The Stand

reavor said:

Flagg's attention was also diverted because the people under him had planned a coup, and he was taking care of that when trashcan came back with the bomb.

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i dont remember a coup from the book, it was a spy from the Boulder asshole , dayna jergens or something. she was trying to work her way in their good graces so she could get close to Flagg. she had one chance when she pulled a knife or a gun and Flagg had turned it into a banana. Dayna at that point knew they were going to kill her slowly and probably get all kinds of l33t inf0z about her Boulder asshole friends, but unexpectedly she rammed her way into the windows and threw herself to her death. Flagg's guys were more shocked because Flagg clearly didnt see that coming. and if he didnt see that coming, it might mean he isnt all knowing and there might be other things he doesnt know about. but i dont remember any kind of organized coup. just guys talking about how Flagg isnt the guy they thought he was. also people were starting to leave Vegas in the dead of night. Flaggs vegas crew were written more complex than the Boulder assholes. if they really wanted to give this story a twist. they could have had it from the pov of the Flagg guys as the good guys and portray the Boulder assholes the hippy dippy peaceniks that they were.

I've always thought that the choice between Mother Abigail's selfish old testament god and a creature of destruction doomed to fail in his attempt to create was a stupid fucking choice. If I am to take these two sides and their representatives seriously than fuck all that noise you can catch me on the east coast. The building military confrontation teased though the entire second half of the book that never happens to instead have the literal Hand of God destroy Las Vegas including the entire population? Terrible ending. These are people that we've learned aren't all villains. Some just threw in with what they saw as order. Given that the world nearly ended who can blame someone for siding with the first person that looked able to get the power back on? God I guess. Atomic hellfire for all of you as another King villain is hoisted by their own petard rather than being bested by the heroes.

But I still really like the book even though I think the themes are fucked and the ending is trash. Why? Because of the characters. The book's long as fuck so you just get all this time to hang out with Stu, Harold, Lloyd, Trash, Flagg, Nick, etc. Also, the Captain Trips stuff in the beginning is all A+. A 1970s coked out-of-his-mind King really paints a wonderful nightmare of an omni-powerful government and its jackbooted thugs stamping out descent as the plague spreads. The first couple hundred pages are such a good time.

The show gave us no time to hang out with anyone but Harold and it's already almost over. Episode 7 should be the walk to Vegas, episode 8 the confrontation and episode 9 the wrapping up. That's it. We're done. Telling the story out of order for the first couple of episodes made no fucking sense. All the music selections are cheap shortcuts of storytelling or character development. Oh shit, remember Don't Fear the Reaper? Here's a tiny bit of it at the end of an episode. Hey, it's Heather Graham! Let's use Brand New Key! Remember Boogie Nights? Why yes I do remember Boogie Nights and I would very much rather be watching that now instead.

In regards to Flagg specifically his power wanes because he's a King villain. Through no involvement by the heroes his magical sight dims. Dayna kills herself before telling him who the moon man is, the Judge gets shot in the face so he can't send the head back like he wanted, Tom escapes, Nadine baits him in to killing her and by extension their unborn child, people are starting to escape the Las Vegas, Trashcan Man flies off the handle when someone makes "people who play with fire wet the bed" joke in passing while he's working at a military base. Trash then booby traps fucking everything killing every single pilot Flagg has plus all the pilots in training plus a bunch of other people and equipment. Then Trash goes in to the desert to find the biggest fire he can and when he brings it back to Vegas a bit of power that Flagg lets loose grows beyond his control before taking the shape of god's hand and setting off the nuke as a couple remaining "good guys" get reduced to atomic residue.

The "heroes" do nothing but show up to witness from ground zero Mother Abigail's god cook Vegas at 5000 degrees.

Arbitrary said:

I've always thought that the choice between Mother Abigail's selfish old testament god and a creature of destruction doomed to fail in his attempt to create was a stupid fucking choice. If I am to take these two sides and their representatives seriously than fuck all that noise you can catch me on the east coast. The building military confrontation teased though the entire second half of the book that never happens to instead have the literal Hand of God destroy Las Vegas including the entire population? Terrible ending. These are people that we've learned aren't all villains. Some just threw in with what they saw as order. Given that the world nearly ended who can blame someone for siding with the first person that looked able to get the power back on? God I guess. Atomic hellfire for all of you as another King villain is hoisted by their own petard rather than being bested by the heroes.

But I still really like the book even though I think the themes are fucked and the ending is trash. Why? Because of the characters. The book's long as fuck so you just get all this time to hang out with Stu, Harold, Lloyd, Trash, Flagg, Nick, etc. Also, the Captain Trips stuff in the beginning is all A+. A 1970s coked out-of-his-mind King really paints a wonderful nightmare of an omni-powerful government and its jackbooted thugs stamping out descent as the plague spreads. The first couple hundred pages are such a good time.

The show gave us no time to hang out with anyone but Harold and it's already almost over. Episode 7 should be the walk to Vegas, episode 8 the confrontation and episode 9 the wrapping up. That's it. We're done. Telling the story out of order for the first couple of episodes made no fucking sense. All the music selections are cheap shortcuts of storytelling or character development. Oh shit, remember Don't Fear the Reaper? Here's a tiny bit of it at the end of an episode. Hey, it's Heather Graham! Let's use Brand New Key! Remember Boogie Nights? Why yes I do remember Boogie Nights and I would very much rather be watching that now instead.

In regards to Flagg specifically his power wanes because he's a King villain. Through no involvement by the heroes his magical sight dims. Dayna kills herself before telling him who the moon man is, the Judge gets shot in the face so he can't send the head back like he wanted, Tom escapes, Nadine baits him in to killing her and by extension their unborn child, people are starting to escape the Las Vegas, Trashcan Man flies off the handle when someone makes "people who play with fire wet the bed" joke in passing while he's working at a military base. Trash then booby traps fucking everything killing every single pilot Flagg has plus all the pilots in training plus a bunch of other people and equipment. Then Trash goes in to the desert to find the biggest fire he can and when he brings it back to Vegas a bit of power that Flagg lets loose grows beyond his control before taking the shape of god's hand and setting off the nuke as a couple remaining "good guys" get reduced to atomic residue.

The "heroes" do nothing but show up to witness from ground zero Mother Abigail's god cook Vegas at 5000 degrees.

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the actual stand in The Stand is more like a save the whales protest. its fucking cringey and then Flagg just kills himself and everyone else by accident. its basically his incompetence that causes every failure he faces. Mother Abigail proves herself to be pointless. all she had to do was sit on her porch and let flagg fuck his own self up and call it a day. i loved the book a ton as a kid/teen. i read it probably a few dozen times, the "updated" version with the Roger Rabbit and other pop culture references i read half a dozen times too. i think thats what soured me on this story. the added moment where Stu and Glen attempt open heart surgery and trying to get a fucking clue while the one dude bled out. kind of tipped me to the fact that these people are fuck ups and that Flagg really wasnt the boogeyman they so wanted him to be.

I swear they have to WORK to make this show as bad as it is. The whole premise has unlimited opportunity for cool shit to happen, but somehow the writers are fucking it all up completely. This one is so boring I would maybe throw in the towel except for two things:

1. Based on Stephen King source material and thus I have to watch it
2. The actress playing Nadine looks like a young Sharon Stone and that alone is enough

the 90s had all kinds of TV and movies pushing that envelope to see how much they could get away with to shock people. for the last decade its been trending boring and safe bullshit. studios are so scared of pissing off the 10 weirdos on twitter that they dont do anything controversial anymore, controversial in the sense that it doesnt piss off the twitter mob. they dont count care if their paying customers are pissed off. those people are istaphobes.

M O O N

That spells dogshit. Lawds yes.

I cannot stand how this show uses pop songs to shortcut having to actually tell a story.

I PUT A SPELL ON YOU
BECAUSE YOU'RE MINE

/gag

reavor said:

basically the big finale... the trashcan man "reveal" becomes weird because the whole interaction and storyline with trashcan has been trashed. he's supposed to take the nuke to an airplane but takes it to flagg instead because... no reason. no deeper interactions between lloyd and flagg. Lloyd turns on Flagg which completely goes against his character in the book. "finger of god" is also flat because it's not flagg who causes it. no Flagg disappearing just as the nuke goes off, instead killed by "holy ball of lightning".

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that sounds pretty stupid. Flagg is an interdimensional cake eating near immortal creature. if he didnt get fucked by Dark Tower book 8, he would be immortal.
The rest actual sounds somewhat accurate. Stephen King shits the bed on a lot of his book endings. this is very well known. he is strong in setup. pacing and sketching up outlines for his goals. his characters are good if you arent familiar with his other works. if you read more than 5 of his novels, you realize that he puts the same caricatures in most of his books. in the Stand, he created so many characters that he used all his staples and its pretty much a glossary for all his future works. he can keep his stories going and going and you will be along for the ride. its good as it goes, , but when he has to end the fucking thing, you can practically feel the moment he takes his hands off his typewriter and shrugs his shoulders and just hurries up and tries, tries to tie it all up in a pretty bow. his foreshadowing game is shit tier for the most part. though he does have some satisfying endings, but very few in comparison with his entire body of work. Arbitrary can confirm all this. when you get a Stephen King property, you must expect this. Frank Darabont is the only director who gets all this and he has the talent to create better endings than King could ever imagine.

Lloyd turning on Flagg sounds like a poor change to make. In the book you grow to feel some sympathy for him despite his introduction with Poke in a robbery gone bad. There's a decent amount of time devoted to him alone in prison starving to death and remembering his past. When he's rescued by Flagg and given his position he is genuinely trying to not fuck it up. He sticks with Flagg to the end because Flagg is the only person in his whole life who saw anything in him. He knows what's right but he just can't get off the road he's on. It's tragic. That's strongly present in the made for TV movie when he shoots and kills Glenn. Ray Walston and Miguel Ferrer have just a great scene there at the end. Hell, they're both A+ in general.

And yeah, King endings being trash isn't just a meme. A lot of the time they're trash. His villains often self sabotage or the final confrontations themselves suck (Salem's Lot, The Dark Tower, The Dead Zone, Doctor Sleep) or the endings just meander (Gerald's Game, also The Stand). Under the Dome is like a fucking purgatory of all his favorite archetypes. I like Dreamcatcher but that's another one full of copypasted King archetypes.

But stuff like Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, The Body, The Long Walk, The Running Man, Misery, Pet Sematary, The Shining and others will forever be stories I love. His early collections of short stories are a bunch of fun.

Arbitrary said:

Lloyd turning on Flagg sounds like a poor change to make. In the book you grow to feel some sympathy for him despite his introduction with Poke in a robbery gone bad. There's a decent amount of time devoted to him alone in prison starving to death and remembering his past. When he's rescued by Flagg and given his position he is genuinely trying to not fuck it up. He sticks with Flagg to the end because Flagg is the only person in his whole life who saw anything in him. He knows what's right but he just can't get off the road he's on. It's tragic. That's strongly present in the made for TV movie when he shoots and kills Glenn. Ray Walston and Miguel Ferrer have just a great scene there at the end. Hell, they're both A+ in general.

And yeah, King endings being trash isn't just a meme. A lot of the time they're trash. His villains often self sabotage or the final confrontations themselves suck (Salem's Lot, The Dark Tower, The Dead Zone, Doctor Sleep) or the endings just meander (Gerald's Game, also The Stand). Under the Dome is like a fucking purgatory of all his favorite archetypes. I like Dreamcatcher but that's another one full of copypasted King archetypes.

But stuff like Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, Apt Pupil, The Body, The Long Walk, The Running Man, Misery, Pet Sematary, The Shining and others will forever be stories I love. His early collections of short stories are a bunch of fun.

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in his own writings and interviews, he admits that all his books have the potential for epic sized tomes. "It" was supposed to be something crazy like 3000 pages. he loses himself in his work and if he doesnt force himself to stop, he will just keep writing. its why his endings are weak. he doesnt want to stop his stories, he wants to keep them going with more and more elaborate backgrounds. so you get a really good story, then he drops you off a cliff and its over. basically the literary version of a ruined orgasm porn video.

reavor said:

supposedly King's super villain.

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Spoiler for real about Randal Flagg, Dark Tower, etc.

Arbitrary said:

Spoiler for real about Randal Flagg, Dark Tower, etc.

Spoiler

Seven books in to the Dark Tower series he is jobbed out by a brand new villain that kills a main character before immediately dying themselves. There is never a final confrontation between the Gunslinger and the Man in Black. Fuck everything about that fucking book.

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oops i was thinking book 8, i guess i was thinking of season 8 of GoT.
hey thats why pencils have ERASERS!!!