Stephen King fans wait with bated breath this week in anticipation of the first episode of “The Stand” mini-series, and as it turns out, there’s nothing to worry about. This nine-episode CBS All-Access adaptation opens with just under an hour of character introductions for three of its leads, and enough world-building to give the audience their bearings without overwhelming them. And while book purists might offer a few protests over some of the series’ character and plot changes (including one game-changing one in the episode’s closing minutes), each serves a purpose and elevates the material.
One of the first pop culture connections the western world made when COVID-19 exploded was to Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’: something the author himself waved away as nonsense. Unlike COVID, the “Captain Trips” flu virus in King’s book has a fatality rate of over 99%, something that’s remarked upon in the very first scene of the new adaptation. “Seven billion dead.” It’s a sobering notion, and acts as the framework for this sprawling post-apocalyptic yarn that’s already spawned one television incarnation and two versions of the original text.
Unlike those telling’s of the story, showrunner Benjamin Cavell elects to start Episode 1, “The End,” in media res, as an organized corpse removal team works to clear all the buildings and dwellings in Boulder, Colorado of bodies. This work is necessary because Captain Trips swept the globe five months before, which the audience gets a narrow peek at when “The End” jumps back in time to the earliest days of the outbreak. In Ogunquit, Maine Harold Lauder (Owen Teague) is recovering from his latest bully encounter when scattered coughs and talk on the radio about a ban on social gatherings take over the public conversation. Within a week every other person in town except Harold and a friend of his older sister is dead.
Meanwhile, in an underground government medical facility, Texan Stu Redman (James Marsden) learns from a doctor that the reason he’s being detained for testing is because he came in contact with Patient Zero of a deadly flu outbreak. Although Stu seems to be immune for reasons unknown, pretty much everyone else who encountered Patient Zero is dead, and things on “the outside” aren’t looking good. Stu’s encounter with the original Captain Trips carrier, and the government’s work to figure out why he’s immune, give the audience enough inside baseball info to get a sense of what is going on in a broader sense, and serves as a counterpoint to the storyline with Harold and the other immune Ogunquit survivor, Frannie (Odessa Young). While Stu is hearing about Captain Trips yet not personally experiencing it, Harold and Frannie are experiencing it and hearing little.
This episode has a lot of work to do for the larger story and is deliberate in how it does it, for there’s a lot to explain flu-wise, and twelve (12!) main characters that need introducing. Cavell and episode one’s co-writer, Josh Boone, wisely ration this work by giving the audience just three main characters to get familiar with for now, and just enough information about the pandemic to sketch out an idea of what’s happening without getting bogged down in scenes depicting the breakdown of society, etc.
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The despair that early-20-something Frannie experiences as she buries her parents in the garden are juxtaposed against teenager Harold’s barely-contained excitement that the world he hated (and seemed to hate him in return) is no more. This struggle between the survivors that long for the old world versus those who revel in its destruction is the foundational text of the larger story, and while devotees of the book may protest some changes in this first episode’s installment (Frannie’s pill-popping adventure, General Starkey’s, played by J.K. Simmons, encounter with Stu, Flagg’s appearance at Campion’s base), all are expediting important character and plot elements that don’t have the luxury of 1300+ pages here.
Frannie’s vulnerability (and Young’s portrayal of it) in this episode and Harold’s role in saving her provide all the backstory needed to make sense of their pre- and post-plague dynamics, which is augmented by the episode’s flash-forwards into present-day Boulder. Likewise, Starkey’s 5-minute information dump in Stu’s presence is worth about 100 pages of novel exposition, leaving any further exploration of Captain Trips’ spread somewhat moot. Marsden’s portrayal of Stu as a level-headed, easy-going yet capable leader sets him up as a natural focal point for the narrative, and gives the audience an accessible, “if I was in that situation, that’s probably how I’d act” proxy. Frannie is Stu’s more vulnerable counterpart in this regard, leaving Harold and the world they all inhabit as the classic worst-case scenario actors in this larger drama.
And it all works in this first episode not because it adheres strictly to King’s text, but because it often refuses to. Frannie is kind of a boring Mary Sue in the book, and Stu spends WAAAAAAY too much time in the underground facility before getting out (not until page 257!), which are mistakes “The End” doesn’t make. This episode moves with purpose, and also teases out two other characters, Mother Abigail (Whoopi Goldberg) and Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgård), without spending too much time on them. For those unfamiliar with the novel, their scenes will likely be the most confusing bits, but their appearances set the more mystical aspects of the story in motion, and in Flagg’s case at the end, does so walk-off homerun style with that closing backseat shot. It’s scary and exciting and just familiar enough to root it in something approaching tangibility, leaving the audience on edge yet hungry for more as the credits roll. [A-]
“The Stand” airs weekly on CBS All Access.
