Spoilers be thriving here. Turn back while you still can.
When the songs are sung about this series, I think that the underlying theme will be that of lost opportunities. Sitting at the end of this journey, I feel like the showrunners had everything they needed in order to make this thing great, save for one thing, namely the patience to give the story the breadth and depth that it needed. I don’t know if this is a case of the network feeling the need to make the fruit hanging so low that it would be accessible to everyone. Or if it was a case of keeping the budget under control. Or maybe it was as simple as the wrong people being in the room when the writers were doing their thing. All I know is that what we got from CBS was a far cry from what they could have delivered.
And in the end, I can only definitively say one thing.
It did end.
But dammit, Jim.
Okay, I promise that this will be my last episode of “things they watered down from the book” but seriously, this is a whopper.
In the denouement of the novel, there is actually a quite touching story that takes place between Stu and Tom Cullen. Stu is completely dependent on Tom as his leg is broken and the two of them have to make their way back to Boulder. It’s one of my favorite parts of the book, seeing them trying to survive and how Stu tries to work around Tom’s disabilities. There’s a great scene between the two of them in a hotel when Stu sets up a little theater for Tom so they can watch movies together. They have to brave extreme conditions in a difficult journey together and in the end they put it all on the line in order to make it home.
I was hopeful for this part of the story because it was also the show’s last chance to provide some kind of a purpose for Nick, who had been so unceremoniously disposed of. In the book, Nick appears to Tom in his dreams and this is how Tom figures out that he is dead. He also gets instructions from Nick on how to take care of Stu.
In the show, episode eight ended with Tom, now on the run from Vegas, right before he finds Stu. We see his shadow in the brilliance of the explosion as he comes across Kojak, running off to greet him and likely find Stu shortly after.
And where did this week’s episode pick up?
Of course, they’re already in Boulder. In sixty seconds we leapfrogged over an entire section of character development. It’s about as appropriate a moment as I could ask for from this show. The moment when Fran looks up and sees Tom and Stu walking into town, grinning like they just had a flat tire up the road made me about as angry as I’ve been for this entire time. And how the hell is it that Stu is walking? In the book, he and Tom are on their own for months through the winter but the show doesn’t seem to suggest that length of time - how could we know?
We get nothing. Stu and Tom’s journey together is reduced to a time jump that’s almost laughable. They aren’t even pretending to live up to their obligation to the book or its fans. Just slam the two characters together and drop them off back home. No need to explain how that happens.
And you can now add Tom to the list of characters that served no function to this story. I’m serious. You could delete every scene that featured either Nick or Tom and have pretty much zero impact on the plot.
Two fantastic characters with a deep and intimate relationship, made into little more than props in the background.
And that’s the most succinct way I can sum up my feelings on this thing. So many rich and beautiful characters on the page that become convenience store, microwaved entrees.
Nick. Tom. Larry. Glenn. Lucy (turns out she was in the show - who knew?) Joe/Leo. Lloyd.
You could have literally removed every one of these people and other than needing more material to fill the space, not one thing is lost from the overall narrative structure. It would be like pulling paint chips off a house.
Here’s what they should have done, in my humble and ignorant opinion. Make the entire show about Fran, Stu and Harold.
When Peter Jackson was faced with the challenge of adapting Lord of the Rings, their basic approach was, if it didn’t have to do with Frodo or the ring, dump it. That’s what should have happened here.
Make this all about Fran and dealing with the awkward and unwanted advances from Harold in a world where seemingly no one else exists anymore. See how this develops as Stu joins the party. Watch them rejoin this newly born society and the role they play in this grand battle between good and evil.
You obviously will still have secondary characters but make them secondary. That way, you aren’t just copying and pasting some names from the book into the screenplay in some act of obligatory inclusion. The advantage of a book is that your tapestry is as big as it needs to be. You can’t do that in a movie. There are walls that won’t move for you. You need to define the story in a much shorter amount of time.
Would it have still been The Stand if most of the characters had been stripped away? Not even close. But at least then you have a story with weight and substance to it instead of a revolving wheel with paper cutout faces that you shoot at to win a stuffed bear. Maybe a series inspired by The Stand would be more satisfying than a show that claims to be performing the book. In my version, you have real justice for Stu and Fran and Harold’s journey. It could feel as real on the screen as it did on the page. And then, maybe, MAYBE, if it’s successful, maybe you could do a second season and tell Larry’s story. Or Nick. Do something in the style of American Horror Story with largely independent seasons that maybe brush against each other now and then. How great would it be to have an entire nine episode season devoted to Nick and Tom?
Well, that ain’t happening.
On other fronts, I need to deal with the ending since so many of us have been clinging to the revelation that Stephen King himself penned a brand new coda for the story, extending on what was published in the book. CBS has certainly been flexing their promotional muscle, describing this as the ending that Stephen King waited over thirty years to write.
Well...not so much.
I won’t spoil it, save for saying that the end to the story is just as it is in the book. There is more slack added to the narrative thread - scenes that delve more deeply into Fran and Stu’s story after they leave Boulder. But the end-point itself remains the same and this entire episode functioned largely as a slow exhalation of breath. Like the director’s cut blu-ray with the never before seen ending that rarely delivers on the promise. Nothing really earth shattering added to the story.
I will allow that this episode felt more structurally composed than the others, mostly because so many plot elements had been “resolved” and we could focus in a little more. There’s also some great performances between Odessa Young and Alexander Skarsgård. They have been two consistent high points for me and if nothing else, Skarsgård has provided me with my favorite interpretation of Randall Flagg to date.
But it also created a great deal of confusion for an episode that was supposed to be wrapping things up. What are we supposed to think about the girl in the cornfield? Was that Mother Abigail’s ghost? Or some embodiment of her spiritual core? Or did the writers just need a convenient way to fix a broken leg?
Ultimately it seemed like taking a lot of time away from what could have been better character development in exchange for making a thematic point that’s not really that profound or that wasn’t already clear. Yeah we get it. Stand and be true. We have a title. Cheers.
The show ends like the book, with Flagg’s reappearance before a small tribe somewhere in South America and I have to think that many found this confusing, implying that a second season was being set up. With the book, the ending functions against the backdrop of the Stephen King universe where Randall Flagg makes many appearances. But looking solely at the show, what are we supposed to take from these closing moments? What’s the message, here? Because I don’t think there are more seasons in the works, despite the clear cliffhanger vibe it provided.
If it helps any, what follows are my thoughts on the end of the book. This is from a new review I wrote last year and deals with this somewhat confusing point that King chose as a sendoff for the book.
One final aspect I found myself drawn to this time around was the epilogue, something that was written for the unabridged version of the book. And again - spoilers here - but what should I take from the fact that in the end, Randall Flagg seems to survive while Mother Abigail does not? What kind of light does that shed on the quest and sacrifices of our heroes? And what I think I have settled on is this: we can't expect the goodness of the world to always be there for us. The evil in the world, that will always be a presence in our lives, no matter what we do to it. The good, however, the righteousness we need in our lives must essentially be found within ourselves. It might no longer be something we can see, it isn't an external presence, rather it exists as some fundamental aspect of our core character.
So that’s pretty much it for me. If you’ve been following along with these reviews, you have my thanks. If you enjoyed the show, I really am happy for you. I was excited to watch this and to see what the extended length and format was going to provide. I thought they got off to a strong start and there have been some strong moments throughout. It just fell apart pretty quickly.
I don’t want to come off like a bitter fan. It wasn’t for me but clearly someone out there liked it. And as I have said in different contexts about different films, if this serves to inspire people to read the book, I consider it to be a victory. But for me, it just didn’t work. Lots of winking and nodding at superficial moments without delivering the substance. They had all the tools. Everything was lined up perfectly.
The show just never got its legs underneath it.
M-O-O-N. That spells, “I’m done.”
