Since its publication in 1978, author Stephen King has come up with three different endings for
The Stand. Somewhat fittingly, the Bible-sized tome with over a dozen central characters, each one detailed enough to be the main character in their own story about the near destruction and possible salvation of the entire human race, has drawn back King’s itchy writing finger to rethink what happens when it’s all over.
King first revised the ending of
The Stand in 1990 with an expanded edition that added a few hundred more pages. Now he’s done one more pass, writing the final episode of the CBS All Access miniseries, which just wrapped up. The differences reflect a writer who’s in an evolving relationship with the world around him.
The Stand s coda injects some suspense before falling flat
After dropping a literal atomic bomb last episode,
The Stand closes off its woefully uneven run with a quiet and very Biblical coda, written by Stephen King himself and carrying on past the point where the book ends. For that reason, there’s considerable tension and suspense even for readers of the original work. But the last-minute pontificating on the nature of humanity and good vs. evil that occurs in the spanse of this strange episode never achieves depth or sharpness. Instead, it merely flops around in its overly simplified moralizing.
With only a few more episodes until the finale, there’s only so much that
The Stand can really do to fix some of its fundamental narrative problems. “The Vigil” is technically a strong episode of the wildly inconsistent series, but the bar’s also pretty low after last week’s mess of an episode. And the problems, frankly, persist. A very major character death happens in the episode, and yet it feels almost like nothing. When not enough character work is done to flesh out these people and their motivations, the big dramatic moments just simply aren’t going to land.