Inside Sissy Spacek’s Big ‘Castle Rock’ Episode, “The Queen”

Castle Rock, Episode 7, “The Queen” is what people colloquially call “a game-changer.” It’s the episode that takes us inside the memories of Ruth Deaver (Sissy Spacek), a character who up until this moment has been discounted since she struggles with dementia. As we follow her dislocated thoughts through the past, present, and future, we see a lifetime of secrets, regret, and utter tragedy.
The episode is also something of a revelation. If you felt like Castle Rock was treading water in earlier episodes, you’ll want to race back rewatch every single beat you missed. “The Queen” shows off just how well Castle Rock has been plotted, and so naturally, Decider wanted to talk to Sam Shaw, Castle Rock co-creator and Episode 7’s sole writer about how he constructed this emotional marvel. Shaw revealed that not everything was as closely planned as it might seem, the chess pieces do have character correlations, and Stephen King gave his blessing to kill off a fan favorite.

WARNING: MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR CASTLE ROCK, EPISODE 7, “THE QUEEN” AHEAD.

How Castle Rock‘s Showrunners Planned “The Queen”

Castle Rock‘s “The Queen” takes Ruth Deaver on a non-linear journey through her memories. Because of this, we travel with her through time and space in what Shaw joked was the “Quantum Leap approach of time travel.” It also means that we seen re-enactments of past scenes with fresh eyes. So…how did Team Castle Rock plan this and how early did they nail down each scene for “The Queen”?
“We knew really, really early on that Ruth was going to get her own episode,” Shaw said, adding that he liked the idea of letting Ruth, “who because she has dementia in some ways is the least reliable narrator in the story and maybe a character the audience discounts, become the custodian of the most important emotional secrets of the story and letting that character be the master key that unlocks the structure of the previous episodes.”
However, “The Queen” wasn’t the first episode written, nor did Sissy Spacek get an early peek at it before she signed onto the project. Shaw said they told Spacek early on that there would be an episode focusing on her character and “the discontinuity of having dementia,” but he admitted that she didn’t get to know more before signing on to Castle Rock.
“All she got to read was the first episode,” Shaw said. “It’s such an insane part of the business and it puts you in the position of a creator or showrunner of asking for a lot of faith and trust.”

Later, Shaw said he squirreled himself away to write the episode, and that he had to weave together the team’s early plans with what happened on set with what struck him in the process of writing. “There’s a mix of advance planning and strategy and luck and serendipity,” Shaw said.

Despite All The Planning, Sissy Spacek Still Got To Improvise On The Castle Rock Set

Speaking of serendipity, Shaw credits one of the first “buttons” that teases the episode to Sissy Spacek’s on-the-fly improvisation. “The whole sort of teaser of this episode culminates with Ruth walking downstairs into a scene from the first episode,” Shaw said. “This moment where she’s gone to get sheets for Henry, and she realizes that she forgot the sheets. I mean, she’s so brilliant, Sissy, and so emotionally present. She looks and feels to me like an actor who has wandered onstage and forgotten what scene she’s in and suddenly recovers the thrust of the story.”

“That scene in Episode 1 originally had a different button. And it was Sissy who had this idea that she should have forgotten sheets when she comes downstairs. That’s just something Sissy improv-ed on the day, and we loved it so much. You just sort of file these moments away and it felt kind of appropriate to return to that moment in the first episode.”
In “The Queen,” Shaw gives a creepy prelude to the moment: Ruth wakes up to find a bloodied dead animal on her sheets, leading the audience to wonder if she forgot Henry’s sheets or to clean up her own.

All About That Creepy Chess Set

Anchoring the episode is Ruth’s beautiful chess set. We first hear about the chess pieces in Episode 6, as she explains to grandson Wendell (Chosen Jacobs), that it’s her system to pull her back to the present. Shaw calls the chess set the “crucial creative choice that unlocked the episode” and said he got the idea for it from two sources: the famed Lewis chessmen and his own life experience.
“I don’t know if you have any firsthand experience with dementia, [but] it’s a big fucking drag. I’ve loved a handful of people who really fought and struggled with dementia. One thing that I found profound about their experiences was that it was really important to be surrounded by objects and mementos that helped contextualize their stories,” Shaw said. “Ruth says in an earlier episode that she doesn’t want to move to Texas; she wants to fall on her traces like one of the Icelandic shieldmaidens. Home is the place where she knows her own story.”
Shaw added that he knew from his own experience that people struggling with Alzheimers “often seize upon tools to hold the monster at bay” and that chess is one of the games that is “prescribed like a medication to help exercise the brain.”
As for the chess set itself, Shaw said he “fell down this rabbit hole” and became “obsessed” with the Lewis chessmen. “It’s very easy to get obsessed with the Lewis chessmen,” Shaw said. “First of all, they’re so bizarre and beautiful and terrifying. And then they have this incredibly arcane backstory. They were discovered in this Scottish coffin and the provenance is debated and mysterious.”
That said, the “haunting” chess set almost didn’t make it into the story…

Yes, That Chess Set Was On The Walking Dead

So a funny thing about the Lewis chessmen… Castle Rock is not the first trendy show to use a reproduction of the chess set in its storytelling. The Walking Dead did it first, and after Shaw found out about this, he almost waffled on keeping them in.
“There was this moment of existential crisis where I had to decide if we had to rip them out of the story, replace them with some other commemorative medieval chess set,” Shaw said.
Shaw then discovered that specific episode of The Walking Dead had been directed by Castle Rock‘s producing director Michael Uppendahl and it had been edited by Kelly Dixon, one of the show’s editors. Shaw said he took this coincidence as a “sign from the universe” to use the Lewis chessmen after all.

If Ruth Is The Queen, Who Is The King?

The name of the episode, “The Queen,” refers to a physical chess piece, but also to Ruth herself, who finally takes on the attributes of the Queen, being all-powerful and able to travel wherever she wants.
“Initially, when chess was invented as a game, the Queen was one of the weakest pieces on the chessboard. Her movements were really limited. At some point, the Queen became the most powerful piece on the chessboard. She has this unlimited range of motion. That idea became a governing metaphor in thinking about the episode,” Shaw said. “We take a character who has been shunted aside and who has lived on the margins of this season of storytelling, and in this episode, she becomes the Queen.”
We asked Shaw if this metaphor extended to other characters in the show. “When I wrote the episode, the answer was no,” Shaw said, but he explained that the episode’s director Greg Yaitanes changed that and thought there should be a relationship between the characters and the chess pieces. “He sent me this whole elaborate spreadsheet involving Matthew Deaver as the Bishop and Alan Pangborn as the White Knight.”
“So if you look closely, yes, there is some method to the madness,” Shaw says.

Why Did Castle Rock Choose To Have Ruth Send Wendell Away?

Other shows might have upped the tension even more in “The Queen” by keeping Henry’s teenaged son Wendell in the house with Ruth and The Kid as all hell broke loose. However, Shaw decided that Ruth would send Wendell away to safety. He said there “a few ways to answer that question,” and then shared just one non-spoiler-y one.
“I think that regret and loss are very central to Ruth’s story over the course of this season, and they’re central to this episode. In a way, I think Ruth has spent a lot of time trying to bury a sense of guilt about a choice she made earlier in her life. She has held onto the idea that she failed to protect her son from her husband,” Shaw said. “Part of the story in this episode involve Ruth reckoning with these mistakes in a profound sort of way.”
Shaw also said that the scene where Pangborn chastises Ruth for wanting to bury the stray dog to atone for Henry’s dog Puck is meant to echo her desire to save Wendell when she couldn’t do the same for Henry.

Yes, That Was Sissy Spacek’s Daughter Schuyler Fisk Playing Young Ruth In That One Flashback

For the vast majority of the episode, Ruth travels back in her memories as her present-day self. However, after she stabs The Kid in the shower, she is bombarded by an avalanche of people, all from her memories, until she pauses and comes face-to-face with her younger self, played by Sissy Spacek’s daughter, actress Schuyler Fisk.
“It’s almost as if all of the rules of engagement breakdown.” Shaw said, “It almost feels like all of her synapses are firing at once and a whole bunch of her memories are colliding with each other. That leads us downstairs to this surreal funeral scene where she sees herself played by her daughter.”
“I think part of the impulse was that it wouldn’t have felt truthful if we had established a clear set of narrative rules that govern the way that we represent Ruth’s dementia on screen and stick to them over the course of the episode,” Shaw said. “Because that’s not how dementia works. I wish that dementia came with a set of instructions but part of what’s harrowing about it is the sands shift and the rules change.”

Stephen King Gave Castle Rock His Blessing to Kill Off Pangborn

“The Queen” ends in tragedy. Lost in panic, fear, and the throes of dementia, Ruth accidentally shoots Alan Pangborn (Scott Glenn), believing him to be The Kid/Matthew Deaver. Shaw said they knew early on in production when in the season Pangborn would die, and how he would go. Still, it was “agonizing” to lose Scott Glenn. Not only because Glenn was such a great force on the show, but because Alan Pangborn is such a beloved figure in the Stephen King canon.
“His character is a character we’d come to love, and beyond our season and our story, Alan Pangborn is a character Stephen King fans really love,” Shaw said. “So we had a real sense of humility making the choice, and it was a little scary to go to Stephen King, sort of hat in hand, and ask him for his blessing. We were really grateful when he gave it.”

Stream Castle Rock on Hulu