'Castle Rock' Season 2 Episode 5: Well-meaning parents are the monsters to be feared in the world of Stephen King
"My Annie is pure, and this place is a sewer."
So says Annie Wilkes' defiant mother after the principal of Annie's school informs her about hints of pathological behavior in her daughter. Annie has just delivered a hard and bloody smack across a classmate's face, who was trying to bully her.
But still, her parents refuse to address the glaring issues prevalent in their daughter. Her father decides to teach her at home, and her mother is unhappy with this proposition.
Yet, she is too busy trying to keep the house running, as her husband has no job. It's a difficult life, and Annie's mother's patience runs thin through the course of the latest episode of 'Castle Rock'.
Parents are heavily-layered entities in 'Castle Rock', though they always mean well, be it Annie's, or Pop Merrill (Tim Robbins), or maybe Annie herself. Out of pure guilt, Pop Merrill adopted Abdi and Nadia after gunning down their mother in Mogadishu.
After living a life of lies and deceit, Nadia is broken to know that her foster father had torn apart her childhood with several bullets. Guilt has corroded Pop Merrill more than his cancer, and his life of trying to assuage himself of it failed as Nadia leaves him in his dying moments.
Destructive parents and emotionally disheveled children are a common thread running in Stephen King's works, more than the monsters.
The real evil lies within us, he shows. Can we fight it? And for how long? Because just like the body-snatchers lurking in 'Castle Rock' currently, your demons catch up with you.
Even Annie, in her best attempts to be a good mother to Joy, is another destructive mother as she has isolated her from everyone her whole life. Of course, watching the latest episode shows that Annie had her reasons too, bizarre as they are.
Annie Wilkes' parents might not have been wracked by guilt, but they had their own issues to deal with. Annie's mother grows weary and exhausted and life has not been kind to her. Negative thoughts begin to take control of her and she can't shake them off.
Wrapped in her own sadness, she cannot see the problems in Annie and believes that her daughter is made for better things, away from the dreary life she has been used to.
And so, these thoughts propel her to drive her car into the lake, with Annie in the passenger's seat. Annie survives, but her mother does not.
This scarring incident wrecks Annie completely and the anger that had been buried in the recesses of her mind, come bubbling to the fore, especially when her father brings home a new wife, who was also Annie's tutor, Rita.
There's a baby in the picture too, and that rattles Annie further. Annie's violent streak is shown when she reaches for the knife when her father informs her about Rita. She picks up the knife, shaking and suddenly stops at what she is capable of.
Rita advises her husband to at least get help for Annie. Despite seeing all possible warning signs of violence, he still doesn't. In a fit of rage, Annie accidentally pushes him down the stairs and he gets impaled on wood. Rita witnesses this, and in a moment of panic, Annie stabs her and runs away with the child.
Sometimes, 'Castle Rock' seems to be a strange warning sign for unchecked mental illnesses and advice for parents to get their children required help, rather than dismissing the idea of therapy completely.
Had Annie Wilkes' parents addressed her problems in childhood, she wouldn't have devolved into a murderous kidnapper on the run. Had Pop Merrill not gunned down Abdi and Nadia's mother, they might still have had a childhood to remember.
Unintentionally, the parents in Stephen King's universe become the monsters they swore to protect their children from. 'Castle Rock' airs on Hulu.