So, what’s left to do after a story’s big bad is dispatched and the primary conflict vanishes with all the speed and finality of a nuclear explosion? The answer, it seems, is to address some unfinished business from the source text and to remind the audience, again, about the larger themes of the broader story. Neither is a particularly necessary addition, though, and while this last episode of “The Stand” works well enough as a standalone installment, it brings little to a limited series that’s done an admirable job with its characters, story, and themes up to this point.
This ninth episode, “The Circle Closes,” opens with a narration from Frannie (Odessa Young), who’s talking to her newborn about the world and their place in it. It’s been some time since the New Vegas explosion and Joe’s (Gordon Cormier) proclamation that Flagg (Alexander Skarsgård) is “gone,” yet Frannie refuses to concede the reality of Stu’s (James Marsden) death. She explains to her baby, Abigail, that she also refused to believe that the infant would succumb to Captain Trips when the child caught it shortly after her birth (and this faith was rewarded), so why not hold out a little more for Stu?
It turns out she was right to keep the faith, for Stu and Tom (Brad William Henke) limp back into town early in the episode to the relief and applause of all of Boulder. It’s a rousing moment, full of warm-hearted emotions at seeing the nominal hero of this story reunited with his love. Yet as if to signal to the audience that all is not well, that there’s more strife ahead, the scene smash-cuts to Vegas, where the ruins of Sin City conceal the smiley-face button from Flagg’s jacket, which grins at the audience right before the opening title card hits.
From there, the episode jumps ahead a few months to a Fourth of July celebration in Boulder, where things seem to be going well for everyone except Frannie, who tells Stu that she’d like to go back to Ogunquit to, “close the circle.” Stu hesitates a bit, pointing out the safety in numbers that Boulder provides, along with its medical resources, yet the idea eventually wins him over. After some tearful goodbyes to Tom, Joe, and several other residents, Stu and Frannie load up a truck with supplies and Kojak and make for the east coast.
And while this is all true to Stephen King’s text, most of what follows from here is a brand new “coda” of sorts for the story, which King penned himself (he’s the credited writer of this episode). Stu, Frannie, Kojak, and baby Abigail make it all the way to Nebraska before stopping at a farmhouse where the small group bed down for the night, then split up for supplies the following day. This leaves Frannie alone with the dog and the baby when she takes a tumble down a well, where she has a vision of Flagg in her dreams.
The gist of this new scene is Frannie’s own personal confrontation with Flagg, where he offers her safe passage out of the well in exchange for a kiss and the ability to look through her eyes from time to time. The moment gives Frannie her own opportunity to make a stand, one she was robbed of when sidelined during Larry (Jovan Adepo), Stu, Glen (Greg Kinnear), and Ray’s (Irene Bedard) walk west. Frannie resists Flagg’s temptations, which leads to her rescue out of the well by Stu and a reincarnated/young Mother Abigail (Kendall Joy Hall). Before waking up, the O.G. Mother Abigail (Whoopi Goldberg) appears to Frannie one last time to let her know that she has passed her test, and that her children will repopulate the world.
It all makes for some tense viewing, and is effectively shot and acted, yet everything about this Nebraska sequence comes off as superfluous. There was a time in the story where Frannie could have forged ahead on her own to influence events and be her own hero, yet the series oddly side-stepped this by skipping Tom and Stu’s journey back to Boulder. The book paints this as a very perilous journey, and while this is hinted at early in this episode when Stu remarks that, “Tom saved my life,” this is all the attention the journey gets. The series has established that Flagg and Mother Abigail weren’t the actual villains/heroes of the story: it was the survivors that filled this role. What better way to set this up than to make Frannie an active agent in Stu and Tom’s rescue well after Flagg’s disposal?
It seems like a missed opportunity, for instead of giving Frannie something to do within the story’s organic progression (Stu and Tom’s story needed resolution), this extra bit about Frannie having her own moral crisis rewinds things by bringing Flagg back into the conversation. Showrunner Benjamin Cavell and his writing team have made no secret about the purpose of this last episode as a chance for King to rectify Frannie’s sidelined status near the end of this story, but again, adding this new portion instead of beefing up what was already on the page just doesn’t land.
By this point, the theme of this story as a struggle for the soul of humanity guided not by mystical forces but the inherent goodness or evil of those remaining is well established. When Frannie and Stu lament the growing petty crime in Boulder during the Fourth of July celebration, and the fact that they can’t keep up with all the new faces, they’re exploring the true struggle of this series: humanity’s ability to start anew without the original sin shackles of their ancestors. Like Adam and Eve’s children, can the next generation move forward without repeating the mistakes of their parents? Flagg is just a symbol, a placeholder for what’s already inside, and in this, the final episode, it seems a little redundant for one of the story’s heroes to struggle with him after his Vegas defeat.
Frannie’s discussion in voiceover early on about humanity’s potential for a backslide is in line with these broader themes, and how the survivors are in the driver’s seat for this new world. “Will we do anything different this time? Can we, even? Are we capable?” Flagg’s appearance at the end of the episode, approaching a tribe of uncontacted indigenous people, hints at the fact that this struggle will continue, that true evil never dies. Were this the only whiff of Flagg, this would be a fine stinger (just as it is in the book): a reminder that the potential for evil always lurks somewhere. But Flagg’s encounter with Frannie mid-episode just re-strikes a nail that’s already been hammered into place (and is denting up the drywall).
“The wheel turns, the struggle continues, and the command is always the same…Be true. Stand.” If Larry, Stu, Glen, and Ray’s trip didn’t make that clear, if Harold’s (Owen Teague) benediction in his semi-crucified state didn’t land that point, then Frannie’s experience in the well and thematic wrap-up on the beach afterward isn’t going to do much. Like most of this episode, this extra bit is relevant and in line with what the series has set up thus far, it’s just a little redundant.
The novel and the series wrap up the same way, and like Cavell and his team’s efforts, on the whole, the broad strokes are all there and paint a similar picture. This coda portion in Nebraska is one of the few big misses in the series, though, one that brought a fresh 2020/2021 twist to King’s story on the whole. The series packed a great deal into roughly nine hours and did justice to a sprawling epic with no less than twelve main characters and locations spanning the full breadth of the United States. Like Frannie’s tumble down the well, there were a few bumps and bruises along the way, but it all worked out in the end. [Episode: C] [Series: B+]
“The Stand” is streaming on CBS All Access
