The Stand – E1 The End

How does this episode stand up to the 94 version so far? Will the split timelines work for new fans? Is Frannie being portrayed correctly? Things fall apart… the center cannot hold.

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CBS The Stand, The Stand, Stephen King

Podcast Notes –

EPISODE 1:  “THE END”

WRITTEN BY:	Josh Boone & Ben Cavell
DIRECTED BY:	Josh Boone
RECEPTION:	Imdb – 6.2 / RT – 54% (A – 32%)

“Today, we take our Stand and review Episode 1”

 

CRITICS

“Despite an A-list cast and a smattering of poignant moments, The Stand’s extended runtime doesn’t make for better storytelling, the mix of realism and fantasy results in a disjointed, tonally inconsistent work that manages to both over-condense aspects of the original saga and overstay its welcome.”

 

“A sometimes dazzling, often frustrating, and undeniably assured effort that swings hard and occasionally connects.  When it does, its riveting.”

NEW FACES & PLACES

FACES – PROJECT BLUE:

• Campion 94: Ray McKinnon/ 20: Curtiss Cook Jr.  

A soldier stationed at a military complex in California who escapes a lockdown after containment is breached and becomes “Patient Zero”, spreading the virus all the way to Arnette, Texas.

• Ellis 94: Denninger- Max Wright/ *Dietz- Sherman Howard

20: Hamish Linklater.

A doctor who researches Stu at the CDC, trying to find the key to his immunity.

• General Starkey 94: Ed Harris/ 20: JK Simmons.

A 4-star General who is commanding officer of Project Blue.

• Cobb 20: Daniel Sunjata.

FACES – BOULDER:

• Harold Lauder          94: Corin Nemec/ 20: Owen Teague

(played Patrick Hockstetter in IT: Chapter One). He’s smart and resourceful, but he’s also narcissistic, possessive, and dangerous.

• Frannie Goldsmith 94: Molly Ringwald/ 20: Odessa Young.

“There’s a lot left to be desired when it comes to the character development of Frannie, which returns to that distillation issue. She feels flat here in the pilot, already lacking the specificity and depth she’s richly drawn with in the novel.”

• Stuart Redman 94: Gary Sinise/ 20: James Marsden.

“He makes a solid viewer surrogate, dumped into the middle of a chaotic and frightening world where he has to piece things together for himself.”

• Norris          20: Nicholas Lea.  Former EMT who is in charge of Burial Committee in Boulder.
• Teddy Weizak: 94: Stephen King/ 20: Eion Bailey. Member of the Burial Committee with dreams of opening a drive-in.

 

PLACES:

• Ogonquit, Maine – Harold & Frannie
• Hemingford Home, Colorado – Mother Abagail
• Arnette, Texas – Stu
• Stovington, Virginia – Secure CDC Facility
• Mojave Desert, California – Bioweapons Facility

GOOD VS. EVIL:

 

GOOD	EVIL	UNDECIDED
Stu
Mother Abagail
	Randall Flagg
		Frannie
		Harold

 

“No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side.  Or you don’t.”

 

CROW’S (WOLF’S) EYE VIEW

PAST (HAROLD & FRANNIE)

5 Months Earlier

In Ogunquit, Maine, we are introduced to Harold Lauder, outcast, bullied by other kids, told he will ‘die a virgin’.  We have some empathy for him, even his family hates him, but fast suspicions – *After crashing his bike, a crow flies off the fence. The last scene shows him masturbating to a picture of Frannie.

We also meet Frannie Goldsmith, noting there is something she wanted to talk to him about, but it can wait until later (pregnancy).  The signs of the virus are already present everywhere – her father is ‘burning up’, ‘hardly anyone showed, they all have what you have’. 

Sometime later, with the streets empty and dead bodies all around, Harold finds Frannie burying her father in the backyard garden (his love).  She has dressed him in his medals and dog tags (though we see the gruesomeness of the virus – tube neck).  She is reluctant to even respond to his calls.  He mentions she has had experience with loss, ‘her brother’.  While she thinks after the virus burns out, people in authority will come, Harold protests that the government are the ones who did this, saying it was all over the internet before it went down – “Look what I made, it kills almost everyone, isn’t it great?…then somebody spilled it.”   Frustrated, she yells at him to leave.  *She dreams of walking through high corn stalks, hearing children crying (Children of the Corn) and finds an open circle in the center of the field (In the Tall Grass).  Mother Abagail appears and introduces herself, telling Frannie, “You come see me at Hemingford Home, Colorado” (Nebraska).

President’s Radio Address: “We cannot afford to jump at shadows in the dark but must take it seriously.  No truth to the rumors that this string of flu is fatal or that it was engineered by this government.  We have never engaged in the clandestine manufacture of substances outlawed by the Geneva Convention.  My fellow Americans, I ask you to do your part by remaining calm, following the instructions of your emergency response personnel.  Maintain order and alleviate mass hysteria…”

He is coughing throughout and midway through, the power goes out. 

Harold listens as a radio broadcast says that all major roads are blocked by army vehicles; it looks like the end with humanity blinking out.  He then shoots himself on air.  Harold practices his speech for Frannie, gathers supplies in town including a gun, a typewriter, and a shiny pair of black boots.  But arriving at her house, he finds her unconscious in the bathroom after a suicide attempt and revives her. She insists she didn’t want to be here anymore, but after hearing his speech about them being the future, she agrees to go along with his plan to travel to the CDC in Atlanta where there may be survivors working on a cure.

Before leaving town on motorcycles, Harold spray paints a message on the side of a building for any survivors that may find it (side of barn):

Gone to CDC in Atlanta, GA.  Leaving Ogunquit Sept. 14.  Harold Emery Lauder. Frances Goldsmith. 

PAST (STU & CDC)

US Army Research Facility – Kileen, Texas

In a holding room at the facility, Stu Redman has been held for 3 days and is now refusing to cooperate until they bring him someone who can answer his questions. Dr. Jim Ellis enters, and we learn that Stu was in the military for a year before being medically retired for a catastrophically ruptured knee.  He also lost his wife, a former nurse, to a car accident (cancer in books – hates hospitals).  Ellis tells him that according to the highly susceptible guinea pigs sharing his room, Stu doesn’t have the virus that Campion spread.

Men playing cards outside Hap’s gas station when a car crashes into the pumps, a man emerges choking and dying.  “The whole place was supposed to seal…I thought I was fast enough.”  After the alarms sounded, and the lockdown clock stuck at 2:37, the closing door jammed on a man’s foot, allowing Campion to run through and escape.  He gathered his wife and baby, and they sped away, seeing a man hitchhiking on the side of the road (Flagg). 

Campion came from a Bioweapons Facility in the Mojave Desert, California. Though Ralph Hodges and Stu were the only ones to make physical contact with Campion, everyone he came in with is now dead (except Ralph’s daughter, Eva).  They have the town of Arnette, Texas quarantined (news reports tell us Army men are barring the entrance/exits, including to media, and all internet/phone has been jammed).  They are working to trace his route and contain it.  Stu finally agrees to resume testing, but the nurse who comes for his blood sneezes.

Soon after, we learn the facility has been compromised and Stu is rushed to the secure CDC facility underground in Stovington, Virginia (he isn’t told why they aren’t going to the Atlanta base).  Dr. Cobb joins as the muscle to get him to cooperate. 

The deep underground fortress, meant for high-level officials, was the brainchild of 4-star General Starkey, who no one has seen for days.  Ellis, stuck there the same as Stu, prepares for a meeting with the WHO to present estimate numbers that make the Spanish Flu look like a sham.  *After he leaves, Stu has a dream that he walks through the window into a cornfield, where he meets a wolf with red eyes in the center. 

Ellis returns, sick and choking, telling him pretty much everyone has it now.  There are reports of immunes like Stu out there but nothing confirmed.  “To think, just a month ago, we were worried about Ebola.” Then, Cobb arrives from the elevator, also dying, and shoots Ellis.  Stu manages to stab and kill him, after which a voice comes from the speakers and guides him through the facility to the control monitor room where we meet General Starkey. 

He says his last contact with the outside was 2 days ago.  Also, he doesn’t know whose command Cobb was under (not his), he was just following a contingency checklist – “men like him don’t stop following orders just because the orders stop making sense”.  He shows Stu a book of poetry by William Yeats that his daughter gave him for a birthday years ago; he never opened it until 4 days ago when he found out she was dead.

         The Second Coming.

         Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

         Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, anarchy is loosed upon the world.

         The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

         The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

         Surely some revelation is at hand, the Second Coming.

Somewhere in the sands of the desert, a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. 

While all about it reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again and what rough beast, its hour comes round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

He thinks Mr. Yates was onto something – how it looks when the shit hits the fan. He was proud of his soldiers, who maintained composure much longer than predictive models expected.  Handing Stu the keycard to the exit, he requests that if anyone asks, tell them he stood his post to the end.  Wishing him luck, Starkey shoots himself, and Stu runs through the halls and out of the facility. 

PRESENT

Boulder, Colorado

In the present, the Burial Committee Team of Boulder clear out a church.  The man in charge of the operation, Norris, finds Harold vomiting and thinks he shouldn’t be ashamed.  In his years as an EMT, he never imagined death on the scale of 7 billion people.  Harold is befriended by another member, Teddy Weizak, who nicknames him “Hawk”.  Harold saves Teddy from falling into a large pit at the burial site, and Norris thanks them for helping with the most important job in the Zone (put away 1,000 units that day).   

But later, Harold types this in his memoir:

“It’s said the two great human sins are pride and hate – are they?  I choose to

think of them as the two great virtues.  To give them away is to say you will

change for the good of the world, to embrace them is more noble, the world

must change for the good of you.  I am on a great adventure.”

There was time, an hour, maybe just an instant, when he contemplated jettisoning the hate.  He was aware that he could simply accept what was, and that knowledge exhilarated and terrified him.  For that space of time, he knew, he could become a new Harold Lauder.  He could let go of all the old grudges, hurts, unpaid debts, worthless as the paper money choking the cash registers of this new America.  But this would have been to murder himself; the ghosts of every humiliation he ever suffered cried out against it.  His murdered dreams and ambitions came back to life and asked if he could forget them so easily. In Boulder, he could only ever be Harold Lauder…out West, he could be a prince.”

*Harold dreams he is in the desert, the lights of Vegas.  The white wolf waits for him and a man emerges, offering in his palm a black stone with red lights.

The next day, after practicing his smile, Harold meets a happy Stu and Frannie (‘getting bigger everyday) at the food truck.  They invite him for dinner sometimes and he agrees.  But privately, he screams at his typewriter