Abhiroop Das
Created by Sam Shaw and Dustin Thomason, ‘Castle Rock‘ takes Stephen King‘s eponymous town and turns it into a house of horrors, with each nook and cranny hiding elements of fantasy and mystery. In the second season of this horror thriller series, an iconic character from King’s oeuvre, Annie Wilkes, is recreated as the newest person in town. As she finds herself stuck between a territorial feud between gangster clans, strange supernatural phenomena take over people’s psyches, shifting and churning reality across space and time. With her daughter’s life in danger, Annie is forced to navigate through her own hallucinogenic constructs and the equally surreal happenings of the world she now finds herself in. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Castle Rock Season 2 Plot Recap
‘Castle Rock’ season 2 shifts the focus away from Henry and The Kid’s saga, and puts it on Annie Wilkes, the protagonist in Stephen King’s story, ‘Misery.’ In this season, she has a teenage daughter, Joy, with whom she travels the entire country. However, an accident leaves them stranded in Castle Rock, and they take shelter in Stargazer Lodge, owned by Ace Merrill. Annie, who takes on the job of a nurse in town, has a psychological disorder that causes hallucinations. Running low on her medicine, she tries to steal the hospital key-card of a doctor named Nadia, but is surprised when Ace arrives at the house to firebomb it. Turns out, Ace’s father, the town gangster Reginald “Pop” Merrill, also raised orphans Nadia and her brother Abdi, and the half-siblings’ frictions lead Ace to take violent measures. While Annie narrowly escapes, Ace discovers that he was seen and targets Joy, only for Annie to kill him.
Desperate to cover her tracks, Annie tries to bury Ace’s body at a construction complex, but accidentally digs into an old network of underground tunnels, full of 17th-century coffins. Although she makes it out of the scene in one piece, her relief is short-lived. The following day, Ace somehow comes back to life, and the place where he was buried is filled with concrete. While Annie is unable to make sense of things, her hallucinations flare up once again. A flashback to her childhood reveals that Annie once worked with her father on the making of his novel. However, things changed when he started having an affair with Annie’s nanny, Rita, and ultimately started a family with her. This led to Annie’s mother having a psychological breakdown, following which she took her own life. Annie, feeling left out in her father’s life, had a violent exchange that left him accidentally dead. Enraged, she stabbed Rita and ran off with her baby, renaming her Joy.
As it turns out, Rita survived her injuries and has been on the lookout for her daughter to this day. Ultimately, she does track Joy and Annie down to Castle Rock, but their meeting quickly goes south. As Rita tries to shoot Annie, Joy sedates her from behind, and the gun accidentally fires at Rita’s stomach, killing her. Annie takes the fall for this incident and is arrested, but doesn’t know that the entire town is slowly getting under a spell. Turns out, Ace’s body has been taken over by a 17th-century settler, named Augustin, who belonged to a cult created by a prophet known as Amity. His revival triggers a chain reaction, where all townsfolk either die and are then reincarnated into cultists or are simply hypnotized by the statue of the Angel, who looks oddly like The Kid. Augustin believes that Amity will possess Joy at the sunset of Castle Rock’s 400th anniversary, and with that, Annie has to race against time to save the person dearest to her.
Castle Rock Season 2 Ending: Did Annie Kill Joy?
Season 2 of ‘Castle Rock’ ends with Annie drowning Joy to death, before hallucinating a positive scenario where Joy survives, and the duo manages to reconcile. Although Annie goes to hell and back in her bid to rescue Joy before she is ritually sacrificed by the cult, the situation soon escapes her grasp. As dusk falls, Augustin approaches Joy, hoping to witness Amity’s prophesied return, but is surprised when Joy stabs him instead. While it is possible that this is purely Joy’s reaction to waking up from the Angel’s spell, the use of the knife is also deeply tied to Amity. Even in her season 1 appearance at the Schisma rifts, the 17th-century prophet can be seen carrying a bloodied knife, and it is possible that killing Augustin is just her past blending in with her present. Nonetheless, with Augustin dead and the rest of the cultists in disarray, Annie escapes with Joy, hoping to right the wrongs this time around.
While leaving Castle Rock behind is a good thing for Annie and Joy on the surface, reality plays out differently. After days of distance and disconnect, Annie slowly begins to get convinced that Joy has actually been taken over by Amity. Her belief is also amplified by her growing fixation with the ‘Misery Chastain’ novel series, penned by Paul Sheldon. Absorbed in the emotionality of the passages, she begins to crave a similarly intense connection with her half-sibling and spirals out of control upon failing to do so. Things come to a head when she finds Joy on the phone with an unknown man, who is later implied to be a lawyer she is discussing legal emancipation with. Annie, in her state of paranoia, believes this to be a revived cult member and thus reaches her tipping point. Fully convinced that Joy is possessed, Annie drags her to the lake outside their house and drowns her to death.
Joy’s drowning completes a motif cycle that represents the generational trauma that has persisted in the Wilkes family. The scene not only mirrors Annie’s first attempt to drown Joy as an infant, but also her mother, Crysilda’s, death by suicide, wherein she tried to take Annie’s life as well. On a larger level, drowning seems to represent Annie’s constant attempts to bury the nagging corners of her psyche, be it by her alcohol or medication abuse, or by acts of extreme violence. To that end, the ending also contrasts season one’s ambiguous conclusion, where Henry finds himself in a similar moral morass with The Kid. While he prioritizes the idea of reasonable doubt, Annie fully gives in to her beliefs, killing someone she perceives as an evil entity.
Is Annie Hallucinating?
The letter Annie encounters after drowning Joy puts a new spin on the entire narrative, forcing not just her, but also the audience, to reevaluate who Joy is and what she has had to endure this entire time. In the letter, she explains that her emotional distancing from Annie is in large part to cope with Castle Rock’s traumatic experiences, as well as find her own identity. In reality, her plan was to leave Annie temporarily and return when she had found the missing pieces of her self-identity. The call with the lawyer was seemingly to fulfill that exact purpose, and upon reading this, Annie realizes her mistake. As she rushes back to the lake and starts CPR, Joy miraculously comes back to life, this time declaring her love for her family and how she has found her “laughing place”. However, this entire sequence is revealed to be a figment of Annie’s imagination in the final scene, as Joy never came back to life in the first place.
At a ‘Misery Chastain’ book signing event, what initially appears to be Annie and Joy bonding over their love for the novels is revealed to be Annie’s hallucination, as the seat next to her is actually empty. Her reason for partially imagining this series of events is simple: her refusal to accept Joy’s death. However, there is a second, more sinister layer to this, rooted in Annie’s selfishness. To begin with, her dynamic with Joy is founded on the latter smiling in her arms as an infant. To that end, Joy is Annie’s “laughing place,” both literally and figuratively, and in this series of hallucinations, she serves exactly that purpose. From sharing Annie’s enthusiasm for Paul Sheldon’s novels to ignoring other children in favor of her, this imagined version of Joy entertains all of her half-siblings’ fantasies, stemming from her days of being rejected by her family. Thus, Annie’s hallucinations serve as both a coping and a wish-fulfillment mechanism at once.
Was Joy Really Possessed by Amity?
Although Joy’s letter makes a strong case for her not being possessed, the same words reveal some of the glaring cracks in her identity. To begin with, Joy is fully aware of the fact that Annie is not her mother, but her half-sibling, which makes the idea of legal emancipation void. The fact that she describes Annie as her mother in the letter and follows that up with affectionate words in a similar vein is puzzling in the present-day context. Furthermore, the discovery of the strange symbols and drawings on Joy’s notebook further sparks doubt about her true self, as both bible verses and drawings of eyes are symbolically associated with Amity. Furthermore, Joy never mentioning Chance in the final stretch of the show is also uncharacteristic of her, as their potential romance has been a plot beat from the very start.
One scene in particular that heightens the ambiguity surrounding Joy’s real self is when she watches ‘Blue Is the Warmest Color.’ As the film is partly about the protagonist’s discovery of her sexual identity, it is possible that Joy is intrigued for similar reasons. However, the fact that the movie is in French adds to the uncertainty, as it is equally likely that this is Amity watching a movie in her native language. As sedation is a known method to weaken a body’s possession, Annie tries to figure out the mystery by spiking a cake for Joy, but their fatal exchange takes place before the results of this experiment can be confirmed. Thus, while there is no explicit confirmation of Joy being Amity in disguise, many narrative crumbs point to the same. Still, Annie’s history of hallucinations and paranoia put her entire perspective into question, with the bottom line being that Joy was tragically murdered, regardless of whether she was possessed.
Where Does the Angel Go? Was he The Kid?
Much like Annie and Joy’s arc, the Angel’s conclusion is steeped in supernatural mystery, connecting in many ways to season one of ‘Castle Rock.’ After the cult’s mass revival fails and the statue is destroyed, the Angel can be seen vanishing from the Castle Lake cliff. As the Angel can seemingly jump in and out of reality, this lines up with the series’ definition of a Schisma, or a rift in spacetime. In season 1, Castle Lake is the spot from where Henry and The Kid alternate between timelines, and that lines up with the Angel’s maneuvers. It is possible that he is an inhuman entity that is capable of harnessing Schisma with intent. Although his motivations for entering different realities are never confirmed, the linkages to the devil indicate that the Angel may simply be an agent of malice, jumping through different realms to spread chaos.
In Stephen King’s ‘Dark Tower’ series, the antagonist, named the Crimson King, is a cloaked creature who possesses a similar set of abilities as the Angel in ‘Castle Rock.’ Given their overlaps in powers and aesthetics, it is possible that this connection is intentional and even ties into The Kid’s true identity. Notably, the final episode takes place somewhere in the middle of 2019, which narratively places it before the 1-year timeskip in the season 1 finale. However, while Henry is alive and well in the latter, in this episode, we encounter a poster that declares him missing. This, coupled with the empty cage where The Kid should have been, suggests that this universe may be another alternate reality, where The Kid and Henry’s fates played out differently. This also explains how The Kid and the Angel might be one and the same, shifting through timelines with varying degrees of success.
Does Pop Die? What Happens to Ace and the Town Cultists?
While Pop is implied to have died in the explosion at Marsten House, Ace, AKA Augustin, likely meets his end after being stabbed by Joy. Notably, it is Nadia who pulls the trigger on the explosives, knowing that it will kill Pop as well. Although she breaks into tears while making that difficult decision, she also understands that it is for the greater good. Furthermore, this implies that she has forgiven him for his past mistakes, which is what their arc has been building up to. For Ace, however, the story plays out a bit differently, as he is technically dead since the very first episode. The person we see in the rest of the story is actually Father Augustin, who is stabbed in the stomach by Joy and possibly bleeds to death. However, with his corpse never shown, and the reincarnation method also including some healing properties, there is a slim chance that he is still alive and searching for Amity.
As the explosion destroys Marsten House and its supernatural properties, as well as the angel statue, the entire town is woken up from its state of hypnosis, and likely returns to normal. However, this does not take into account the dozens of cult members who are now reincarnated in the bodies of present-day people. While many die alongside Pop, there is a good chance that there are still many 17th-century French settlers who are still alive. However, given that sedation provides a way of stripping them of their abilities, the town is likely to defeat the cult members for good. The fact that Annie and Joy’s departure from Castle Rock takes place a full week after the final battle shows that the duo was safe for that duration. Still, the psychological imprint of the cult’s attack is what ultimately leads to Annie’s undoing and Joy’s tragic death.
Read More: Shows Like Castle Rock
You must be logged in to post a comment.