Maybe that’s the single biggest problem with this version of The Stand: It pulled all its punches. There was really no internal struggle going on among any of the characters other than Harold and Nadine—Larry didn’t repeatedly second-guess his own habitual shittiness, for example, nor did Lloyd Henreid realize he’d sold his soul to the devil, nor did the Trashcan Man struggle to reconcile his pyromania with his desire to fit into Vegas society and do right by Flagg, the man who elevated him from captivity to the height of power. Vegas itself is pure fantasy and spectacle; it never makes the vital point that people willing to serve a sadistic authoritarian look and sound like normal people more often than not. The demands of Mother Abigail’s very Old Testament God are never properly struggled with either; the idea that the forces of Good can be cold and uncompromising in their Goodness never gets communicated. The freaking plague itself was an afterthought!

I reviewed the series finale of The Stand for Decider. What a disappointment.

Now consider the Trashcan Man. Arguably the series’ single biggest misfire from a character standpoint, he has no arc or growth or interesting personal journey to speak of. When he first appears in the series, he’s a gibbering crazy man with a penchant for firestarting. When he next appears, he’s retrieving a nuclear warhead, at the express orders of Randall Flagg. And for his final appearance, he delivers the bomb, as requested; the only hiccup is that he brings it to the wrong place, and considering his overall level of sanity it would have been a minor miracle if he hadn’t brought it to the wrong place.

If you’ll permit one last contrast with the novel, this is a case in which nearly every choice made by the show was the wrong one. In the book, Trash is crazy, yes, but he’s capable of coherent speech, coherent thought, and actual attachment to other human beings. He feels friendship with the people he gets to know under Flagg’s command in addition to puppylike devotion to the Dark Man. But his compulsive pyromania gets the better of him after someone unthinkingly ribs him about his fiery habits, and he winds up killing several men and destroying much of Flagg’s nascent air force before fleeing. Desperate to make amends, he does the only thing he feels is big enough to make up for his crime: He retrieves a nuke all on his own, without Flagg’s orders to do so, and delivers it to the Dark Man’s doorstep as an offering of penance. It’s a whole lot more complex, interesting, and ultimately human than just hooting and hollering his way from Point A to Point B to Point C the way he does in the show.

(In a way, Trashcan Man is as underdeveloped as Mother Abigail. In her case, we’re never really made to understand what’s so magnetic about her, or how close a relationship with God she really has. She’s just kind of…there, and it’s like the good-guy characters coalesce around a random old woman, not the Voice of the Almighty on Earth. Similarly, Trash is just a firebug, not the complicated individual with a near-supernatural expertise in weapons, incendiaries, and explosives that he is in the novel.)

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Stand, in which many of its overall weaknesses are made manifest, for Decider.

The smartest thing this adaptation of The Stand has done yet is to stand aside. The convoluted, shifting timeframes, the need to balance the apocalypse with its aftermath—that’s all gone now. In its place is a very, very straightforward story: The man in black lives in the desert, and four people (and one dog) are walking to meet him.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand, which I pretty much liked, for Decider.

I hate to do this, but I hope you’ll permit a book-to-TV comparison just this once. In Stephen King’s novel, this traumatized pyromaniac, née Donald Merwin Elbert, is a central figure, one of the core characters we follow across the country in the aftermath of the plague. If Lloyd Henried is the Stu Redman of Las Vegas, the main man in the new society Randall Flagg has founded just as Stu is the head honcho of Mother Abigail’s, Trashcan Man is roughly equivalent to Nick Andros, an outcast from society allegedly destined for a key role in the new world, or Tom Cullen, a man whose mental disabilities allow him more unfettered contact with forces beyond our understanding. (That element of Tom’s personality appears to have been dropped by the show.)

Yet for some reason, instead of following Trash from the outset, The Stand‘s 2020-2021 iteration just sort of plops him down at the start of the sixth episode out of nine episodes total. We’ve barely gotten a glimpse of him blowing up oil tanks somewhere and receiving a psychic communiqué from Flagg when bam, the next thing you know he’s already in Vegas, getting the lay of the land from Lloyd and receiving the blessing of the Dark Man himself. Why didn’t the show sprinkle Trashcan Man scenes throughout the season, starting no later than episode two or three? I legitimately have no idea. Was it simply to shield us from Ezra Miller’s performance in the role—a high-pitched, gibbering caricature of a neurodivergent person? Again, I got nothing, man. I enjoyed the creepy Willy-Wonka-tunnel evil psychedelic montage he envisions when Flagg psychically contacts him, and I appreciate that he alone out of everyone in Vegas seems to recognize that Flagg is effectively a demigod worthy of worship, but otherwise nearly every decision involving this character is baffling to me right now.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

It’s as if on the Vegas Strip did Randall Flagg a stately pleasure dome decree. People in fetish gear fuck freely in public. Everyone’s drunk, and some are doing blow right out the open. It’s a bacchanalia—and it’s being staged around a gladiatorial pit where slaves are made to fight each other with chainsaws.

In other words, it’s the nightmare scenario of people who used to want parental advisory stickers on Marilyn Manson records. Is it a plausible setup for a dystopian society run by a demon in denim? I’m not so sure. Where did he find all the hardbodied models, male and female, who are gyrating and pole-dancing and having sex out there? Does no one find the blend of hedonism and ultraviolence a little much? Could a new society really coalesce around that particular kernel?

The funny thing, and I use funny very loosely here, is that we’ve scene what an American dystopia would look like just last week. And while there is a certain cathartic venting of violent desires, it’s against perceived enemies to the desired order of things, not randos dumped into a thunderdome scenario while onlookers hump each other. It seems to me that the pitch Randall Flagg made to Lloyd Henried in prison—don’t you want the chance to get even with the kind of people who did this to you?—is a much more compelling and plausible way to structure New Vegas. Everyone there is attracted to the darkness Flagg embodies, so promise them the chance to extinguish the light (specifically in Boulder)! Turning the place into a sex club with a death-match arena in the middle just rings hollow. It’s a Hollywood idea of what fascism looks like.

I reviewed this week’s less-than-promising episode of The Stand for Decider.

I get the feeling that this iteration of The Stand is meant to focus on the whole life-in-the-aftermath aspect of the story, to the near-exclusion of the pandemic, and relegating the dark vs. light conflict—the titular stand!—to second place, at least for now. But it’s running out of road for this approach. Sooner or later, and probably sooner than later, it’s going to come down to Mother Abigail and her crew against Randall Flagg and his own. (A crew we simply have not seen at all yet, aside from that one episode when he rescued Lloyd Henried from prison.) I think the tone it’s struck for the material on which it’s concentrating its efforts is appropriately elegiac and surprisingly gentle. But if you’re gonna knock the house down again, it pays to have sturdily built it, and that I’m not sure the show has done at all.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

It is kind of a feat, when you think about it: an audience in 2020 not knowing what’s going to happen in The Stand. This unusual, mix-and-match adaptation of one of the best-known horror novels in the English language continues to unfold in non-linear fashion, making familiar characters and plot points seem strange and unexpected. Sometimes this is very effective, like how it allows Nick-the-outsider and Nick-the-high-priest-of-Mother-Abigail to be directly contrasted with one another in the episode where we get to know him in the first place. Sometimes it doesn’t work as well, like how it races through the creation of the “committee” established by the survivors to govern Boulder; here it’s all the work of Mother Abigail, who picks them to be her emissaries first and a governing body second (if at all).

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

Overall, this episode functions less as a successor to the premiere and more as a part two. Showrunners Josh Boone and Benjamin Cavell are still introducing characters, weaving their pasts and presents together in that same dreamy way—a million miles from Stephen King’s relentless forward pace at this same stage in the story in the book version. In effect, we’re just seeing pieces of the puzzle at this point, and waiting for the final picture to take shape. Until then, it’s hard to judge the show as a success or failure, though the game cast, impactful score, and occasional flash of post-apocalyptic imagery (like the George Washington Bridge covered from one end to the other by stalled cars filled with dead passengers) are keeping my interest. It’s kind of like we’re in the early stages of the superflu, before it’s had a chance to really take off. We’ll see what kind of world we’re inhabiting when we reach the other side.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

So that’s what The Stand 2020 is. I can tell you what it isn’t, though: It isn’t anything like Stephen King. I mean, the characters are all there, sure, and the story beats too, albeit shuffled; what I’m talking about is (paraphrasing Barton Fink here) That Stephen King Feeling. King, as he himself has written about extensively in his treatise on horror Danse Macabre, nearly always establishes a situation-normal status quo, then introduces some world-ending catastrophe or soul-eating demon-thing that overturns the whole Apollonian apple cart. You have to see little George Denbrough make his toy boat, kiss his big brother goodbye, and head out into the rain in his yellow slicker before you can meet Pennywise the Dancing Clown, you know? It’s the most King-feeling thing in all his work: You set up the house of cards, and then you knock it down.

In the book version of The Stand, the house of cards was the entirety of human society—specifically the American subsection thereof—and the knocking down was performed by Captain Trips. And boy, was it ever! For my money there’s no more thrilling section in all the King books I’ve read than the opening quarter or so of The Stand, where we meet all our main characters as civilization stumbles, crumbles, and completely collapses around them. Hell, they don’t even need to be main characters at all: There’s a chapter that simply follows the virus across the country from one random person to the next, establishing the virus as history’s most lethal chain letter, that’s just gleefully dark and frightening. It’s as good as King gets.

And The Stand’s 2020 TV adaptation will not be going there at all, it seems. It is, to put it mildly, a bold choice. And you know what? I like bold choices where adapting Stephen King is concerned! The most slavish recreations of his work tend to be the most boring; even in a case like the recent Hulu series Castle Rock, which was not a straight adaptation at all but an attempt to do for King’s oeuvre what Noah Hawley’s Fargo did with the Coen Brothers’ filmography, the effort to nail all those little King-isms came at the cost of doing anything actually memorable, let alone frightening. (I’m old school in that I think horror TV shows are supposed to be scary. Go figure!) Compare and contrast with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: It’s very much Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, not Stephen King’s, and it just so happens to be one of the greatest movies ever made; King, of course, despises it.

So no, a lack of fidelity isn’t going to get on my nerves per se. It never does! So I’m not interested in comparing chapter and verse, describing what the series got “right” and “wrong” about the details or even the broad strokes. In the end, it’s all in the execution. And in this early going at least, the execution is intriguing enough to keep me watching. The fading between times and places, the freeform mixture of “now” and “then,” gives the show the feel of a dream, or a nightmare (several of which punctuate the action, after all). The lush, traditional score (no John Carpenter knockoffs here) by Nathaniel Walcott and Mike Mogis contributes beautifully to that dreamy feeling. Will it last? Or, in the absence of the harrowing rise of the superflu plague, will the flashback/flashforward device wear out its welcome before the real action kicks in? These are open questions, but compared to “Why the hell am I watching this?”, they’re questions I don’t mind asking at all.

I’m covering The Stand for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere. It’s bold, I’ll give it that!

Take a pandemic. Add the paranormal. Make it a uniquely American story of survival horror. The result: “The Stand,” Stephen King’s epic post-apocalyptic novel from 1978, a new mini-series adaptation of which debuted Thursday on CBS All Access.‘The Stand’ Review: Stephen King’s Pandemic Story Hits TV AgainDec. 16, 2020

Conceived in the pre-Covid era, the show has taken on new resonance since, telling the story of a weaponized virus that wipes out 99 percent of the population. But that’s only the beginning. The real battle happens afterward as supernatural forces of darkness and light — embodied by the demonic dictator Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgard) and the holy woman Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg) — duel for the souls of the plague’s survivors.

Since the original novel’s original release, King’s saga has entered the pop-culture consciousness in many different incarnations, including an expanded edition of the book and an earlier mini-series adaptation. In anticipation of the show’s arrival, we’re tracing the story from its point of origin to its latest mutation.

I wrote about the many inspirations and iterations of Stephen King’s The Stand for the New York Times.

When I think about Stephen King’s The Stand, which I have done with some frequency since I first read it in 1994, there’s one passage that always leaps out at me. It’s a description of the novel’s villain, Randall Flagg, a bad guy with such a magnetic presence that King would reuse him across nearly a dozen other books and stories in various guises. In The Stand he’s effectively the Anti-Christ, an ancient, grinning, denim-clad psychopath with magical powers. With little or no knowledge of who and what he really was, Flagg wove in and out of 20th Century America’s violent fringe movements — he was a member of the group that kidnapped and brainwashed Patti Hearst, for example — before emerging to lead a totalitarian nation-state based in Las Vegas (!) after a weaponized flu virus wipes out over 99 percent of the world’s population.

It’s during this phase of his life, which we experience in the pages of The Stand, that Flagg takes unto him his bride, a schoolteacher named Nadine Cross, who for reasons unclear (to her, him, and the reader) had been destined all her life to wind up in his clutches. During the grotesque and violent consummation of their relationship, his human shape melts away, revealing the demon beneath. This shatters Nadine’s sanity, but it also provides her with piercingly clear vision of this supposedly all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful entity’s chief limitation: He’s a moron.

…and now it was the shaggy face of a demon lolling just above her face, a demon with glaring yellow lamps for eyes, windows into a hell never even considered, and still there was that awful good humor in them, eyes that had watched down the crooked alleys of a thousand tenebrous night towns; those eyes were glaring and glinting and finally stupid.

Forgive me for the oft-repeated comparison I am about to make — I am but a writer of thinkpieces, and such is our lot — but does that sound like anyone you know?

I wrote about Stephen King’s The Stand and Our Present Moment for the Outline.

Caught completely off guard by an opponent he didn’t see coming (not yet anyway, rimshot), Dalton straight-up gives up on his date with the Doc. I’m serious, man, he just takes his balls and goes home. He drops his smile, fidgets, looks out the window, takes a final drag of his cigarette, and acts like he’s just had the completely unrelated idea that it’s time to take her home. “I keep talking, you’re gonna go off thinking I’m a nice guy.” He’s putting his pack of Marlboros into his jacket pocket, he’s smiling and raising his eyebrows and doing little head nods, haha, he’s back in business baby!

Done with looking away from this man, Elizabeth reclaims his gaze, seizes control of it. Her voice a bedroom-fireplace crackle, her smile spreading like an inkblot, she looks him dead in the eyes and says “I know you’re not a nice guy.”

Pain don’t hurt, or so we’ve been told. From this we can conclude, can we not, that Dalton is a sub, or at the very least (and given what we see of his later behavior this proves out) a switch. It follows that the moment Dr. Elizabeth Clay smiles at him while calling him a piece of shit is the moment Dalton falls in love with Dr. Elizabeth Clay.

It will all go very smoothly from there, I’m quite sure.

Take it away, Larry Underwood and friend.

“Sure,” she said, cringing back and starting to cry. “Why not? Big star. Fuck
and run. I thought you were a nice guy. You ain’t no nice guy.” Several tears
ran down her cheeks, dropped from her jaw, and plopped onto her upper chest.
Fascinated, he watched one of them roll down the slope of her right breast and
perch on the nipple. It had a magnifying effect. He could see pores, and one
black hair sprouting from the inner edge of the aureole. Jesus Christ, I’m going
crazy, he thought wonderingly.

“I have to go,” he said. His white cloth jacket was on the foot of the bed. He
picked it up and slung it over his shoulder.

“You ain’t no nice guy!” she cried at him as he went into the living room. “I
only went with you because I thought you were a nice guy!”

The sight of the living room made him feel like groaning. On the couch where
he dimly remembered being gobbled were at least two dozen copies of “Baby, Can
You Dig Your Man?” Three more were on the turntable of the dusty portable
stereo. On the far wall was a huge poster of Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw. Being
gobbled means never having to say you’re sorry, ha-ha. Jesus, I am going crazy.

She stood in the bedroom doorway, still crying, pathetic in her half-slip. He
could see a nick on one of her shins where she had cut herself shaving.

“Listen, give me a call,” she said. “I ain’t mad.”

He should have said, “Sure,” and that would have been the end of it. Instead
he heard his mouth utter a crazy laugh and then, “Your kippers are burning.”

She screamed at him and started across the room, only to trip over a throw-
pillow on the floor and go sprawling. One of her arms knocked over a half-empty
bottle of milk and rocked the empty bottle of Scotch standing next to it. Holy
God, Larry thought, were we mixing those?

He got out quickly and pounded down the stairs. As he went down the last six
steps to the front door, he heard her in the upstairs hall, yelling down: “You
ain’t no nice guy! You ain’t no—”

He slammed the door behind him and misty, humid warmth washed over him,
carrying the aroma of spring trees and automobile exhaust. It was perfume after
the smell of frying grease and stale cigarette smoke. He still had the crazy
cigarette, now burned down to the filter, and he threw it into the gutter and
took a deep breath of the fresh air. Wonderful to be out of that craziness.
Return with us now to those wonderful days of normalcy as we

Above and behind him a window went up with a rattling bang and he knew what
was coming next.

“I hope you rot!” she screamed down at him. The Compleat Bronx Fishwife. “I
hope you fall in front of some fuckin subway train! You ain’t no singer! You’re
shitty in bed! You louse! Pound this up your ass! Take this to ya mother, you
louse! “

The milk bottle came zipping down from her second-floor bedroom window. Larry
ducked. It went off in the gutter like a bomb, spraying the street with glass
fragments. The Scotch bottle came next, twirling end over end, to crash nearly
at his feet. Whatever else she was, her aim was terrifying. He broke into a run,
holding one arm over his head. This madness was never going to end.

From behind him came a final long braying cry, triumphant with juicy Bronx
intonation: “KISS MY ASS, YOU CHEAP BAAASTARD!” Then he was around the corner
and on the expressway overpass, leaning over, laughing with a shaky intensity
that was nearly hysteria, watching the cars pass below.

“Couldn’t you have handled that better?” he said, totally unaware he was
speaking out loud. “Oh man, you coulda done better than that. That was a bad
scene. Crap on that, man.” He realized he was speaking aloud, and another burst
of laughter escaped him. He suddenly felt a dizzy, spinning nausea in his
stomach and squeezed his eyes tightly closed. A memory circuit in the Department
of Masochism clicked open and he heard Wayne Stukey saying, There’s something in
you that’s like biting on tinfoil.

He had treated the girl like an old whore on the morning after the frathouse
gangbang.

You ain’t no nice guy.

I am. I am.

But when the people at the big party had protested his decision to cut them
off, he had threatened to call the police, and he had meant it. Hadn’t he? Yes.
Yes, he had. Most of them were strangers, true, he could care if they crapped on
a landmine, but four or five of the protestors had gone back to the old days.

And Wayne Stukey, that bastard, standing in the doorway with his arms folded
like a hanging judge on the big day.

Sal Doria going out, saying: If this is what it does to guys like you, Larry, I wish you were still playing sessions.

He opened his eyes and turned away from the overpass, looking for a cab. Oh
sure. The outraged friend bit. If Sal was such a big friend, what was he doing
there sucking off him in the first place? I was stupid and nobody likes to see a
stupid guy wise up. That’s the real story.

You ain’t no nice guy.

“I am a nice guy,” he said sulkily. “And whose business is it, anyway?”

A cab was coming and Larry flagged it. It seemed to hesitate a moment before
pulling up to the curb, and Larry remembered the blood on his forehead. He
opened the back door and climbed in before the guy could change his mind.

“Manhattan. The Chemical Bank Building on Park,” he said.

The cab pulled out into traffic. “You got a cut on your forehead, guy,” the
cabbie said.

“A girl threw a spatula at me,” Larry said absently.

The cabbie offered him a strange false smile of commiseration and drove on,
leaving Larry to settle back and try to imagine how he was going to explain his
night out to his mother.

Let the negging commence. With his typical poetic elision and equally typical lack of awareness as to how he might come across to a normal person, Dalton has given the Doc his best guess as to why he’s been so successful as a bouncer and cooler: “The ones who go looking for trouble are not much of a problem as someone who’s ready for them. I suspect it’s always been that way.” But here comes trouble he’s not ready for at all: the kind of withering, barely-worth-the-effort condescension and contempt he’s shown to lesser men throughout the film, aimed right back at him.

As soon as he’s done epigrammatically gassing himself up and righting a listing derelict sitting nearby—acting on a signal from Elizabeth, who nods in the man’s direction to tip him off—he turns back and exchanges a smile with his date. How can she resist the charms of a knight errant?

“Somebody has to do it,” she says, smiling broadly, broadly enough that he doesn’t notice that she’s saying his job is quite stupid.

“Somebody’s gotta pay somebody to do it,” he replies in another typical rhetorical ploy, the poet/workin’ man two-step. Here’s my eloquent summary of my raison d’être, here’s me rollin’ up my sleeves, scratchin’ my balls, and takin’ out the trash.

Taking her eyes off of him, looking down at the table or into her own lap, smiling almost ruefully, she says “Might as well be you.” She says it like Larry Underwood’s mother sighing about the trouble her son the famous musician has gotten himself into out there in The Stand. All the things you could have done with your life, James Dalton, and this is what you choose. Not a question, a statement. This is what you are. Okay. If that’s the way it has to be.

Her smile becomes a ghost and then vanishes altogether. Dalton’s follows as if it has no choice in the matter at all. Not in this matter.

Dalton has no comeback here. Larry would hem and haw and mewl a bit before finally giving in; Dalton, a trained fighter, knows when he’s been beaten. The disapproval, the disappointment, is worse than the trouble itself. It is the trouble. Trouble he was not ready for at all.

Brad Wesley’s pants are a mess. Look at those wrinkled-ass trousers. Like an elephant’s trunk, twice, in khaki. This is his apotheosis right here, his truest moment of pure power, the point at which instead of blowing up buildings in the middle of the night with no one looking he feels able to order his man to run over a Ford dealership in a monster truck in broad daylight with a crowd of like two hundred witnesses watching. Dalton’s there, the owner of the Ford dealership is there, Wade Garrett is there, his own ex-wife Elizabeth is there, and guess what, the man don’t give a fuck, this is his town, don’t you forget it, but apparently the dry cleaners is not included. Those pants are the visual equivalent of him crowing about having the raw kingmaking power to open a JC Penney. What the hell was Ben Gazzara doing to wrinkle his pants up like that? Did no one from wardrobe intervene? Did they think it made for a nice feet-of-clay visual shorthand and just let it slide? Jimmy, couldn’t Jimmy have said something? Ketchum, a man who looks like he was born starched, what about him? Will no one tell Brad Wesley his pants are embarrassingly wrinkled? Is this what it feels like to be truly alone, even with the world at your feet? Standing in front of your great triumph over your enemies and looking like a goddamned fool and you have no friends to say so? What? Is up? With the pants?

The Stand is Stephen King’s best book, I decided about three decades into my career of reading and re-reading Stephen King books. One of the many reasons I think this involves a fellow name of Starkey. Starkey’s a military guy, brass, way up on the totem pole but it’s a totem pole they keep hidden in the dark at all times. He was in charge of the bioweapons project that had a little hiccup and started to destroy the human race, and so he’s in charge trying to halt that destruction. He’s also in charge of trying to cover it up, first under the pretext that it will buy them a few extra days to find a vaccine or a cure before panic sets in, and then mostly out of sheer force of American military habit.

The thing about Starkey is that as time goes by and it becomes increasingly clear he won’t be earning any medals for this one, to say the least, he grows fixated on the security monitors that show him the inside of the facility where Captain Trips emerged and started drowning everyone in their own snot while their brains boiled. At first this happened much faster than it does later, for reasons that I don’t think the book ever quite makes clear, and even if it did the idea of a flu virus that kills in under a minute the same way a regular flu virus would kill over the course of several days is science-fictional even for The Stand.

Be that as it may. The important thing for Starkey, less important than other things really but increasingly important to him as the bodies pile up outside that’s for sure, is that one of the people in that facility died in the cafeteria, just dropped dead at his seat, and when he did his face fell right into his bowl of soup. The soup starts congealing and getting really disgusting, which is the case with everything else that used to be warm and made of organic material down there, but the soup and the face in the soup are what start to bother Starkey, and bother him bad.

It’s the indignity of it, you see. This fellow in the lab, for all anyone knows his face will remain in that bowl of awful soup for…well, for as long as it takes for the site to be deemed sterile enough to enter at first, and then, when it becomes clear no one will be left alive to enter it, for all eternity. Starkey just stares and stares at this guy with his face in the soup. Did I mention Starkey also gave the order to have secret agents in Russia and China open vials of the flu without ever telling them what they were doing, just to make sure that when America dies she takes the rest of the world with her? Yeah, but anyway the soup. It’s just not right, a man dying like that, like a slob, like a joke. Something must be done.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about Brad Wesley’s pants. They’re wrinkled, is the problem. See? See? See?