The Stand: Series Premiere Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Warning: This review contains minor spoilers for “The End,” The Stand’s series premiere episode. The Stand is now streaming on CBS All Access, with new episodes releasing weekly on Thursdays. [poilib element="accentDivider"] CBS All Access debuts its vision of Stephen King’s The Stand -- first adapted as a miniseries in 1994 -- in a time when it feels more relevant than ever. Nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic have given us plenty of real-world examples of both everyday heroism and craven opportunism, but King’s novel was always about tackling those dynamics on an epic scale, seeing avatars of good and evil choose champions in a battle for the soul of the world. The first episode of this new take on the material, “The End,” puts a few key pieces onto that metaphysical chessboard in a slow-moving, but promising premiere. While The Stand features one of the largest casts of characters of any of King’s novels, “The End” doesn’t rush to introduce them all at once. It’s evident from the outset that the showrunners are planning to shake up how the chronological events of the novel, including character introductions, play out on screen. While that kind of shift is par for the course in adapting a novel as sprawling as The Stand, “The End” does feel a little disjointed at times. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=stephen-kings-the-stand-season-1-gallery&captions=true"] The opening scene, for instance, takes place in an already-settled Boulder Free Zone, the society in Colorado that some of the survivors of the Captain Trips virus establish in the months after the pandemic wipes out most of the world’s population. Shortly after that, we flash back to five months earlier to see what some of our lead characters were doing when Captain Trips began infecting the world’s population. And at one point within that flashback, we see another flashback to how the virus first escaped the government lab it was being developed in. If you’re familiar with the book, you won’t have trouble keeping these things straight, but if this is your first experience with The Stand, it may be disorienting. Hopefully future episodes will be a little more focused, as these time jumps feel more aimed at livening up an episode in which there are few, if any, “wow” moments. “The End” doesn’t spend too much time in The Stand’s present day, just long enough to introduce us to Harold Lauder (Owen Teague), a teenager clearing out corpses from homes throughout the city while on burial duty. In Boulder, Harold is a valued, maybe even popular member of the community, but flashing back to when Captain Trips hit his hometown of Ogunquit, Maine, five months earlier, Harold’s dark side shows itself. He’s obsessed with his former babysitter, Fran Goldsmith (Odessa Young), who obviously wants nothing to do with him. Fran’s got problems of her own; her whole family dying and learning she’s pregnant in the final days of civilization is quite the one-two punch. After burying her father, Fran has a dream of “Mother” Abigail Freemantle (Whoopi Goldberg) who beckons Fran to join her in Hemingford Home, Colorado. Mother Abigail will be crucial going forward, but Fran’s not quite sure of the point of following voices in her head, so she reluctantly chooses to leave Ogunquit with Harold, who seems to be the last man on Earth for her to travel with. While Young is a bit hamstrung by the heavy introduction to her character, Teague’s Harold immediately feels sick and dangerous. The glee on his face when he takes a gun off a cop’s body - maybe the first time he’s felt powerful in his life - belies the warped worldview his in-progress manifesto espouses. Still, Teague’s performance as the troubled Harold is strong and it’s nice to see him succeed in making the jump from minor King creep (Teague played Patrick Hockstetter in IT: Chapter One) to major King creep. Meanwhile, East Texas resident Stu Redman (James Marsden) finds himself being transferred to a government research facility in Vermont, the lone survivor of an encounter with Captain Trips’ patient zero, Charles Campion. Stu’s scenes primarily serve as Captain Trips exposition dumps and Marsden doesn’t get much to do besides react and ask questions here. Stu’s introduction ends up feeling the least substantial, and much of his wry personality (at least from the book) is absent thus far. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2017/07/21/what-stephen-king-thinks-of-the-dark-tower-movie"] Stu’s scenes highlight a potential issue going forward, and that’s in how The Stand communicates the scope of its global devastation. We’re hearing a lot of rumors about Captain Trips, we’re seeing bodies loaded onto trucks in news footage, but most of our time spent with Stu, Fran, and Harold is locked in their fairly limited points of view (Stu spends the whole episode underground while Fran and Harold live in coastal Maine.) There are plenty of characters left to meet, some of whom we should be finding in more populated areas, so maybe this won’t be a recurring issue, but at least in “The End,” the storytelling suffers from a lack of perspective on what Captain Trips is doing to the rest of the world. SPOILERS FOLLOW: While most of Stu’s storyline in “The End” serves a necessary world-building purpose, it does gift us with a really great cameo, as J.K. Simmons stops by to play General Starkey, in charge of the Vermont facility Stu is transferred to. In Simmons’ hands, what could’ve been a throwaway moment that serves to get Stu out of the locked-down building becomes a soulful monologue which sets the tone for what’s to follow. Starkey’s recitation of Yeats’ “The Second Coming” not only warns that “things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” but asks “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” The “rough beast” that passage refers to here has a spectral presence over the premiere, as “the Dark Man” Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgard) moves through both dreams and reality to influence the events taking place. We’ll be seeing much more of Flagg later, but “The End” does a solid job of laying the groundwork for its formidable villain, even seeming to confirm his involvement in the Captain Trips outbreak, something the novel only hints at

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