Recap / The Stand 2020 S 01 E 01 The End

"Five'll get you ten it was the "people in charge" who did this in the first place. Some government scientist said, "Hey, look what I made! It kills almost everyone! Isn't it great?" and he got a medal and a raise. Then someone spilled it."

—Harold Lauder

A superflu wipes out over 99% of the world's population. In Boulder, Colorado, Harold Lauder works to dispose of the dead to make the town livable for the survivors, all while secretly plotting against those he feels have wronged him.

Five months earlier, the superflu known as "Captain Trips" is at its height. Texas native Stu Redman cooperates with doomed government efforts to find a cure, while Fran Goldsmith is left the only survivor of her hometown with her unwanted admirer Harold.

Tropes:

• Abhorrent Admirer: Harold is this in terms of personality and demeanor, being pale and having an unsettling air around him, with an unhealthy obsession about his childhood babysitter and crush Frannie.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: In the book, Harold Lauder is (originally) overweight with a bad case of acne. In the miniseries, he's played by Owen Teague, who is slim and has clear skin.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: As in the 1994 series, Stu's mother and brothers aren't mentioned. He's still a widower, but she died in a car crash instead of from cancer, and much more recently. This version of Stu served in the Army for a year before getting a medical discharge after tearing up his knee tendons, and works on oil rigs instead of in a failing calcualtor factory.
• Adaptational Nice Guy: The US military is portrayed much nicer than in the book or previous miniseries, as they're legitimately just trying to contain the outbreak rather than focusing on a coverup. General Starkey, who is willing to let Stu leave the Vermont facility once there's no one left to tell him not to, even states that the soldiers all stayed focused on doing their jobs long after the predictive models said they would have in this situation. In the novel, Starkey has journalists who try to cover the superflu murdered and deliberately spreads the virus to America's enemies and rivals so the world wouldn't find out that it originated from the U.S. It is not known or shown in the miniseries whether he ever did or didn't do any of these things, only implied that he didn't.
• Adaptational Villainy: While Flagg was definitely the main villain of the book, he wasn't responsible for the outbreak in the first place as he is here. That was all on mundane human beings.
• Adaptation Deviation: Harold's older sister Amy (who is also Frannie's best friend) was The Ghost in both the original book and the 1994 series. Here she appears briefly in the first episode and gets a few lines.
• After the End: The series takes place after the world has been decimated by the superflu "Captain Trips", leaving less than one percent of the world's population immune and alive.
• Anachronic Order: Happens a lot, due to the series not progressing as linearly as the book. The first episode jumps back and forth between the post-apocalyptic society of the Boulder Free Zone and the last days of modern civilization as Captain Trips ravages the world. The last scene then flashes all the way back to Campion escaping the initial outbreak with his family, becoming patient zero for the pandemic.
• Animal Motifs: Flagg uses Creepy Crows and wolves as his familiars. A scorpion similar to the one on Flagg's belt buckle also appears to watch Harold typing.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Used by Dr. Ellis to get Stu's cooperation in finding a cure.
  Dr. Ellis: Hey, your wife was a nurse, right? What do you think she’d tell you to do?
• Bad News in a Good Way: In Stu's Flashback to his time in quarantine, Dr. Ellis responds to his demand for information on his friends by telling him that one of his friends' children is still alive... for now. When Stu responds with reasonable shock, Ellis doubles down to explain why they need his cooperation to hopefully find a solution.
  Stu: How many of them had what Campion had?
  Dr. Ellis: All of them.
  Stu: What do you mean, all of ’em? What…? And how are they?
  Dr. Ellis: Ralph Hodges’, uh, youngest daughter, the four-year-old.
  Stu: Eva?
  Dr. Ellis: She’s alive. [Beat] She was when I came in here.
  Stu: What do you mean? What’s-what’s that supposed to mean– “She’s alive”?
  Dr. Ellis: Mis-Mister Redman, I am so sorry. This situation– it exists. We’re working to contain it, and right now that is all that matters.
• Big Bad: Randall Flagg, the demonic figure trying to rule the post-apocalyptic world and who was responsible for the outbreak in the first place.
• Body Horror: People in late stage superflu infection have noticeably bloated throats, presumably from fluid buildup.
• The Cameo: Bryan Cranston makes a voice-only appearance as the President, making a radio announcement denying that Captain Trips is anything to worry about.
• Danger Takes a Backseat: Played With; the end of this episode is the chronological beginning, showing Campion escaping the base with his wife and daughter. As he drives down a highway he sees none other than Randall Flagg himself hitchhiking, and drives right past him... only to see Flagg in the rearview mirror sitting next to the baby, smirking. However, Flagg doesn't harm them, because they'll all soon be dead from Captain Trips anyway.
• Depopulation Bomb: Captain Trips wipes out 99% of the human race.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: People have dreams of Abigail or Flagg, leading them to go to Bolder or Las Vegas, respectively.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • After Fran's father dies, she crosses the Despair Event Horizon and is almost catatonic as she listens to the President's address to the nation on the flu before the power goes out. When Harold comes to her house, he finds her in a bathtub after downing pills and is able to save her.
  • General Starkey, after giving Stu the aid needed to get out of the Vermont facility, likewise shoots himself rather than succumb to Captain Trips.
  • Before the General is Jim Ellis, the doctor most in contact with Stu and his closest ally in the facility he was being kept in; when he contracts the virus and is one of the few people still alive among the personnel, the doctor refuses to die in agony from the disease. The only thing keeping him from killing himself was his desire to help Stu try and escape from the facility, and he arrives just in time for Dr. Cobb to try and kill them both (with Cobb commenting that he thought Ellis had "opted for the early check-out" to "beat the traffic"). He gets shot for his troubles, but is at least spared a horrible and agonizing death from the virus.
  • The conspiracy theorist radio host Harold listens to shoots himself on the air after becoming infected, rather than let the disease finish him off.
• Emergency Presidential Address: Like in the novel, the unnamed President (voiced by an uncredited Bryan Cranston) gives one full of Implausible Deniability even as American society is falling apart due to the superflu. The speech is interrupted several times by the President's coughing fits, giving the lie to his assertion that the disease is not deadly.
• Face Death with Dignity: General Starkey reads a bit of Yeats from his Tragic Keepsake book, calmly puts his hat on, trades goodbyes with Stu, then shoots himself.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The beginning of the first episode has Harold and another worker cleaning a house where they find a room full of movies, and one of the posters is for the movie Darkman. The "Dark Man" aka Randall Flagg is revealed to have been responsible for the release of the virus and ending the world.
  • One of the guys who chase Harold out of their neighbourhood after catching him spying on Fran tell him, "You're gonna die a virgin, Lauder. For sure." Episode 7 proves him right.
  • When Fran dreams of Mother Abigail, the cornfield, the clothes she'd wearing and the doll she finds all appear in Episode 9. Stu dreams of the same cornfield, and reaches it by following baby Abigail's crying.
• For Want Of A Nail: The whole plague could have been avoided if the security bulkhead of the room Campion was in at the time of the initial outbreak hadn't jammed, allowing him to escape and inadvertently start spreading Captain Trips. It turns out that Flagg was responsible for this, forcing the door to stay open.
• Ghost Town: Ogunquit, Maine, becomes this after all but two people are killed by Captain Trips, and with over 99% of the world's population gone this applies to the whole planet.
• He Knows Too Much: Cobb has orders to kill Stu once certain conditions are met to keep him from talking about anything he saw in the CDC facility. The fact that everyone's dead, society's collapsed and there's no one left for Stu to tell doesn't stop him from trying to carry out that order.
• Incurable Cough of Death: One feature that makes the Captain Trips superflu so deadly is the initial stage presenting as common cold or flu symptoms. Basically, if any character coughs or sneezes, it's a sign they're absolutely fucked.
• The Immune: Stu Redman is explicitly stated to be immune to the virus, which the U.S. military hoped to study in hopes of containing the outbreak. Unfortunately, everyone at the facility died before they could make any headway. Due to how contagious Captain Trips is and the 100% fatality rate, anyone still alive is likely to be immune.
  Dr.Ellis: Like, the first rule of epidemiology is don't end up on the wrong end of the stethoscope.
• Interrupted Suicide: Harold stops Fran from killing herself out of despair after burying her father who had succumbed to the virus.
• Jerkass: Cobb treats Stu, the only immune person they have found so far, with contempt and makes it clear to him that the latter can either cooperate and be comfortable or refuse and have his stay with the military be an unpleasant one. When all hell breaks loose, he attempts to carry out contingencies for keeping information about the virus from leaking... despite there literally being no one left who'd care.
• Jerkass Has a Point: The two nameless bullies that chased Harold did so after catching him spying on his neighbor and warned him not to come back. As his actions prove and those familiar with one of King's recurring themes know, they are right to be concerned.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Teddy Weizak. A bit of a loudmouth and very comfortable raiding plague victims' belongings (which may be why he volunteered to help dispose of the corpses in Boulder), but he genuinely befriends Harold after he saves Teddy from a near-fatal accident, and also plans to open a drive-in theater in town for everyone to have some entertainment.
• Just Following Orders:
  • Cobb tries to kill Stu in order to fulfill pre-planned coverup orders, despite the fact that there's no one left to actually force him to do so. As General Starkey points out, men like Cobb don't stop following orders just because there's nobody left to give them or even if following them makes no sense under the circumstances.
  General Starkey: Men like Cobb, don't stop following orders just because the orders stop making sense.
  • Tragically, Charles Campion is an example of what happens when this trope gets subverted, as him deserting his post when the facility went on lockdown led the virus to escape and end the world.
• Kidnapped for Experimentation: Variation. Stu was originally taken for quarantine along with his friends after being exposed to The Plague, but became a test subject after becoming the only survivor. The lack of ethics applies, because he was brought in by force and the circumstances of his imprisonment become worse with time.
  Stu: Well, you've kept me prisoner for three days, no lawyer, no phone call. I guess you can call me whatever you want.
• Leave Behind a Pistol: Subverted. Dr Ellis gives Stu a scalpel, implicitly so he'll be able to take the easy way out rather than starve to death as everyone who knows where he is dies. Instead, Stu uses it on Cobb in self-defence, and is released from the facility by General Starkey.
  Dr Ellis: [Handing Stu the scalpel] I wish I had something better to give you.
• Loners Are Freaks: Harold is an anti-social teenager who spies on his crush, his former babysitter, treats the near extinction of humanity as the chance to finally get her, and is mistreated by a pair of bullies for said peeping and something he wrote that got him suspended.
• Magical Negro: Mother Abigail, who is a messenger for God.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Before the start of the series, Harold wrote a piece for his creative writing class and was suspended after reading it aloud in class. Whatever the subject matter was gave him a reputation amongst his classmates as being a "potential school-shooter." Given what we see of his other works, it can be inferred the content was pretty dark.
  • Something happened to Frannie's brother before the outbreak, though the only information we get is that he was deaf and whatever happened seems to be a subtle Trauma Button for her.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Stu looks uncomfortable when the nurse about to take his blood sample sneezes; she dismisses it as "allergies," but he looks uncertain. He's right; the operation to study his immunity is moved in a hurry when the nurse's kid tests positive.
  • Similarly, as he's leaving Stu's room in the new location, his doctor coughs. Stu looks startled, but the doctor doesn't appear to notice. Sure enough, the doctor is next seen at death's door and planning to avoid the horrible death from Captain Trips by killing himself with an overdose.
• Patient Zero: Army private Charles Campion becomes this when he escapes the bioweapons facility he was assigned to as security during a lockdown, while everyone else on the base died in containment. As he flees across the United States, unknowingly infected with the superflu, he starts a chain reaction of infections that result in the extinction of 99 percent of humanity.
• The Plague: "Captain Trips", the virus named by the public on social media, is a superflu that is both extremely contagious and has a 100% fatality rate. According to Harold, approximately only 0.4 percent of the world's population is immune.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: General Starkey, who helps Stu escape the sealed-off Vermont facility on the grounds that there's no longer anyone left to order that he be kept locked up or killed.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Charles Campion was on monitor duty at the bioweapons facility producing Captain Trips. When there was a containment breach, he triggered the lockdown. The door to his station jammed, so he took the opportunity to duck out before it closed and left town with his family, fleeing more than 1,000 miles across the United States. Unfortunately, he had already been infected and carried the virus the whole way, creating an uncontainable chain of infections that decimated the population.
• Setting Update: The first edition of the novel was published in 1978 and set in 1980; the second, extended edition was published and set in 1990. The first miniseries was more or less set in the time it was made, i.e., the early 1990s, while this miniseries is set in the 21st century. This is shown by the presence of social media in the story, as well as the upgrading of some of the characters' dialogue (such as the President's emergency address to the nation, where the phrase "radical anti-establishment groups" from the novel has been replaced with "social media").
• Shout-Out:
  • Stephen King had a peg on his wall as a young man, where he hung rejection letters, the same as Harold. Harold's rejection letter is from Cemetery Dance Publications, who published some of King's books.
  • A sign in Ogunquit references the town of Derry.
  • The poem General Starkey reads to Stu is "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats.
• Stepford Snarker: Dr Ellis.
  Stu: For starters, how come you're not wearing one of those masks?
  Dr. Ellis: I'm, um, too good looking. Sorry, uh, my psych profile says I use humor to cope with stress.
• Talking in Your Dreams: Both Abigail and Flagg talk to people through their dreams.
• Tragic Keepsake:
  • General Starkey has a book of poetry his daughter once got him for his birthday. He never read it until he heard that she'd died, and hasn't been able to put it down since.
  • After her father's death, Frannie puts on his dog-tags from his time in the military and likely hasn't taken them off.