Let’s take a look at Netflix’s new supernatural series, The Innocents, a story of Romeo and Juliet among the shapeshifters, which will be released 8/24/18. Season 1 of the British show, filmed in Britain and Norway, has 8 episodes. Hania Elkington and Simon Duric created, executive produced and wrote the series. Simon Duric previously worked on The Force Awakens and The Crown.
In episode 2, Baggage, June reflects on her complicated relationship with her own mother, Holly, as she faces leaving her daughter, Hannah, behind in Gilead when she escapes. June is moved from the Boston Globe offices and makes her way closer to freedom, so the reality of what she’s doing hits her in this episode. In Canada, Moira’s already physically free, but she and the other refugees must grapple with the lingering effects of what Gilead did to them and what it forced them to do.
June jogs through the Boston Globe building on what looks to be a well-traveled route. She’s been hiding there for two months and is still maintaining her shrine to the executed employees, with candles burning in remembrance. The employees must have loved candles. You’d think she’d have run out a long time ago. It’s a freedom of speech miracle.
She remembers her mother saying that women are so adaptable that they can get used to anything, and wonders what she’s gotten used to without realizing it. This mirrors Aunt Lydia’s statements that normal is just whatever you’re used to, and things in Gilead would begin to feel ordinary and normal to the handmaids before long.
Moira also still jogs, but she jogs through the streets of Toronto. Her route takes her past the refugees’ shrine for their lost American loved ones. It’s not so different from June’s shrine, except it’s outside.
Mara continues her very bad day in this episode, trying to sort out how much of her life is real and how much is frighteningly real hallucination. Oliver, the king of blurred reality, takes over the medical wing and Alexis’ attention for seemingly benign reasons, but this is Oliver. He’s a manipulative, spurned genius and nothing will ever be simple with him. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems with Charlie either, and he’s all over this episode, intervening with Oliver and Alexis, and interrupting Paul and Mara to drop a bombshell.
The episode begins with Charlie arriving at Mara’s apartment not long after she’s figured out that she’s dating a hallucination. Paul and Alexis are already there. Paul’s making tea, because he’s a good boyfriend coworker, and as far as I can tell the Brits make tea in response to every life event. I support this habit.
Charlie has Mara tell her story in detail, but she leaves the derealization sex out. That kind of intense physical hallucination probably should be reported, but I understand her need for privacy. It protects Paul’s heart as well, so let’s keep his dreams alive for as long as possible.
Charlie and Paul try to reassure Mara that she’s safe and they’ll work it out. Mara jumps out of her seat to tell Paul that she’s done everything she was supposed to do, everything he told her to do, but she’s far from okay. Mara doesn’t even know if the rest of the team are really there. Everyone looks sad and guilty, but it’s Alexis, of all people, who responds. It’s the most warmth we’ve ever seen from her.
This week, Mara learns about love, in a small South American town, or at least the Reverie version of the town. She learns that love isn’t always as simple and straight forward as it seems, and can endure in unexpected ways. As is usual, the lesson applies to her own life as well.
Mara wakes up in the morning after episode 7 and Chris is still in her apartment. She asks him if he thinks this is a good idea. They go back and forth a minute, then she realizes she’s overthinking it. Chris says he’s good, Mara says she is too, and they decide everything is okay.
An elderly woman, Pilar Simonet, who lives in an assisted living facility, looks at her dreary life and decides that today is the day she’ll try her Reverie. She says “Apertus” as fast as she can when a staff member discovers her with her tablet. She wakes up young and beautiful in a small South American village where everyone is friendly.
At Onira, Mara and Charlie meet with Jack Selve, executive director of Shady Pines Assisted Living, who is NOT OKAY with his residents using Reverie. They’re supposed to be engaged with each other and life, not technology. Why, Pilar is such a bad girl that she’s missing a treatment for her terminal lung cancer today, plus physical therapy and meals. She’s apparently been sneaking time in Reverie for 2 weeks, and her health has worsened because of it.
Maybe if the staff of Shady Pines treated her like an adult it would help.
In episode 7, we get our first real taste of what the military intends to use Reverie for and the capabilities of Dark Reverie adaptations to the program. Mara is sent into a hostile Reverie for the first time, and experiences physical consequences. The team work together to support Mara as she saves a boy from an unjust fate.
At the start of the episode, Paul and Mara are together in Reverie 2.0 on a date, where Mara is helping Paul learn to fly. After he comes in for a soft landing, Paul leaves through his door in the library. Before Mara can leave, a new door appears, and she, like Alice, can’t resist following the White Rabbit to see where she ends up.
Where she ends up looks like an empty underground parking garage, but she hears someone screaming in the distance. Mara follows the sound and finds a young man, Ehmet, locked in a room and handcuffed to a chair. Ehmet doesn’t know that he’s in a Reverie. He was kidnapped, blindfolded and driven somewhere in a van. He blacked out, then woke up where he is now.
Mara explains that he’s in a virtual reality simulation. Ehmet thinks she’s lying. He’s being questioned about an attack on an airbase by someone who claims to be US military and called him an enemy combatant. They won’t let him eat or leave until he tells them what they want to hear.
This is a disturbing episode that leaves the audience with a lot to think about. We lose some characters, gain some characters, and begin to learn who some of the others really are. We also learn some things we wish we didn’t know.
It’s hard to say which box is meant to be the titular box in this episode full of sinister and confining boxes. There’s the box containing Henry’s police file, which Pangborn tried to conveniently lose many years before as part of a deliberate cover up. There’s Matthew Deaver’s coffin, which makes a grand entrance through town on the back of a truck, straight past his widow, who definitely didn’t want to see him back in town.
There’s the many boxes that make up the prison, from the cells to the surveillance room to the camera monitors to the watchtowers. There’s the boxes that Zalewski and the other guards will be buried in. And the wooden box that Josef Desjardins has in his backyard with a cereal bowl and spoon locked inside that could have held Henry, Kid, or both at some point.
Then there are all of the mental and metaphorical boxes that the characters put themselves and each other in. Zalewski asked how one town can look the other way so much. The answer is partially that they all live in boxes with high walls and no windows. They avoid climbing up high enough to look over the top to check on anyone else.
Episode 3 of Castle Rock follows Molly Strand as she reconnects with Henry and attempts to make her big presentation on the local TV show Living Color. The biggest thing in Molly’s life, though, is her “undiagnosed psychic affliction”, as her unnamed sister put it. Like anyone with an unpredictable health condition, Molly does her best to cope with whatever life throws at her and the symptoms that brings on. Since science doesn’t have an answer for her (just as it doesn’t for so many of us), she turns to alternative treatments.
In addition to following the Psychic Adventures of Molly Strand, we also follow her psydekick and sometimes adversary trigger, Henry Deaver, as he continues to stir up trouble in the Castle Rock vicinity. He finally meets the Kid face to face and officially becomes Kid’s attorney.
The jury’s still out on whether we should be rooting for Kid to go back into the cage or be freed into the wild. I’m currently thinking that the trinity of Henry, Molly and Kid together, with hands joined, will bring on the end of life as we know it. What we need to know now is, is Henry a good witch, or a bad witch, and what would the post-apocalypse new world look like?
In episode 2, Henry investigates Lacy’s suicide, hoping it will lead him to his missing client. He stops by the church again and connects with Jackie Torrance, a local history buff who helps with the local church program to minister to the prisoners. Henry also connects with Zalewski, who helps him get his first look at the Kid. The Kid is having adventures in the regular prison population, as the Warden agrees to put him into solitary, doubled up with a roommate. Pangborn is playing his own complicated game using inside information.
More of what the town put Henry through when he was a child begins to come clear. It’s obvious that he was convicted in the townspeople’s minds as soon as his father’s injured body was found, while Henry himself was still missing. Being black and adopted was enough for the town to use their imaginations to come up with a story that they found believable. The truth was irrelevant, and still is.
This week Mara helps a dancer who’s unable to envision her life without dancing, but who’s lost the ability to dance after a devastating bicycle accident. Mara’s patient has gotten lost in her Reverie, reenacting the best parts of her life and the experiences she wishes she could have had. Saving Holly reunites Mara with Chris, the psychiatrist who was her boyfriend before her family’s murders. In her grief, she shut him out. Now, she has to deal with him in a professional capacity, and face the hurt she caused him by pulling away from their romantic relationship 19 months ago.
Holly is a former dancer who is now paralyzed and uses a wheelchair. She lives with her sister, Vivian, who is also a dancer. While her sister runs a dance studio and lives a busy life, Holly spends her days in Reverie dancing in an empty theatre. At the beginning of the episode, Holly spends too long in Reverie and needs to be brought into Onira Tech’s medical wing.
I was undecided about whether to recap Castle Rock because I was afraid it might be too scary for me, but we had a request, so here we are. Be prepared to hold my hand, dear readers!
The show takes place in the Stephen King universe, using some of the locations and characters from his books and some actors from Stephen King’s other filmed properties, but it tells an original story. Castle Rock itself is a small rural town in northern Maine, home to several King books, including Cujo, The Dead Zone and The Dark Half. Shawshank State Penitentiary, from the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, lies outside of town and is one of the town’s main employers.
Hulu released the first 3 episodes this week, but I’ve only watched the first, so no spoilers for the other 2 here. I’m also not going to spend much time looking for Stephen King Easter Eggs or referencing the stories that are the foundation of this one. I’ve read some of Stephen King’s works and seen some of the films/TV series, but I’m not the kind of fanatic who’s tried to keep up with everything he’s ever done.
King also has a tendency to either forget to include female characters or be misogynist toward the ones that are there, so by about the 1990’s I’d had enough of that and haven’t read/seen much that’s new since then. Castle Rock should be able to stand on its own in the modern world if its going to survive, not depend on nostalgia for old works, and it shouldn’t stay stuck in King’s past mistakes.
