb her empathic abilities, and in her attempt to score more of them, she finds herself interrupting a macabre children’s reenactment of a murder trial, and later ends up in jail busted for trying to buy pills off of one of the children. Henry bails her out of jail and helps her get to her television appearance on time, but he can’t stop everything going off of the rails during her interview. She can’t stop her empathic abilities from hearing a past conversation Henry’s had, so she blurts out on live television that Shawshank Prison has a kid that’s been kept in a cage without due process. It gets everyone’s attention, including the current Warden’s. At this point she can’t help but give in to her connection to Henry, and the two of them seem poised to figure this mystery out together.

Henry does have an unsettling face to face interview with “The Kid” at prison, and it’s unclear how mentally together “The Kid” is. He asks strange questions like, “Has it begun?” “How many years old are you?” Or “Do you hear it now?” The questions confuse Henry, but before he can get any answers, “The Kid” is pulled away by guards, who we find out have all gotten bonuses to keep their mouths shut about “The Kid”. The Warden clearly wants to make a deal to release “The Kid” quietly, but Henry has other plans. Could Henry unwittingly be letting the genie out of the bottle by helping “The Kid”, and be sealing the fate of Castle Rock and its residents?