Summary
“Memento Mori” doesn’t make things any easier for Charles and family, and it turns out that the people of Preacher’s Corners just might have a point.
This recap of Chapelwaite season 1, episode 2, “Memento Mori”, contains spoilers.
You wouldn’t want to live in basically any town Stephen King has ever written about, but Preacher’s Corners seems especially miserable. Everyone’s broke, racist, and superstitious, and the latest citizen, as we see in the cold open of “Memento Mori”, is born hideously deformed. It makes sense that life for this kid won’t exactly be stellar, but it says a lot about the town’s opinion of the Boone family that he’ll probably fare better than Charles and his kids.
Chapelwaite season 1, episode 2 recap
Yes, everyone is still really hating on Charles, despite the fact he’s determinedly polite and plans to uplift the whole community by turning the family’s sawmill into a shipbuilding yard, bringing prosperity to everyone. Not that they’re willing to allow such a thing. The Boone family legacy is cursed, and even if that wasn’t true, judging by the reception Charles’s kids get at school thanks to their mixed heritage, they wouldn’t fare particularly well amongst the townsfolk anyway. His youngest daughter Loa, by the way, has rickets, which I don’t recall being mentioned in the first episode.
This isn’t a funny show, but Preacher’s Corners is hilariously doom-and-gloom. There’s that unspecified sickness mentioned in the premiere, the horror of a disfigured baby – which is taken as an ill omen – and people being murdered in the night and drained of their blood. That victim was Edward Mallory, the father of Susan, the quarantined girl in the white dress, and her mother is convinced the Boones are responsible. Charles internalizes a lot of this and at one point imagines himself slicing off a nose he is sure if infested with worms. It’s another of his strange visions. “Memento Mori” isn’t pulling any punches with the nastiness compared to the premiere.
All Hallow’s Eve looms nonetheless, which hardly seems like a cause for celebration given the circumstances, especially since Loa’s seashell necklace, given to her by her late mother, has gone missing, Charles couldn’t recruit anyone for the sawmill, and, as Rebecca explains, the townsfolk are prone to illnesses of all varieties. One of the racist kids attacks the Boone youngsters and then claims his dad will beat up their dad after Able, basically the only nice person in town, intervenes. And when Susan eventually succumbs to her illness, a frantic Rose runs into the street to publicly blame Stephen Boone for her demise, even though he apparently died a year prior. Charles just can’t seem to catch a break.
What “Memento Mori” suggests, though, is that the people of Preacher’s Corners just might have a point. When an enraged Charles, looking to prove a point of his own, returns to Chapelwaite and digs up Stephen’s grave, he finds it empty.
You can stream Chapelwaite exclusively on Epix.
