‘The Stand’ Retro Recap – ‘Part II: The Dreams’

Written by John Edward Betancourt 

If there's one common thread that many end of the world stories share, it's that often times, these tales struggle with what happens to the story and our characters after the apocalypse has passed. You usually see these stories focus too heavily on the survival aspect, losing sight of what it wanted to accomplish in the first place. Or it moves so quickly toward the resolution of the bigger plot elements that the potential to tell an even grander tale slips away. But Stephen King is not a writer to back down from a creative challenge such as this and his teleplay for the second chapter of ​The Stand proves this through and through, since he was able to ensure that this grand opus did not fall into those familiar storytelling traps.

Because 'Part II: The Dreams' not only takes us into the heart of the aftermath of the Superflu epidemic, it tackles the bold question of 'what comes next?' head on, and the end result was a compelling and slow burning chapter in the tale, one that ever so gently established who is good and who is evil by allowing the characters to make a powerful choice. They can either serve the Lord Himself and travel to Hemingford Home, Nebraska and help the mysterious Mother Abigail in her fight against evil. Or they can start making their way toward Las Vegas, Nevada and answer the call of 'The Walkin' Dude'; Randall Flagg, and live a life filled to the brim with freedom untold, provided they hand over their soul to him.

But what I truly appreciated about how this particular episode played out, is the sheer fact that for the most part, you don't quite know who is good and who is evil at first. Sure, Stu, Nick and a handful of others quickly establish themselves as goodhearted people who want to maintain that status quo, and the opposite applies to people like Flagg or Julie Lawry, who clearly relish in evil and you know that from the moment they arrive on screen. But folks like Nadine and the Trashcan Man and even Lloyd Henreid to a certain extent, at first just seem like lost souls who really don't know what the heck they want out of life and it takes a little work from Flagg to win them over and in the case of the few that I just mentioned, clearly good does not always conquer evil, and at times even those who are dedicated to Mother Abigail's cause seem skeptical of serving a greater good, but something compels them to go on.

However, while it's neat to see characters choose their side and uncover the better or worst parts of themselves, this is still a horror story and it needs to startle and disturb us and Part II does a fine job of that as well in both subtle and direct fashion. The subtle aspect is handled in masterful fashion, simply by presenting us with a world ravaged by Superflu, since there are corpses strewn about everywhere in this tale, and it's downright creepy to see the roads, the skies and our great cities devoid of humanity and as for the direct scares, well...the only one that comes to mind that managed to leave me genuinely disturbed is the scene where Larry and Nadine try to escape New York City by heading through the Lincoln Tunnel and when you combine Larry's hallucinations, with the dark and the claustrophobic feel of being in a tunnel filled with the dead...well the end result is downright terrifying.

Yet despite the fact that this episode is nowhere near as intense as the first one, it still takes you on the quite the ride. If anything, this particular chapter allows for the audience to decompress from the horrors they have just seen, and lick their wounds as the main characters do, all before switching gears and providing us with a sense of urgency. You can feel the tension of the forthcoming battle building throughout this entire episode and everyone is truly in a hurry to get where they need to go and that type of tension pays off in spades in the final moments of the episode when we see a convoy of people heading into Boulder, Colorado. It means that the battle lines are quickly being drawn and while one might expect that to lead into a faster paced episode that barrels us toward confrontation...well don't get your hopes up just yet, because a different kind of tale is waiting for us in Part III. Until next time.

---