Deron Generally
Deron GenerallyThe Stand
CBS All Access
Season 1 Episode 6
The Vigil
The Trashcan Man arrives with Ezra Miller playing the role. Miller seems to having fun in a role that is delightfully deranged as his path of destruction brings him to the attention of Flagg who shows him a vision of his most lurid and disturbing dreams. It’s a good scene despite the questionable voice Miller uses for the character and six episodes in we finally get to see something disturbing in this series.
With Mother Abigail missing, Harold and Nadine decide that instead of killing the committee, they will go bigger at the vigil the town plans to hold. Owen Teague and Amber Heard’s continued lack of chemistry together is still an issue with trying to figure out how these two characters manage to be in the same room together let alone plan a mass murder.
Trashcan Man arrives in Vegas with no issues or struggles. Once again, the series opts for character moments rather than character development so a character is in one place, pops up in another and the viewer is left to fill in the blanks. The only person in Boulder that seems to have any agency or emotion is Irene Bedard’s Ray Brentner. She gives life to the scenes she’s in and is the only one who seems to generally care about Abigail being missing or anything at all for that matter.
We get our first confrontation between Mother Abigail and Flagg and it is as anticlimactic as the rest of the series has been so far. To make matters worse, the next scene is so overplayed that it is obvious that the writer was desperate to find some way to make Flagg powerful. It doesn’t work and the entire sequence is a waste of Clifton Collins Jr acting abilities and presence.
Fran breaks into Harold’s house and ends up in a confrontation with Harold that is so melodramatic and ridiculous that the fact that it is written specifically for this miniseries is almost a blessing. The scene is so bad I couldn’t roll my eyes any further back into my head. What follows is meant to ramp up the tension of Harold and Nadine’s attack, but it’s so unfocused that it is almost comical.
The new episode of The Stand has a desperate energy to it that concerns me. With only two episodes left and no character development or conflict development to be had, this episode seems to be telling the viewer exactly where the miniseries is going next. A series of quick moments to hit plot points with no connecting threads between them is what this episode boils down to and where the rest of the miniseries seems to be going.
The Stand S01XE06
