Castle Rock - The Box - The Game of Nerds

This weeks episode of Castle Rock was the most intense of the season so far. As Henry Deaver is trying to find out more information about his disappearance as a kid, Dennis Zalewski is heading for trouble. I enjoyed this episode quite a lot. Like I said it was intense and creepy and it gave us some more information into the lives of our main characters.

Like I said, Henry is trying to find out more information about his mysterious disappearance in 1991. Henry goes to the library to do some research for his case but stumbles upon an article from back then about his case. The article talks about a man named Vince Desjardin, who was released from jail a few months before the disappearance, who was accused of being the person who kidnapped Henry. Upon going to the Desjardin’s house, he finds a box in the backyard. He breaks the lock and only finds a bowl in the box. It could just be a box to keep a dog in, but it feels like something much more sinister.

When he is about to leave a car pulls up. It’s Vince’s brother who explains to Henry that the house is his now and invites him inside. When Henry tells him who he is, Desjardin shows him the case file he has of the event upstairs and tells him it was him that was living in the house at the time of the disappearance. It’s super creepy and a little confusing as to why he has it, but we can all be sure that he had nothing to do with the disappearance. They wouldn’t give away that secret just yet.

The Desjardin’s plotline was only so Henry would confront Alan Pangborn so that Alan could reveal something he had suspected for years — that Henry actually killed his father. Alan tells him that before his Mr. Deaver died he wrote: “Henry did it.” No surprise here, the revelation gets to Henry who seeks out comfort with Molly Strand.

The entire episode you can see Dennis not handling the pressure of work and wanting to hurry up and testify so that change can finally come to Castle Rock and Shawshank Penitentiary. However, after the revelation Alan told Henry, Henry calls Dennis to tell him that he is going to advise the kid to just take the settlement and he is going back to Texas. That seemed to be the final straw that broke Dennis’ sanity. Dennis takes out a gun and starts shooting the other guards in the prison. With how many mass shootings there have been in the past few years, this is one of the most intense and disturbing scenes I have seen in a while.

The story plot was a bit awkward at some parts of this episode, however. Ruth Deaver seems to have the oddest case of Alzheimer’s I have ever heard of. Typically very forgetful, in episode one she didn’t recognize Henry (her son) at first, but when Henry tries to talk to her about her disappearance she seems irritable and that she’s hiding something, before bringing up the fact that she will not be going to Texas with him, that was brought up way earlier and not even between those two characters.

One part I am interested in seeing more of is, they had Henry’s fathers casket exhumed so that he could be buried at the church that he had worked for when he was alive. It feels like something else is going to happen with that, so I am excited to see what exactly.