The story, set around a destructive pandemic that wipes out much of humanity and the subsequent re-formation of two morally divergent societies in its aftermath, always had a beginning, middle, and an end.
As King noted in the preface of the '90s version, the additional material provided the opportunity for a richer story — like adding in a confrontation Frannie has with her mother before the world falls apart, when the college student reveals she's pregnant and about to enter motherhood on her own.
Her own mother doesn't take it well. According to series co-creator Benjamin Cavell , King, for many years, wanted to give heroine Frannie her own "stand. They have a little help from Trashcan Man returning with a nuke, as well as an avenging light force for good that strikes and kills a variety of characters before ultimately making the bomb explode, destroying everything on that side. She can't walk across the mountains to confront the Darkman," Cavell noted.
And that is what happens in the drama's final episode, but it also finds King making alterations to his own material. And it's worth breaking down the changes to try and unpack their significance. TV Stu James Marsden doesn't make it back in time to be there for Frannie as her now daughter gets — and recovers from — Capt. When things settle into a groove in the Boulder Free Zone, Frannie suggests to Stu that their little family head off on their own, back to her home state of Maine.
During their trip, while stopping at a unique farm Mother Abigail's OG home in the book with cornfields and an old water well, TV Fran gets to make her "stand. Stu is kept busy by heading back to a town they saw on their drive, fetching supplies and baby medicine in this off-book twist, and while he's gone, Frannie positions herself atop a rickety old water well cover as she tries to pump H2O for herself, baby Abby and the late stand-against-Randall-taking Glen Bateman's dog Kojak.
He torments Frannie, letting her see her broken body from this dream-like other side, and runs down a list of her life-altering injuries from the fall.
In the aftermath of the plague, two dueling avatars of good and evil emerge. On the light side is Mother Abigail, a godly old woman from Nebraska. Flagg — described as a man in jeans, a denim jacket, and boots, who walks the highways of America with his pockets stuffed with pamphlets — is the avatar of the dark.
Flagg sets up shop in Las Vegas , where he builds a force of evil people or, in some cases, just morally flexible people to restart civilization in opposition to Mother Abigail's group. Over the course of the novel, it's revealed that Flagg is much more than just a charismatic man, and that he can assume monstrous forms and conjure tremendous energy when needed.
At the end of The Stand spoiler alert , Flagg is defeated when a literal, giant glowing hand — the Hand of God — intervenes and destroys his followers, though Flagg himself is revealed to have survived in an epilogue in The Complete and Uncut Edition of the novel. Flagg next appeared in King's fantasy novel The Eyes of the Dragon , as a court magician who wears a dark hood and is simply named "Flagg.
To achieve this, he poisons the king of Delain and frames the king's heir, Prince Peter, for the crime, while becoming chief adviser to the new leader, Peter's younger brother Thomas.
Flagg spends much of the novel amassing power as the de facto ruler of the kingdom, until Thomas finally confronts and attempts to kill him. Here again, Flagg manifests a demonic form over the course of the story, and he manages to escape despite Thomas' attack. Thomas and his butler, Dennis, eventually find him, but the novel doesn't reveal what happened to Flagg or to the men who sought him, leaving the character alive and free to appear in other stories.
The Dark Tower is Stephen King's eight-book fantasy saga seven main series novels and one spin-off novel that chronicles a lone gunslinger's quest to reach the titular Tower, which is a kind of nexus for all existence. The series begins with the famous line, "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. Flagg appears in several different guises throughout the saga, always as a major antagonist of Roland, the gunslinger on the quest for the Tower.
He first appears in Roland's life as Marten Broadcloak, a court sorcerer responsible for bringing down the kingdom from the inside and tricking Roland into murdering his own mother, with whom Marten had an affair. Later, he appears as Walter o'Dim, the Man in Black who taunts and tempts Roland with knowledge of the Tower and the future of his quest. He appears again even later in the series as a man calling himself Richard Fannin, and he's also in the spin-off novel, The Wind Through the Keyhole , as the Covenant Man.
The Dark Tower series is famous among King superfans not just because of its epic scope, but because its continuity has grown to encapsulate other King stories, either retroactively or deliberately, including IT , Salem's Lot , and Insomnia. This is part of the reason that Flagg is able to appear as a character in so many stories, because he exists as a near-immortal antagonist not just within The Dark Tower , but within the multiverse established for King's fiction.
The seventh book in the main cycle, subtitled simply The Dark Tower , reveals that Flagg was born Walter Padick, a miller's son who set out to find his way in the world and suffered trauma at the hands of a stranger. Rather than returning home, he sought to learn magic, and he eventually mastered many forms of it.
This allowed him to catch the eye of the Crimson King, the being at the center of The Dark Tower saga, who brought him into the fold as his servant in the multiverse. Because The Dark Tower presents him as a figure who's extremely difficult to kill and able to traverse the many worlds of the cosmology seemingly at will, Randall Flagg has been freed up by the nature of King's fiction to appear in a number of different tales in a number of different universes, sometimes without any direct confirmation from the author that he's referring to Flagg.
For example, the character of Raymond Fiegler in King's collection Hearts in Atlantis is likely another incarnation of Flagg, as evidenced by the R. Though Flagg is his most popular name thanks to his prominence in The Stand , the character is also known to go by many other handles, even beyond his existence as both Marten and Walter in The Dark Tower.
This mutability has led King fans to search for him in just about every book the author has ever put out, just in case the villain rears his ugly head somewhere else. Though King's novels name him as the son of a miller, Furth retconned this with King's approval to make the miller Walter's adoptive father. However, before Larry and Ray can meet their watery end, all hell — or possibly, quite the opposite — breaks loose as thick clouds gather over the building's central atrium and start zapping people with lightning bolts.
Soon the lightning coalesces into a floating ball that seems to consciously target Flagg's minions, and finishes by repeatedly zapping Flagg himself, then destroying everything by detonating a nuclear warhead and putting Ray and Larry out of their misery in the process.
Safe to say, that was no ordinary lightning. In the book, although the circumstances are a bit different, the warhead is detonated by a "Hand of God," described as a giant, glowing hand in the sky. If you look closely as the clouds wrap around Flagg's building, they do resemble fingers, meaning that the lightning was basically divine intervention.
Given the strong spiritual undertones in the series, it's fitting that an act of God would be the thing that would finally take out Flagg Stu Redman James Marsden breaks his leg en route and is left behind along with Glen's dog Kojak, some travel supplies, and enough pain meds to either take the edge off for a few days After hiding from Flagg's henchmen under a pile of dead bodies, Tom was able to escape Las Vegas, and started the long walk toward Boulder.
On his way back, Tom's attention is drawn by Kojak, whom he joyfully follows. While we never see Tom's reunion with Stu, we can infer it happens when Stu finally makes it back to Boulder along with Tom and Kojak, telling Frannie Odessa Young that Tom saved his life.
By the time they make it back, Stu is walking albeit with a limp , and it's clear from Frannie's narration that at least a few weeks, and possibly even several months have passed. In the book, this time gap is explained by Tom nursing Stu back to health in a hunting lodge, aided by the ghost of Nick Andros Henry Zaga. In the show, we'll just have to use our imaginations. One of the creepier subplots in a miniseries filled to the brim with creepiness was Nadine's Amber Heard supernatural pregnancy, fathered by the disembodied spirit of Randall Flagg.
You see, Nadine encountered Flagg in what appeared to be a hallucination while she was crossing the desert to get to Las Vegas, and they finally consummated their disturbing relationship, with him transforming into a horrific demon mid-act. He then sent a car to transport her the rest of the way, and it didn't take very long for her to realize she was pregnant with his Who or what was gestating inside Nadine's womb will always be left to viewers' imaginations, but we can at least venture to say that it wasn't a healthy bouncing baby human.
For one thing, Nadine went from being a virgin to seemingly nine months pregnant in the span of just a few days. For another, it was clear from Nadine's corpse-like appearance and the sharp movements beneath her skin that whatever was inside her was consuming her from the inside out.
Nadine finally realized that she was never intended to survive the birth, and committed suicide by throwing herself from Flagg's penthouse window. From Flagg's devastated reaction at the loss of his progeny, we can assume that whatever Nadine was about to give birth to was instrumental to his plan, and most likely intended to be the demonic successor to Flagg himself.
Fortunately for everyone, that plan never came to fruition. Although The Stand is filled with human characters, it is ultimately about a war between cosmic forces of good and evil.
On the side of good, representing the will of God, is Mother Abigail, and on the side of evil, there is Randall Flagg. But unlike Mother Abigail, who is incredibly old and uniquely gifted but undeniably human, Flagg is Not only can he fly and impregnate people from across hundreds of miles, but he also can apparently regenerate after being repeatedly struck by lightning and then vaporized by a nuclear blast.
To call Flagg "the Devil" is probably both the right answer and an oversimplification. Mother Abigail alludes to the idea that he is actually the son of the Devil, during her conversation with Frannie in "The Circle Closes," drawing an obvious parallel between Flagg and the Christian belief that Jesus Christ was the son of God.
In Stephen King's books, Flagg is more of an ageless, malevolent wizard who repeatedly shows up to push characters toward darkness.
So in the broader scope of King's works, Flagg is both a sort of living Devil, and also something else a little more human.
In The Stand , however, the character leans heavily into the Devil or son of the Devil persona, both in how some of his actions mirror Biblical stories, and in his demand to be worshipped. The unnamed Trashcan Man Ezra Miller is one of the more enigmatic characters in The Stand , characterized only by his pyromania and his erratic behavior that indicates some sort of neurodivergence.
He's introduced well into the series, and is tasked by Flagg to go retrieve a nuclear warhead that Flagg intends to drop on the Boulder Free Zone, wiping out Mother Abigail and her followers. But instead, the Trashcan Man his skin literally melting off his body due to the radiation of the warhead drives the warhead into Flagg's hotel, where it is then detonated by the Hand of God.
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