Stephen King has written an absolute eff-ton of books, novellas, and short stories in his time, but his most famous is likely The Shining. It’s a dark, sad tale of alcoholism, telepathy, and the danger of topiary sculptures best immortalized in the Stanley Kubrick film that cast Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, the anger-challenged author who attempted to murder his wife and child while under the influence of the haunted Overlook Hotel.
Since Castle Rock takes place in the same universe as many (and perhaps all) of King’s stories, it was a given that the show would connect somehow to The Shining, but until Episode 8 the only reference was the name and character of Diane “Jackie” Torrance — canonically Jack Torrance’s niece who renamed herself after her uncle to piss off her parent — the town’s resident crime enthusiast who longs for the weird old days when interesting (read: deadly) things happened in her hometown.
In Episode 8, Jackie finally became more than an easter egg when a new hotel opened in town and allowed her to live out her bloodiest dreams for reasons much better than her axe-happy uncle’s were.
The episode begins with the story of a disgraced professor and his cheating wife moving into deceased warden Dale Lacy’s old house with the intention of turning it into a murder-themed bed & breakfast, capitalizing on Castle Rock’s macabre past to draw in true crime fans. It’s a pretty neat idea, except for the fact that The Kid is roaming around town and dragging the bad old days with him, so inevitably the professor murders their first guests for no reason and his wife helps him hide the bodies.
Enter Jackie Torrance, whose curiosity about the new hotel’s theme brings her to the bed and breakfast right after the bodies are disposed of. After crimesplaining a few of their historic details to the professor and his wife (in a particularly heavy-handed moment, he remarks that Torrance “really knows her axes”), they shoo her away, but not before acting creepily enough to keep her interested.
Jackie’s love of a good murder and distrust of the couple comes in clutch in one of the episode’s later sequences, then Henry Deaver breaks into the B&B and is attacked by the knife-wielding couple. Just when it looks like the professor will take him out — whack. It’s Jackie Torrance standing triumphant over the attacker’s body, having killed him with, what else? A felling axe.
Having Jackie save Henry makes Episode 8 a tiny redemptive coda to the story of the Torrance family seen in The Shining. Jack was driven crazy by a hotel and tried to murder his family with an axe; Jackie used an axe to save someone from being murdered by hotel owners. It’s small, but as far as tying back into King’s stories it’s one of the more fun and direct nods to the continuity of his ever-expanding universe.
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