Screenshot: CBS All Access
The Stand. I really liked parts of it, and I bounced
hard off other parts. But I think the moment that sums the show up best is that, towards the end of the series, there’s a scene where a character has sex with the Devil. The Devil usually appears as Alexander Skarsgård (exactly how I would appear if I were the Devil) but while the two character are having sex, his usual glamour slips a little, and the scene flashes between a romantic scenario in a rose petal-strewn hotel room with a naked Skarsgard, and some gross and rather violent writhing in a desert, which ends on a closeup of a terrifying monster screaming directly into the camera.
The Stand arrived on Thursday with The Circle Closes , a coda to the iconic story written by King himself. The episode was billed as being a new ending to the saga, a version of the story that King had been wanting to tell for three decades so, even going into things fans expected a unique experience. However, with a few details of the main story left after last week s The Stand , there are still enough elements of the novel to compare to how they re approached in the episode and the overall ending requires a little bit of explanation as well for what it changes and does not change from King s classic. Let s break it down.
The Stand: How The Walk Differs from Stephen King s Book
The seventh episode of The Stand arrived on CBS All Access on Thursday with The Walk seeing the aftermath of both the bomb and Mother Abagail s (Whoopi Goldberg) return as well as, as the title of the episode suggests, the departure of Stu Redman (James Marsden), Glen Bateman (Greg Kinnear), Ray Brentner (Irene Bedard), and Larry Underwood (Jovan Adepo) for Vegas on foot. While this episode was largely a travel montage as the group made their way to face the Dark Man, there were some major plot points. With next week being the penultimate episode of the limited series, there were some big developments this week but they came with some critical differences from Stephen King s novel, and we re breaking them down.
“Do you think he’s still alive?” a man asks a new friend. Then he clarifies: “The Rock?” The pair look down at what the man holds: a copy of, of all things, “Skyscraper.” It’s both punchline and lament, one moment among many in which the characters of “The Stand” confront their new reality. Is The Rock still alive? Probably not. Like 99 percent of humanity, it’s likely that he succumbed to the virus known colloquially as Captain Trips, a government-developed superflu inadvertently unleashed upon the world by a scared man who just wants to keep his wife and kid safe. And as a moment of drama, it’s an unlikely high point in Josh Boone and Benjamin Cavell’s adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal dark fantasy novel. The world ends, and that’s a wrap on The Rock as we understand him; all our old institutions of wealth, fame, and power have crumbled. It’s surreal and sad, a punchline and a moment of grief in one, and then it passes, and it’s time to get back
12/17/2020
CBS All Access caps off our COVID-dominated 2020 with the premiere of a new miniseries adaptation of Stephen King s post-pandemic allegory about good and evil.
On the page, Stephen King s
The Stand (1978) is a study in horrifying momentum. It s so propulsive that King was able to add hundreds of pages 12 years after its original publication without sacrificing the celerity of a narrative that keeps moving from one climax a burgeoning plague, humanity mobilizing in Boulder, the final stand to another. It s generally clear, and it s always churning along.
CBS All Access new adaptation of
The Stand is a car on cinderblocks. It looks great. If you glance under the hood, you can see all of the work that s been done on the engine. But no matter how ready it seems to peel out onto the road, it isn t going anywhere. Very rarely is the Benjamin Cavell-steered adaptation, with Josh Boone directing the pilot, actively bad, but it s very frustrating.