Let the post-apocalyptic meet’n’greet continue! The Stand Episode 3 (“Blank Page”) keeps up the trend of focusing on a small number of main characters per episode. After introducing us to Harold, Stu, and Frannie in the premiere and Larry, Lloyd, and the late Rita in the follow-up, this installment spotlights a trio of the most interesting characters in the Stand legendarium.
There’s Glen Bateman (Greg Kinnear), the free-thinking sociologist professor; Nick Andros (Henry Zaga), the deaf-mute drifter (and, in this iteration, son of an undocumented immigrant) chosen by Mother Abigail (or God) to be her voice; and Nadine Cross, schoolteacher and caretaker of the feral child Joe, whom we learn has had a long-distance relationship with the Dark Man since puberty.
Of the three, Nick seems like the most anomalous character. While everyone else is just trying to get their shit together in the aftermath of the apocalypse, Nick’s chosen-one status is cemented right away, when in subsequent dream sequences he rejects Randall Flagg’s promises of power and accepts Mother Abigail’s invitation despite not believing in God. “That’s alright,” the old woman responds. “God believes in you.” From what little we see of Nick’s pre-plague life—he gets jumped in a bar by a local yokel, then wakes up in a deserted hospital with only the dying guy who beat him for company—he seems like a more desperate case than anyone else we’ve met.
Perhaps it’s because he senses a fellow outsider from abled society that the developmentally disabled Tom Cullen (Brad William Henke) gravitates toward him. Tom, whom Nick meets in the hospital, has a rehearsed speech about his disability, his illiteracy, and his inability to read social cues that he rote-recites several times when they meet (a thoughtful and skillful update to the book’s approach to Tom). It takes some doing, but eventually Nick makes Tom understand that he can’t hear what he’s saying, or respond vocally. To put it in Tom’s terms, M-O-O-N, that spells deaf-mute. Since Mother Abigail already told Nick that her residence in Hemingford Home is “spelled M-O-O-N, should anyone ask,” we know that this pair is destined to be together.
Though they seem less foreordained, it also seems that Stu and Glen are somehow perfect together. Stu meets the man a day or two after bumping into Frannie and Harold, with whom he parts ways when Harold rejects the idea of linking up. (Apparently he changed his mind at some point between then and arriving at Boulder.) An eccentric and garrulous widower and amateur painter—his picture-perfect portraits of Mother Abigail and Frannie, two women he’s never actually met, are his and Stu’s first hints that some larger force really may be at work—Glen celebrates Stu’s arrival with jazz music on the stereo (he has a generator), caviar on potato chips for dinner, and some weed. Seems like a decent dude, no? This goes double when he offers his diagnosis for what caused the whole superflu mess, in response to Stu wondering if he feels any obligation to get things up and running again: “‘Up and running’ is what got us here,” quoth the good professor. “I think it’s high time we tried ‘down and standing still.'”
And then there’s Nadine, who’s basically a case study in how a person who can say and do all the right things on the outside can have a mind like a rotted floorboard within. (Harold Lauder’s continuing buddy-comedy antics with his fellow corpse disposal worker Teddy (Eoin Bailey) are another case in point.) We learn through an opening flashback to her time in an all-girls boarding school or orphange (it’s not clear) that she has been hearing from the Dark Man since she was an adolescent, when he possessed a planchette she and some other kids were playing with—it’s like a ouija board with a pencil that writes instead of a lens that highlights one letter at a time, if you didn’t know—and scrawls “NADINE WILL BE MY QUEEN” in big block letters on the dorm room floor.
Yet when Larry meets her on the road, she’s caring for Joe, a deeply traumatized kid whose reaction to seeing a grown man in the form of Larry is to charge him with a butcher knife. She’s still taking care of the kid by the time they get to Boulder, though she and Larry appear to have become somewhat estranged. And by any indication, she really does care about Joe—look at how happy she is when Joe reveals he’s a guitar whiz after borrowing Larry’s axe. It’s just that she also cares about the Dark Man, who comes to her when she finds and uses another planchette and enters a kind of eroticized trance to communicate with him. Amber Heard does fine work here, nonverbally communicating Nadine’s intense attraction to a man (or whatever he is) she clearly knows is no good—and who’s stringing her along in the bargain, telling her to stay in Boulder and connect with Harold rather than making her way to Las Vegas to join him immediately.
Which brings us to the issue of Las Vegas itself. Not directly—we have no clue what the place looks like under Flagg’s rule—but via a refugee played by T.J. Kayama. This poor sucker rolls into Boulder barely still running under his own steam, in an eerie echo of how runaway soldier Charles Campion crashed his car into that gas station where Stu was hanging out when everything started. Stu and Larry, who seem to have become friends, discover via the wounds in the man’s arms that he had been literally crucified. Flagg appears to have spared him at the last moment to send the residents of Boulder a message, which he delivers via demonic possession in Flagg’s own voice: He’s coming to kill them all. Before the poor guy gets all Exorcist and subsequently dies of his wounds while crows crash into his hospital window, he reveals to the assembled worthies of Boulder that Flagg is using slave labor and preventing anyone on his side of the country from escaping. Will this all be out in the open in front of Las Vegas’s residents, or is he presenting them with a kinder, gentler face? We don’t yet know.
This is the part of the review where I note that for a horror show, this one hasn’t been all that scary just yet. The revelation of the crucifixion wounds is the closest it’s gotten, maybe. But the menace of Flagg has been slowly growing from one episode to the next, and it’s possible it all crescendos to some bone-chilling moment down the road. We’ll just have to keep walking until then.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
Watch The Stand Episode 3 ("Blank Page") on CBS All Access
"blank" - Google News
January 01, 2021 at 05:00AM
https://ift.tt/3o46NZx
'The Stand' Episode 3 Recap: These Are the People in Your Neighborhood - Decider
"blank" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3aXU3fw
https://ift.tt/2Wij67R
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "'The Stand' Episode 3 Recap: These Are the People in Your Neighborhood - Decider"
Post a Comment