CASTLEROCK SEASON 2 (2019)

Annie Wilkes returns, and my god we have missed her. Having watched Misery more times than I can care to remember, any rekindling of Annie Wilkes, in any shape or form on the screen would grab my attention. Castlerock (2019) is a perfect setting for Annie. A new world, one she is reluctant to enter but fully immersed, she flourishes. It spans Annie’s coming of age, through flashbacks and eventual backstory She is not alone, arriving at Castlerock with her daughter Joy; a repressed teenager who has been brought up in their isolated world. Annie’s erratic behaviour and addiction to prescription anti-psychotic drugs immediately waves a red flag of what is to come.

What Castlerock does as a series very well is to have simultaneous narratives running parallel to each other, which end up effortlessly concluding together. Whereas I found the narrative of the first season more complex, the second season is easier to watch with fewer riddles. The emphasis is less on uncovering a mysterious but more of a show and tell, with a greater emphasis on character development. However, Annie’s storyline is not the only focus point. The family dynamic between the Somalian born Nadia and Addie and their adoptive American father and brothers is just as compelling.

For all its thrill, horror, and violence, Castlerock is essentially about family especially the relationship between parent and child, significantly when this is not a conventional one. This is most poignant in the last stages of the drama where Annie tackles the change of her thirteen-year-old daughter Joy from a child into the grasp of adulthood. Or when Nadia tries to reconcile love she has for her adopted father and the dark secret he has kept from her since childhood. The series explores what it means to be nurtured and how even with the best intentions, parents can get it wrong.

(Photography: Bad Robot/Warner Bros.)

Castlerock, 2019 (TV). Bad Robot