2:43: Really?  I understand the instinctive urge to get away from trouble, but there would also be an instinctive urge to help someone who's just suffered a car crash.  So for them to approach the car initially struck me as fine and not at all out of the ordinary.  A minute or two *later*, as they caught on to how sick Campion was, and saw his dead family... that's when I think the fear would have seized me.

4:28: Yeah - The Stand has for sure been on my mind these last three and a half years, but really it's been a comforting thought process.  As I looked around at what's going on in the world, I have reminded myself many times that "it could be worse."  And indeed it could - there just no reason whatsoever that something on the scale of The Stand couldn't *happen* in our world.  Any year the flu that comes around could hit us that hard, or close to it.  It's not "likely," but it's not out of the question.  In past centuries such a think would likely peter itself out in some "region," but the way we all travel around these days it would slam the whole planet in short order.  So... I'm counting my blessings still, in spite of what's happened.

5:05: Starkey wasn't a scientist; he was military oversight, much like Leslie Groves was re: the atomic bomb program.

7:35: Yeah, this highlighted an interest aspect of Captain Tripps, which King probably used just for literary convenience.  As far as I could tell, no one got sick and then recovered.  If you got sick, you died.  Full stop.  It either killed you, or it didn't touch at all.  Full immunity.  My guess is that in the real world that's not how such a thing would be - I imagine we'd see people recover from all levels of sickness.  Might not be many, but I think that's a lot more likely than full immunity.  I'm not a doctor, though.

9:45: But you see, that was very real.  It's how the world *was* in the day The Stand was written.  There have *always* been "good people" and "bad people" in the world, but in past centuries and decades even the good people were apt to reflect the flaws of the prevailing society.  Most white Americans from the generation Larry's mother hailed from *did* carry some latent racism with them.  It never even occurred to them that it was a bad thing, and society was not in the business of pointing that out to them.  I think the right way to think about this is that those flaws were flaws in *society*, and people just tended to absorb the society that reared them.  Today there is far, far less excuse to carry around such thoughts, but in those days it just didn't make sense to automatically categorize someone as a monster for having such ideas.  We really should keep this in mind when we study history.  Larry's mom is a perfect example of such a person - fundamentally a very decent person, but born of a flawed age.

12:40: One thing I like about the book is that up until the dreams start, there's no indication necessarily that there's going to be anything supernatural whatsoever about it - if you went in not already knowing that King writes that sort of book (and he doesn't, always), that stuff might come as a complete curve ball.

15:00: See, you might argue that those soldiers were *trying* to protect people (against something they couldn't really do a damn thing about, but still) - but we readers know the truth.  What they were really trying to do is hide their foul-up.  And in that is *not* American.  At least it's not what we think America ought to be.

16:00: Randall Flagg is one of the greatest literary characters ever created.

18:05: Oh, I think King *absolutely* intended to write the government as a villain in The Stand.  There's just nothing whatsoever redeeming in any of their actions.  In the real world, I think we'd get a mixture.  Some elements of our government are at least mostly "righteous," but certainly not all of them, and when an entity has the level of power the government has "bad" can be really, really bad.

23:20: Harold is tragic.  He could have had such a much different life, and he came close to having it.  But... alas.

24:26: Well, there *is* a problem like that with the world.  All the kids that are chronically bullied in school and so on?  Most of them don't really *deserve* that - it's just petty cruelty on the part of the other kids.  The thing is, that's out there in the world and if you're going to make it you have to get through, one way or another.  If you *let it* turn you into something ugly yourself, well, that failure is your own, because there are others who suffer just as much who *do* get through it and come out perhaps with some bad memories but ready to live a positive life.

25:30: Glenn is my most admired character in this book.  See, if the world was populated with Glen Batemans, then we'd be ok as long as there were *any* survivors.  We'd react with thought and reason and wouldn't behave like animals.  Even if 75% or 80% of the world were like Glenn, we'd be ok.  But, the world isn't populated with Batemans.  You asked earlier if the government hadn't really done the right thing, even though they lied.  Well, yes - given the nature of the population, I agree with you.   The tragedy isn't what they did - the tragedy is that the world we've built is not one in which they *could* do the right thing.  The failure - the real failure - happened much, much earlier.  At this state I don't know if we can come back from it, but I do know that even if we can it will take us a long, long time.  To do it, we need to make rationality, reason, calm thoughtfulness, and basic regard for one another the bedrock of our culture again.  We've come a long way from that.

28:22: Lloyd is fascinating as well, because before too much time passes he *recognizes* that he is damned.  He absolutely understands that he stepped onto the dark path long, long ago, and understands at some deep level that he has no way back.  Maybe part of him wishes he'd made different choices, but he doesn't weep about the unfairness of it all or anything like that.  He accepts that he's made his bed, and the only thing he can do is lie in it.  Near the end, even when he fully expects things to fall down for his faction, he sticks.  I think he understands that at this point he's just playing a role that he can't escape.  In a way I feel sorry for him, or if not so much for him, for the child that grew into him.  Like Harold, he's another character that might have had a different life, if they could just go back and change a few of their decisions.  Lloyd's are much further in his past that Harold's, but it's the same idea in both cases.

29:55: I think this book is *really about* Larry Underwood.  He's different from the other "good guys."  The rest of them start out good, and stay good.   They're almost just background.  Wonderful background, but still background.  But Larry changes during this novel.  Larry *redeems* himself.  He finds a new way in the world, that is far different from the selfish egocentric man he began as.  In the end of this book, there is no ingenious action on the part of the heroes that saves things.  Basically, God just wipes the evil away.  But *why*?  After all that, why does God just decide enough is enough?  I think it's because he sees Larry turn away from a bad path and onto a good path.  The fact that Larry could salvage goodness from the dumpster fire of his life - that humanity contained that latent potential - I think that was the act that convinced God the human experiment should continue.

31:40: The shootout scene was wonderful, and I think it was very realistic in that it was describing a shootout among people not trained in the use of firearms.  You didn't see someone grab a gun and just pop pop pop, all the bad guys gone.  The missed.  They were pathetic.  They had to try over and over before they got the job done.  I think that's *exactly* how most such situations, randomly populated with people off the streets, would go.

32:50: I agree with you 100% - that's *exactly* how our political process is going these days, and there are bad guys on both sides.  I have little use for any of them these days.  I think some good people still go to Washington, but I think they immediately discover that they have to compromise to survive, so very soon they either join the bad club (to survive) or lose out and get sent home.  The political process is like a filter tailor-made to winnow out the people who have real character, and what we're left with (again, on both sides) is creeps and users.  And BTW, you handled that with style and grace - don't worry; you didn't "get political."

33:30: No, it's not strange at all.  Because Tom is a *child* - all 200+ brute pounds of him.  There he is, big and probably stronger than he realizes, but he's a child that needs to be cared for, and for those of us that still have some caring for others left in us, children are the very first people we will reach out to protect.

35:40: No, I *totally* agree with you.  It's more like Mother Abigail is prepared to "use" the other characters to server *her* purposes.  Or, rather, her God's purposes.  Her perspective on it, though, is unselfish - she would actually say that God was using all of them, and the particular roles each one filled were irrelevant.  Her very *last* thought would be that she was there to serve "the white folk."

37:20: We tend to make everyone caricatures these days.  We lose sight of the shades of gray - the mixtures of positive and negative traits that all of us carry around.  We see one little thing in someone that we don't like, and we demonize them.  *Especially* in online public communities - having that audience on tap, so see us demonize the "bad guy," to see how very virtuous we are - we're on that like bees on honey these days.  It's sad and pathetic.

38:15: No, no no - that wasn't Larry.  It was *Nick* that was on the receiving end of the "He believes in you" line.  In Mother Abigail's eyes (due to some prescience she had been given), she saw Nick as the defacto leader of the ones that went on to Boulder, and he filled that role until he died.  Then in her eyes the role fell to Stu.

42:10: Dude, you've got Tom Cullen's tagline backwards - it wouldn't be "YES - that spells moon."  It would be "MOON - that spells yes."  🙂

45:35: Mother Abigail had no interest in anything that the people of Boulder did except as they pertained to Randall Flagg.  That was a huge difference between her and Flagg.

46:56: And yet the Boulderites did have their successes.  Maybe it's just because I happen to be an electrical engineer, but I found the "turning on the lights" scene in the mini-series to be an incredibly inspiring, moving moment.  Triumphant and  a testament to the resiliency of human spirit.  I thought it was a slick move on King's part to seize upon something as mundane as *electricity* to wrap around this idea.

47:50: I think the problem, had King tried to do what you said, would have been on the Vegas side.  Flagg was no ordinary dictator - he had magical ability to see into people's secrets.  It would have been impossible for his underlings to play the usual backstabbing games that characterize dictatorship.  I think you're totally right to associate that kind of thing with dictatorship in general, but in the case of The Stand we had a special case and I think it would have raised more problems for King that add quality.

49:27: That is ABSOLUTELY TRUE.  The people that we really should want leading us are the ones that don't CRAVE leadership and power.  This is just like a fundamental axiom for me.  The people we should want as our police officers are the ones that deeply want to "do no harm."  Instead, we get a lot of people who have been bullies and so on from the time they were children - they seek out the job because it's an opportunity to wield power over others.  I want to be very clear here - this is not *all* police officers I'm describing, but I really feel we should be making an overt effort, through psychological screening and so on, to *exclude* such people from our police forces.  I think candidates should be given the best battery of tests we can come up with, and any indication whatsoever for a propensity toward aggression, bullying, and so on should immediately remove them from consideration.

49:47: Oh yeah - the book was tremendously unfair to Nadine.  In that one scene when she cries out, "Who chose?" I just ache for her.  She didn't seem to have any opportunity to avoid her path - it was like she was just born to carry the burden she got dealt.  It seemed horribly, horribly unfair.  Part of me actually wanted Larry to save her, but he couldn't because that was also the critical choice in his own path.  Had he gone to Nadine when she begged him to, he would have fallen.  His refusal to do so was the culmination of his redemption.

52:15: Yeah, definitely the bomb is the nail in the coffin for Nadine and Harold.  And Harold so aptly captures this: "Nadine?  We're damned."  You got it, buddy.  The new miniseries made a couple of years ago didn't do nearly as good a job capturing the sympathetic aspect of Nadine.  The impression I got is that she knew from day one that she was on the path of evil, and everything she did was just aimed in that direction.  That was much less like the book than the 1990's miniseries.

53:15: Don't forget Susan Stern.  I really hated to see her go - she was such a wholesome and attractive woman.

54:35: And Ralph - don't leave Ralph out.

55:13: The even bigger significance of the broken leg scene was re: Larry.  Particularly in the 1990's mini-series.  The absolute abject misery that Adam Storke brought to that scene nearly brought tears to my eyes.  When he asks Stu, "Don't you see how CRAZY that is????" I just wanted to hug him.  The poor guy - he'd just almost had more than he could take at that point.

57:18: I see now.  You dislike the ending.  But this theme has shown up all through fiction.  Look at The Lord of the Rings.  Tolkien, in his letters, was very clear about what was going on there.  The characters DID NOT defeat Sauron on their own.  Even Frodo *failed* at the last minute - at the end of his journey, the Ring took him.  Finally.  He had resisted it for as long as he could, but in the end he couldn't drop it into the fire.  But, Gollum was there, wanting the ring for himself, and his actions caused the Ring to be *lost* into the fire, through no one's deliberate intent.  Tokien says outright that Eru Iluvatar was the one who defeated Sauron.  Ultimately the story was not about the good guys *winning* but rather about the good guys... well, STANDING, and being judged worthy by their Creator.  I'm not saying that I particularly love it, but it's an old story.  By the time that moment comes at the end, the real story is already over - it was over as soon as the our heroes followed through on their Stand.

59:10: Well, that would have been another way to end the story.  But I don't think it would have been any better than what King wrote, and it might have been worse.  Because it would have been unrealistic beyond belief.  Look around at the world.  Do you really, really see around you a people that have the capacity to do that?  I see *some* people like that, but not nearly enough.  It's a nice thing to dream about, I guess.  Like I said above - the story was really already over at this point.  As soon as our heroes willingly put themselves into the hands of Flagg's guys, Flagg was beaten.  The rest was just tidying up, and that's how it comes off to me.

1:00:30: And, to answer Stu's question... No.  We don't.  We make the same freaking mistakes over and over and over again, and have been doing so for thousands of years.  The best we can do is try to make the small part of the world we touch a better place for the people around us.


Hey man, fantastic review - I watched it with rapt attention, as the above commentary probably makes painfully clear. You did a wonderful job.  Take care and stay safe out there!  Watch out for the flu!