Did The Stand Cheat Its Most Tragic Character

Did The Stand Cheat Its Most Tragic Character?

As CBS All Access’ adaptation of The Stand nears its finale, the miniseries may have turned one of its tragic victims into an outright villain.

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Did The Stand Cheat Its Most Tragic Character

WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Stand Episode 8, “The Stand,” now streaming on CBS All Access.

CBS All Access’ miniseries adaptation of The Stand has one episode left, but the main conflict against the sinister Randall Flagg has largely come to an explosive end. While plotting to personally lead a nuclear strike on the rival survivor community located in Colorado’s Boulder Free Zone, Flagg’s pyromaniacal associate Trashcan Man accidentally brought the active nuclear warhead directly to Flagg instead of the airfield where its intended bomber awaited. And while Flagg himself was apparently destroyed along with his community of followers in Las Vegas, taking two scouts from Boulder with him, the real victim, Nadine Cross, died shortly before the bomb’s detonation.

Nadine was introduced as a young woman who was groomed all her life to become Flagg’s bride and eventual mother of his child. When the deadly contagion Captain Trips broke out, wiping the majority of humanity in a matter of days, Nadine was among the survivors that accompanied Larry Underwood to Boulder, secretly serving as a double agent of sorts for Flagg. Recruiting the psychotic teenager Harold Lauder to join her cause, Nadine and the young man set off a bomb of their own intended to kill Boulder’s ruling committee before arriving in Vegas to meet with Flagg directly.

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Did The Stand Cheat Its Most Tragic Character

However, the change in narrative style for the miniseries adaptation changes things up by omitting much of Nadine’s journey to Boulder, offering only brief flashbacks to reveal how she encountered Larry and joined his trek westward to Colorado. In Stephen King’s original 1978 novel The Stand, this journey is where much of the inner conflict that Nadine had with her own dark destiny was displayed. In between dreaming of Flagg, Nadine would beg Larry to save her by having sex with her to break the dark man’s hold over her as he had kept her chaste all her life to bear his demonic child. After arriving in Vegas, Nadine would become catatonic after conceiving the child with Flagg in the novel, killing herself rather than allow herself to be used further by him.

In contrast, apart from some wistful glances and only one last appeal to Larry before she carries out her plot in the adaptation, Nadine is depicted as being considerably more villainous. The adaptation makes this especially clear with Nadine tricking Harold to crash his motorcycle on the way to Vegas while the novel has Flagg manipulate the road to kill Harold after he’s of no further use to him. And while the novel’s Nadine is explicitly made a victim of Flagg upon arriving in Vegas, the miniseries has her enjoy her time with him until she realizes he never intended for her to survive the birth of their child, killing herself upon making this revelation.

The Stand is full of morally complicated characters, tempted to give in to their baser, more selfish natures by Randall Flagg in Las Vegas while Mother Abagail appeals to their more pure-hearted, compassionate nature from Boulder. One of the characters at the heart of this moral struggle is Nadine Cross, who ends up falling to the dark side long enough to wreak explosive mayhem before killing herself. While the broad strokes of this character arc remain intact in the miniseries adaptation, the inner conflict with Nadine is largely streamlined while her more villainous nature remains, robbing a major character of a lot of the nuance that made her significantly more tragic.

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Starring James Marsden, Odessa Young, Jovan Adepo, Owen Teague, Greg Kinnear, Amber Heard, Henry Zaga, Nat Wolff, Brad William Henke, Irene Bedard, Whoopi Goldberg and Alexander Skarsgård, The Stand is now streaming on CBS All Access, with subsequent episodes premiering each Thursday.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/the-stand-cheat-most-tragic-character/

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