‘Castle Rock’: What Was That Music at the End of “The Queen”?

This week’s episode of Hulu’s Castle Rock was a major standout, not just of the young series but of this entire year on television. The show took an hour to focus on the character of Ruth Deaver, played by the legendary Sissy Spacek, whose character had been shown to be suffering from Alzheimer’s-esque dementia. As we see in this episode (and as she alluded to last week), Ruth has become un-stuck in time, to use a Vonnegut term, drifting from moment to moment throughout her life and using her fancy gothic chess pieces to help ground her in the present. You should check out Meghan O’Keefe’s excellent breakdown of the episode for some details — and spoilers — for how the episode came together. I’m here to talk about the final five minutes, which hit me with a wallop.

Those last five minutes follow the episode’s big spoiler (which I won’t reveal here, but you can either read Meghan’s article linked above or, better yet, watch the episode because it’s fantastic) and act as a kind of coda for the episode. A comedown. Ruth emerges from her garage, washes herself off, and finds it in her to keep moving from what just happened. She again becomes unstuck in time, and we see a moment that’s been referred to a lot: Alan Pangborn (Scott Glenn) shows up on her doorstep, after many years away, to re-introduce himself. Ruth, who not only remembers the young Alan who she confided in so deeply during her troubled marriage to Matthew but also all the years she and Alan will spend together after this moment, clutches Alan close to her and says, “Please don’t leave.”

During these scenes, a piece of music is playing that’s different from the usual Castle Rock score and probably sounded tantalizingly familiar to viewers. The piece is called “On the Nature of Daylight,” and it’s by the film and television composer Max Richter. Richter composed the piece for an album he made in 2004, and since then it’s been used in several feature films, from Stranger Than Fiction (2006) to Disconnect (2012). In 2010, Martin Scorsese’s film Shutter Island used a mix of “On the Nature of Daylight” and Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” a mix that would later show up in a memorable So You Think You Can Dance routine.

But most prominently and powerfully, you likely recall “On the Nature of Daylight” from the closing moments of the 2016 film Arrival. It shows up in time for that film’s big plot twist, and provides an ideal companion for a sequence that is sad, contemplative, moving, and incredibly hopeful.

There are big thematic connections between Arrival and Castle Rock‘s “The Queen,” too. Both involve a main character who has attained the ability to move throughout the timeline of her life, knowing everything she knows now. For Ruth, it’s frightening; for Amy Adams’s character in Arrival, it’s illuminating. For both, it unlocks a major piece of the plot. Ruth Deaver and Louise Banks are in very different stories, but what’s most deeply moving about both of their stories is how they know what’s going to happen and move forward anyway.

A bit more tangentially, Alan showing up on Ruth’s doorstep in the final scene of “The Queen” reminded me a lot of the final episode of The Leftovers, another TV series that was hugely shaped by Max Richter’s original music.

There’s something about score music in film and television — not popular music, but that orchestral score that flows through the action like water — that pulls different stories together in our minds, almost without us knowing it. As soon as “The Queen” was over, I had to go right to the final scene of Arrival and melt into that for a moment (thankfully, both Castle Rock and Arrival are on Hulu). I’ll likely not be able to think about one without thinking about the other for a good long while. Which is fine, actually.

Watch Castle Rock's "The Queen" on Hulu

Watch Arrival on Hulu