The Stand, Episode Two: “Pocket Savior” Thoughts and Impressions

Too tired to type, but not to talk. Enjoy me talking about the second episode.

The Stand, Episode One: "The End" Thoughts and Impressions

Well, a day after saying I haven't seen it yet, I have now seen the opening episode of The Stand, the second adaptation of what it probably King's greatest novel to date. This isn't going to be a review, really, just me processing my thoughts.

And in short, what did I think? Strong start. A very strong start.

I know there are King purists who have issues with how this was handled. They don't like the new anachronic structure, that begins in Boulder, and through various time hopping, begins to fill us in on how everyone got there. I've even seen some really insistent Redditors (and people elsewhere) start in with the whole "Josh Boone just doesn't understand the story", a complaint that always makes me role my eyes and think "Sure, buddy, and if you were ever given the opportunity to do your own version, I'm confident someone would say the same of you."

I used to wonder why I seemed to trust critics more than audiences when it comes to freshly released material. And it's this; no matter how little I agree with a professional critic, they at least take the time to explain their stance on the topic at hand. Well, most do, and when they don't, when a review is little more than a critic belittling those who don't share their opinion, then said reviewer has failed at their job. But for the most part, a reviewer will back up what they say with a thought-out, reasoned argument and, usually, critical consensus will be how history views something. There are exceptions, but in many of those cases, audiences were just as dismissive as critics were. Pick almost any film that has become a cult classic on home video, and you'll likely find that both critics hated it at the time and it bombed at the box office, too.

Viewers, on the other hand, tend to just react. They shout "WHY DID THEY CHANGE THAT!!!??" or "That was the worst thing I've ever seen in my life!" They hold on to these reactions for years, often refusing to re-watch the source of their ire because they don't want their opinion to change. And yes, I think this was the case for a lot of viewers of Andy Muschetti's It films, to say nothing of the reaction to Disney's Star Wars films. I mean, I see the weaknesses there, as well, but come on, guys, "worse than the prequels"?

And that is, for the most part, how the over-the-top screaming reactions to "The End" can be summed up. Anachronic order when the book was chronological! Bad! Flagg held open the door for Campion! Bad! Harold is skinny! Bad! We didn't get to see much of Arnette! Bad!

I'm not saying I think every part of this was successful, but ultimately, it feels like a lot of the complaints are basically people who wanted a word-for-word translation, and I've already spoken at length about how those just don't happen, and it wouldn't work if it did. Or alternately, watch any Mick Garris film based on a King work, especially if King himself did the screenplay. Can you honestly say those films are even good, let alone better?

I guess I should also bring up the discussion of just how should The Stand even be filmed, with a lot of people of the mind that it really deserves to be its own multi-season TV series. One person has even laid it out; it needs four seasons, each season covering a fourth of the novel.

There are various reasons I can't agree here. A lot of it comes from how much of the novel is internal monologue, with various characters remembering events from their pasts that are, in many ways, irrelevant to the story at hand. In a novel they work to flesh the characters out. In an adaptation, they should be the first thing to go. And offhand I can think of passage upon passage that is little more than characters reminiscing about stuff from the past, sometimes decades ago. These can go on for pages and pages, and while that's fine in a novel, it's just not needed. To be honest, I'm not sure why this story can't be covered in 9 hours. I might have preferred ten, but I spotted a lot of filler even in the book (most of Stu and Tom's journey back to Boulder was a big one).

The second big reason I'm okay without this covering multiple seasons is that there's no guarantee of renewal, and would you have wanted an adaptation that got us no further than Part One?

So, I'm fine with the anachronic approach. King even used it himself in other books so I don't see why it can't be used here. King might even use it if he were try and re-write it today. I do think some confused time-jumps with POV flashbacks, however. A time-jump means we, the viewer, are being shown events of a different time. A POV flashback means it's just the memory of one character. One review I read seemed to think that all the time-jumps were meant to be Harold's flashbacks, meaning that flashing back to events and people he wasn't privy to doesn't work, but they weren't Harold's flashbacks, so it does work.

One YouTuber pointed out that at times this seems rushed, and it does, mostly in how quickly the plague spreads. I think this could end up being fleshed out in later episodes, so I won't immediately call this a flaw, but yeah, I could have stood with a more gradual plague spread. Here it seems like everyone just dies overnight. One scene they're coughing, the next they look like Bib Fortuna in the last episode of The Mandalorian.

And speaking of, this time they really do a great job with the "tubeneck" effect. The miniseries kinda ignored this. But not here. Oh, no. At one point, Frannie moves her dad's body and the neck-tube wobbles, and it looks like there's something fleshy and solid under the swelling. I could immediately understand what touching that swelling would feel like. Well done. At one point we get to see a tube slashed with a scalpel, complete with a squirt of blood and pus. Disgusting and awesome.

Some have been angered by showing us that the Dark Man appears to be the author of these events, or at least set them directly in motion, thanks to showing us how Charles Campion was able to escape the testing base. In the book, he just manages to get out inches ahead of the lockdown. In this episode, he initiates the lockdown himself, but then notices the door to his chamber is stuck open. He stares at the door, stares at a picture of his family, and you see him warring with himself over what to do. Finally he bolts from the room to get his wife and kid and go on the run. The moment he leaves, the camera pans down and we see a cowboy boot holding the door open, that lets it close the moment Campion escapes.

Personally, I like this. Flagg, in the book, seems to possess little memory of who he is, and it implies his powers are new to him, but when you consider that he's the same man as the Man in Black from The Dark Tower, it becomes obvious that this is just Flagg taking on a new persona, not the idea that literally he was human until the events of the story began. We'll see how Flagg is handled in future episodes; I thought I heard something about how this will make clear that Flagg was just a normal human before (and I understand that even in King's canon he began as a human, but I also understand that it's been a long time since those early days).

It really does seem, when I examine those complaints, that the chief issues people have with it (aside from it feeling rushed) really do stack up as "they changed it, and that is bad". I've said before that changes are not automatically bad should they be done in an effort to clarify or enhance the story in a visual medium. Fidelity to a novel's spirit, overall story and characters remains a must (a big part of why I hated The Grey Castle) but changes in the aid of making the story fit the medium better? I'm all for that. Again, when King writes his own screenplays and hires utter hacks like Mick Garris to direct them, the result is often crap, or at the very best just sorta okay, and in every case they try for a literal translation, or as close to one as they can get. Meanwhile some pretty damn good Kingian adaptations take great liberties with the translation. Even stuff that doesn't get a lot of credit, like The Night Flier.

So let's talk about a couple of changes that weren't so good. First off, I wasn't a big fan of making General Starkey into a hero. Starkey is a relatively minor character in the book, but his impact is rather large. See, Starkey isn't a bad man, but he is the man in charge of the project that developed the virus in the first place, and is the man tasked with keeping it all under wraps, whatever that may mean. Several times in the book he orders the death of innocent civilians just for speculating publicly on the nature of Captain Trips, and he even orders Stu executed at one point.

In this series, he's played by JK Simmons, who is excellent as always even if I really did want to see him in a larger role, like Glen Bateman. Simmons can play bad guys, or conflicted good guys, but here he's solidly heroic, letting Stu go because he's not about to "just follow orders" when the people who were giving them, and the reason they were ever issued, are gone. In fact, this series invents a person who's the exact opposite, a low-ranking soldier named Cobb (played by Daniel Sunjata) just so Starkey can look even better in comparison. I liked the moral ambiguity better. In the book he is driven to his lowest point, whereas here he goes out like a hero.

But I mean, that's not even really a huge issue for me. I can live with it, even if I'm unsure about it. There's another scene where Frannie (Odessa Young) OD's and is found in the nick of time by Harold, and some have complained that Frannie would not get that low. I don't know, though, it's kinda clear they're going in a different direction with this Frannie; she seems more melancholy from her first moment on screen, and she's clearly less tolerant of Harold than in the book. The book lets us know that she's far from Harold's biggest fan, but outwardly is kind to him. Here she's spiteful to him practically from the first, though I will also say that Harold himself has many creepy moments that likely fueled this.

And this brings me to the highest of high points; the casting. They're all wonderful, but special praise must be given to Owen Teague as Harold Lauder. We remember Teague as Patrick Hockstetter in Muschetti's It, and while he was good there, too, he wasn't given much to work with. But here, he's incredible, and I see a bright future for his acting career, assuming COVID ever goes away. While Book Harold was fat and had bad skin (until he stopped eating chocolate and his physical job in Boulder melted his weight off him) but here, despite being skinny and clear-faced, his Harold just screams perverted creep. The first thing we see him do is stare at the object of his unrequited affections (Frannie) through a knothole in her fence. Later he takes one of his dead sister's photos of the two of them at the beach and folds it over so that only Frannie is visible, and jerks off to the photo. We see him practicing his speech to convince Frannie to leave town with him, and then, combine that with his behavior when we flash back to Boulder and...man, I love what they've done with the character. 

As for the other characters, we haven't met many of them yet. Aside from Harold, Fran and Gen. Starkey, we briefly see Whoopi Goldberg as Mother Abigail, who looks credible enough and I liked her voice-over intro so I think she's going to be just fine, and we meet Stu, already locked up and under observation, played here by James Marsden, who I wasn't sure about when I first heard this, but he acquits himself well. He's a good-looking actor, but thanks to his age being allowed to show (he's 48 in real life, and he definitely has more lines on his face and grey in his hair than I'm used to seeing on him), he comes off more like an everyman than I was afraid he would. This might be his best performance, too. His scenes are very strong. I liked the building friendship between him and Dr. Ellis (a sort of mix of Denninger and Dietz, played by the always likeable Hamish Linklater), that felt real even as short as it was. Some of Dietz as also split into Cobb, the humorless soldier ready to take care of the "problem" Stu represents even after the reasons for it don't exist anymore.

We don't see much of Flagg this episode but what we do see is pretty chilling stuff. I'm not sure what I think of his hair, though. He's played by Alexander Skarsgaard, leading me to wonder what it is about the Skarsgaard brothers that they keep showing up as ageless, mysterious, powerful beings in works by or based on Stephen King? We gonna get Gustaf as The Man in the Black Suit next? Actually, he would...never mind.

But the question I think is being asked by a lot of Constant Readers is, does it hold up to the 1995 original mini-series? You may have already surmised that I think this blows it away, at least so far. The mini-series was, in my view, merely okay, which for a Mick Garris piece is practically glowing praise. I'm crediting the fact that it wasn't bloody awful with the fact that the source material is so good. But again, as is the case with Garris, it felt more like some sort of dramatic reading of sections of the book. It suffered from some godawful casting (I liked Gary Sinise, Rob Lowe, Ruby Dee and some others, but Molly Ringwald, Corin Nemec, the usually reliable Matt Frewer, Adam Storke, even Ray Walston all were either awful or seemed unsure of what they were doing there), not to mention some truly awful visual effects, and the fact that it aired on network TV removed nearly all its teeth. Speaking of casting, whose idea was it to have Kareem Abdul Jabar play the monster shouter? In what universe was that a good plan?

I don't have much yet to compare Skarsgaard to Jamey Sheridan or Goldberg to Ruby Dee, but I can tell you right now Owen Teague destroys Corin Nemec, and I think I believe Odessa Young more so than Molly Ringwald as Fran. I think I would believe a ball of pocket lint in any role more than I would Ringwald, though. How does Marsden stack up against Gary Sinise as Stu? Well, hard to say yet, because while I like Sinise, he always seemed too old for the part, which is odd because he was younger back then than Marsden is now, but Sinise has this lived-in face while Marsden has been playing young guys for the past 20 years and only now is starting to look even close to his age. I guess I also felt like Sinise was too...man, I don't know what to say. Most of his roles have a degree of menace to them, even his good guy roles, and while Stu needs to look tough, he does not need to look menacing. I'm not saying Sinise played Stu as menacing. I'm saying that he came off a little bit that way almost by accident. And again, even though there's more years between Marsden and Young than there were between Sinise and Ringwald, it still felt like Stu could be her dad, while Marsden looks fine as her pseudo-husband.

Future posts on this series will likely contain more comparisons between this and the mini-series. It's sorta unavoidable. At the moment I feel like this is leaps and bounds better, but I also am not a fan of the mini-series while I know plenty are. Again, I think that the approach of the Garris series was to try and just transcribe the book as best he could in six hours, but he's incapable of including the heart and soul of what made the book so special, while I think Boone has already done a much better job there. A large part of that is tone. Garris's tone is never right. In the case of The Stand, everything felt too clean, too sparkly, even thought the entire story is about a disease starting the Apocalypse. Everybody was attractive, nobody was filthy enough from their cross-country trips, scenes were always sunny and well-lit (unless it was night, of course). Here, the mood is dour and dark, and everyone seems tense and on edge. Harold is not just a whiny kid but a potential school shooter who embodies the sociopath. Frannie is not a model, nor is she smiley and happy all the time. Stu manages just the right amount of hardness without seeming the asshole. Like I said, we haven't seen much of the other characters yet, but so far, those that we've gotten more than one quick scene from, I think we're three for three here.

A reading update

Lots going on right now; I had my own brush with COVID when my 19-year-old son let us know he'd tested positive. As I had recently driven him to work, this necessitated the rest of my family getting tested; thankfully we're all negative, but the rules where I live are that if you've been in contact with a COVID-positive person at all, isolate for 14 days in case you become symptomatic, even with a negative test. If you do become symptomatic, those 14 days start over again. So far, we're fine.

You'd think that would enhance my reading time, but really it doesn't to any great degree. I've been working from home this entire year, so I will still be putting in regular shifts (12 hour days) and I still have two small children running around my house, creating joy and utter chaos wherever they go.

But I still am reading, and still plan to keep this blog as regularly updated as I can.

I also have kept watching, and at this point have watched pretty much everything except some stuff I haven't read the book/story versions of, and would rather go in having read them. I have also watched literally King-written film/miniseries in existence, with the exception of that one X-Files episode he wrote (that I understand got substantially re-written anyway).

When it comes to watching TV series based off King, the question is how much do I really want to watch? Unlike my friend over at thetruthinsidethelie.blogspot.com, I don't include "fauxquels" such as Pet Sematary II, A Return to Salem's Lot or the myriad Children of the Corn sequels to be must-watches for this project, but then I did watch The Running Man and The Lawnmower Man, both of which are just barely related to their alleged source material, and I also am watching, and enjoying, Castle Rock. But I kinda quit early with The Dead Zone, the Canadian-produced TV adaptation that stars everyone's favorite 80's John Hughes nerd Anthony Michael Hall. I watched until it was obvious we'd left King's material in the dust and that from here on out we were gonna get passing references at best, and honestly, I wasn't enjoying the show, so I stopped. Maybe if I had enjoyed it, I would have kept watching. I don't know. Or maybe if it didn't run six full seasons. It was easy to get all of Kingdom Hospital watched, and even Castle Rock's seasons are cable series-length.

Write-ups for them are forthcoming, of course, as will posts on what I've finished reading.

Which brings me to my latest reading update. When I stopped the blog last, I was working on Four Past Midnight, which I dropped early, but went back to later on, finishing all four novels in that collection. I burned through The Waste Lands, Needful Things, Gerald's Game, Dolores Claiborne and the remaining stories in Nightmares and Dreamscapes before kinda getting burned out on pure-King-nothing-but-King again, and returned to my first love, which is fantasy.

I think part of what stopped me was knowing what novel was next. I have read Insomnia before and I remember thinking it was not a bad story at all, but one I didn't truly enjoy, and one I didn't relish the idea of returning to. I also knew, if I planned to keep on making this a blog about an interconnected Stephen King Shared universe, that this was one I couldn't leave out, for reasons that will become clear when I talk more about it. At any rate, I have just completed it, and I will be doing a full post on it right away here.

This morning I also read, for the first time, "The Man in the Black Suit", which isn't my first story fully read from Everything's Eventual but it is the first one I've read that didn't seem to be tied to The Dark Tower. So I have already read "Lunch at the Gotham Cafe", "Everything's Eventual" and "The Little Sisters of Eluria", the latter two being obvious and the first being because I heard there was a connection between the insane waiter from that story and the Crimson King. And there is. Kinda.

"The Man in the Black Suit" feels like breaking new ground, and I like that in this collection King tells you some background information on the stories, something I believe he does for all collections going forward. He didn't do this in his previous collections, except for Four Past Midnight, which I thought at the time had mostly to do with the fact that these are four full novels packaged together. I'm thinking that posts on the short stories will still be shorter write-ups collected together, as I've done in the past.

For Insomnia, I'll do a post for it separately, as I said, but I think it won't be a review proper and more just thoughts and impressions I have about it, which is likely how it will be overall here. If something is in need of being filmed, or remade, I may talk about that in brief, but if I cast it at all it will be through the page mycast.io, and will consist of "who I pictured while reading" rather than a full explanation of my cast.

There will also be more posts coming on my Kingian viewing, and would you believe I haven't had a chance to watch the first episode of The Stand? I have it queued up and ready, and I'll definitely expound my thoughts on that one.

Meanwhile, as my picture shows, I also got some new reading material, which at some point will be included on this blog (though don't ask me when). This is reading material that goes beyond "did King or Hill write it". and is more tangentially related to my Kingian studies. For starters, I broke down and bought two Owen King Books, We're All in This Together and Double Feature. I know I said I wouldn't bother including his works, but I was intrigued by both, so I will be reading them, and I'll let you know what that was like. I still don't think I'll be seeking out Tabitha's works. They just sound really dull.

I already talked about having Rocky Wood's Stephen King: Uncollected, Unpublished, and to add to that I now have Feast of Fear, which sounds like a fascinating dive into King's thoughts and ideas, and finally I have an unexpected addition to my reading list.

I did not know that there was a "novel" of Storm of the Century, and really, there isn't, but King did have the full screenplay published, in paperback, and it looks from the outside just like one of his novels, and has been counted among his novels by Constant Readers for years. I saw the miniseries, and wondered if I should try and pick up the book. I struggled with this, because I've always considered scripts and screenplays to be different from novels, and felt like in those cases seeing the filmed product was likely enough, but then, thanks to having a copy of Nightmares and Dreamscapes, I had read the screenplay for Sorry, Right Number, King's original story for Tales From the Dark Side, which was published years after the episode aired, and I'd also seen the episode, so why would I not want to also have this published screenplay? Well, in part because an episode script included in a collection vs. a full book struck me as two different things. Second, because the copies I found on Amazon were pretty pricey, and I couldn't really justify it. But then, while having a look in the horror section of my local used bookstore (all this happened before my son's COVID diagnosis) I found it. And I wasn't gonna let that moment pass, I can tell you!

Whether I'll read it when I get to it, I haven't decided. I saw the series and I know I'll be talking about it. I think a full read and then post on both the screenplay and the series is warranted.