Stephen King explores the consequences of changing the past in 11.22.63

In some ways, 11.22.63 feels like Stephen King saw Back to the Future and decided to make a civically superior drama. But in this case, the stakes are much higher—and more gruesome. Jake Epping (James Franco) accepts the challenge to live through three years of the ’60s in an attempt to stop John F. Kennedy’s assassination. His mentor, Al Templeton (Chris Cooper) instructs Jake to to find out whether Lee Harvey Oswald really killed Kennedy, and if so, to kill him first.

Producer J.J. Abrams and King explore the utilitarian ethical conundrum over and over in the show, based on King’s 2011 novel by the same name. Saving Kennedy by killing either Oswald or the real assassin, Templeton theorizes, will avert a series of subsequent events, including the Vietnam War, saving many more lives.

King has admitted to grappling with faith. Similarly, Jake wrestles with the idea of killing one to save many, a struggle foreshadowed by a sub-plot in the first two episodes. In his “real,” modern-day life, Jake knows an older man named Harry who says his father murdered his mother, sister, and brother on Halloween night, 1960. Since the time-travel portal just happens to open on Oct. 29, 1960, Jake decides to save the family—again reasoning murder is the only option. In the final scene of the second episode, he has a MacBeth moment while desperately scrubbing Harry’s father’s blood from his hands and repeating, “They’re still alive. They’re still alive. Doris, Tugga, Ellen. They’re still alive.”

“Sometimes people have to do terrible things to make the world a better place,” Jake tells a man who has just related his own horrific story about receiving a Bronze Star for killing a German soldier.

“The last thing you can say about killing a man is that it’s brave,” the man responds.

Unlike in the famous trolley conundrum, viewers can’t help but realize Jake has more than a binary choice. Did he really have to kill Harry’s father, or could he have found another way to save the family? He does attempt a third option—unsuccessfully luring them away from the house ahead of time. Maybe he thought their murder was inevitable as long as Harry’s father lived, but viewers aren’t privy to his thought process. Still, the first two episodes of the eight in this series, available only on the streaming service Hulu, clearly point to a crisis of conscience for Jake: Can and should the past be changed?

For all its abstract ethical conundrums, Stephen King still manages to include his signature blood and gore in 11.22.63. After nearly being hit by a car in one scene, Jake runs to help the driver and finds her lying in a pool of blood, looking up at him and repeating “you shouldn’t be here.” In the second episode—titled “The Killing Floor”—Harry’s father Frank kills a calf with a sledgehammer. The moment isn’t shown onscreen, but it’s audible and stomach-churning. Later in the same episode, Jake kills Frank by strangling him—which is shown onscreen. Not surprisingly, the show is rated “M” for mature.

Viewers will be most haunted by the show’s scariest antagonist—not Lee Harvey Oswald or the CIA, but the past itself. Templeton cautions Jake early on about how fate strongly resists change: When you try to alter history, “the past pushes back.” In Jake’s case, that means strangers constantly telling him “you don’t belong here,” mysteriously falling chandeliers, and returning to his boarding house to find it engulfed in flames. It’s all very reminiscent of a force the Apostle Peter called a roaring lion, “prowling the earth for someone to devour” and pushing as hard as possible in ways big and small against the inevitability of Christ’s lordship in the constant, cosmic battle for our hearts.

Or as Jake’s landlady says when she sees blood on his face, “God knows what’s in your heart. … He’ll be the final judge. Hope you’re prepared for that.”