Long after I had watched (and re-watched) in the finale of Castle Rock, I found myself sitting down to map out what the hell had just happened. I mean, I was literally drawing out graphs showing the parallel timelines, alternate realities, and doppelgängers that had crossed paths in this show.

Essentially, Castle Rock ends where it began. As we learned in the penultimate episode, The Young Man, played by Bill Skarsgard, says he came from a separate dimension where he is named Henry Deaver—the son of Ruth and Matthew—who got trapped in this alternate universe while trying to help a young version of Andre Holland's Henry Deaver. Unfortunately, instead of helping Skarsgard's Henry Deaver get back to his dimension, Holland's Henry Deaver briefly sees what appears to be a flash of some demonic creature and chooses to put Skarsgard's character back in the cage where he was first found.

If anyone found themselves unclear what happened when those credits rolled, don't worry. Castle Rock co-creators Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason wanted to leave it open to audience interpretation. We caught up with the creators to unpack that big twist Castle Rock finale and discuss if Holland's Henry Deaver made the right decision, the wrong decision and what's going on with Season Two.

Dana Starbard

ESQ: I guess to start out, tell me what your goals were with this finale and what you wanted to leave the audience with.

Dustin Thompson: By the time we get to the final couple of episodes, we're starting to pull the strings together on the questions of who is The Kid and how he ended up under Shawshank. We are starting to hear an interpretation of that in Episode Nine, or a story that The Kid is telling about who he is, and how he got here, and what relationship he has to Andre's Henry. And that's a story that he dramatized and he tells very powerfully.

We come into the final episode, and Henry—Andre-Henry—starts to ask questions about that story, and is a rational guy who has been through a lot. And, in a way, it sort of brings us full circle back to the beginning of the story and to finding Henry arguing his case with Leanne and questions of doubt. And how certain can we be about someone's story? Henry's a death row attorney, so he's constantly dealing with people who are telling stories, and some of them are true and some of them aren't. I think that as we sort of head into our final moments and into when we see Andre's Henry has Bill locked in that tank again, and just sort of assumes that mantle. We come to understand what point of view Andre's Henry has about the story that he's been told, and I think that, at some level, we have our own point of view about what is true and who's right and who's wrong, both in the objective and in the moral sense in a story.



Dana Starbard

Sam Shaw: Naturally, the audience wants answers or explanations because it's uncomfortable to be confronted with events that seem to defy rational explanation. Part of the architecture of the season was to arrive at this, kind of a Rosetta Stone almost—this kind of grand unification theory that The Kid offers up. And to construct a final episode around the question of whether or not Henry accepts the story. Depending on what the audience's point of view is about that story and about Henry's choice, it may be a tragic ending, or it may be a complicated but heroic ending. As Dusty said, I think we have a point of view about that, but I think we'll probably, and maybe frustratingly so, be reluctant to explain too much or to give an exegesis.

I think about the ending of The Shining, and I know how it makes me feel. On the one hand, it seems to be just a story, and on the other hand, seems to rope in ideas that are as far flung as Native American genocide, and sexuality, and child abuse, demonic possession, and time travel.

It ends with a major question: If Holland's Henry made the right choice and imprisoned something evil, or if Holland's Henry made the wrong choice and trapped a man who has mistakenly wondered into the wrong reality.



DT: I think that's a very fair way of putting it. I do think that's the essential question on some level, which is: Is this Henry Deaver from another universe or timeline locked in that cage, and one Henry Deaver has the other Henry Deaver locked in the cage? Or is there some other explanation? In one, Andre's Henry chooses to believe that he has done the right thing even if doing the right thing comes at an enormous price of finding himself back in Castle Rock, and essentially becoming the jailer. He's become the thing that he thought he could never be as the guy who spent his entire career trying to get people out of prisons, and now finds himself a warden of one at the end of our story.

So in one of these options, everything we heard in Episode Nine was a lie?

SS: That's absolutely right. And then there's a world where, following that episode, the final episode of this season could have been to get ET home. Do you know what I mean? And that's really not the story that the finale tells.



DT: Another aspect of it that we always found interesting was this idea that, regardless of what the backstory of Bill's character is, he has obviously been held underneath a prison for a very long time. We see at the beginning of our story what that does to him. That opens up the question if he has become sort of monster along the way, even if he wasn't in the first place.

Dana Starbard

Another question I was left with was if Sissy Spacek's character Ruth was suffering from dementia, or if she was actually unstuck in time, so to say.

SS: I'm not really sure, functionally, what the distinction is for Ruth between those two scenarios that you just described. I'm not really sure there's a distinction between a story about a woman with Alzheimer's and a story about a woman who has become unstuck in time, kind of like Billy Pilgrim and for whom the past and the present and various time loops are forever coexisting with one another. The best Stephen King novels often blur the lines between paranormal and a more quotidian, real-life horror, and it felt like her story was an opportunity to do that. But it felt really important to us in the end not to adjudicate and answer that question explicitly for the audience.

What in Stephen King's canon would you point viewers to that could shed more light on this finale, or even the theory of the multiverse in general? Where were you looking, and where would you suggest that viewers read, or watch, or look for?



DT: Sam already started to allude to The Shining, and I think that the way it was handled both by King and Kubrick in different way—the ending to that story depended on whose point of view you were in. To us, with regards to this final act of our first season, The Shining is definitely the one that sticks out in terms of some of those questions of ambiguity.

Dana Starbard

King readers are certainly intimately familiar with the idea of there are other worlds than these whether it's the shared parallel world of Delores Claiborne and the eclipse, or whether it is the Dark Tower and the Finneys. Obviously, King has been engaging with the question of the multiverse, and that doesn't just mean all the characters are connected, but the fact that they're in his imagination exists. There are many different kinds of worlds, and so we, from the beginning, were really excited about the idea of engaging with that question, but engaging with it in a very different way.

How are you figuring out a second season and what stories would you like to explore in this town?

DT: One thing that Sam and I talked a lot about at the beginning of all this was this idea that you really feel that Stephen King knows the name and the backstory and the deep character obsession and weakness of every gas station attendant and every librarian in Castle Rock. Each season gives us the opportunity to present a new story—whether it's jumping around in time and presenting a story set in the 1970s, a more classical monster story, or a totally naturalistic Stephen King kind of story. Even in an anthology, where you are going to point the camera in a slightly different direction and not necessarily see your main characters as your main characters, I think that it was important to us to feel like there was a kind of grand story that was building over these seasons.

Matt Miller Culture Editor Matt is the Culture Editor at Esquire where he covers music, movies, books, and TV—with an emphasis on all things Star Wars, Marvel, and Game of Thrones.

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