A Review of “THE STAND” Episode 2: "Pocket Savior"
The second episode of “The Stand” follows Larry Underwood and Lloyd Henreid, but can we talk about Mother Abigail for a second? That’s who Whoopi Goldberg is playing when CBS can afford her for the day, I guess. She’s arguably “The Stand’s” most important character, who the show appears to be saving for future episodes. This isn’t a slam against it, since the writers seems to know what they’re doing. Still, there’s barely any mention of her when Larry’s group shows up. Maybe they want her to be enigmatic until she dumps some major exposition, but the apocalypse has come and gone by time the story heads west.
Nat Wolff as Lloyd
Nat Wolff plays Lloyd with a smarmy sheen. Showrunner Josh Boone intended for him to play Harold back when the show tried to get off the ground years before, but you can easily imagine him in either role. We get a few minutes of Owen Teague’s creepy Harold in Boulder, and hey, Nick Andros is there too! We’ll get to him later, but not in this episode. Just know that he’s deaf and he has an eyepatch. There’s also Nadine (Amber Heard) who…looks sideways at the box of an off-brand Ouija board.
Stephen King famously wrote Larry Underwood with Bruce Springsteen in mind as his character was a musician on the rise just as the flu hit. Here he’s played by Jovan Adepo of “Overlord” and HBO’s “Watchmen,” as he navigates a post-plague Manhattan. He meets up with Rita, another survivor and former socialite who’s conspicuously absent from present-day Boulder. Heather Graham doesn’t get a lot of screen time as Rita (we haven’t even met half the cast), but she’s affecting in the few scenes she has with Adepo, including her final moments in the episode, which are understated and touching. It’s unfortunate that the famous Lincoln Tunnel sequence is traded in for a sewer, but the sequence still covers the same ground, while giving us another explicit look at the stellar makeup design.
The structure in “Pocket Savior” is even more perplexing than last week. We’re a quarter of the way through the main story (King wrote episode 9, an additional epilogue), but the focus seems to be about “how” everyone came to Boulder, instead of the “why.” Maybe CBS knows you’ve seen “The Walking Dead” and doesn’t want to draw comparisons, and Boulder IS important, but it feels as if we skipped over a lot of character-building. There’s every reason to believe what’s missing will be back-loaded, but for now it’s a head-scratcher. I can’t help but wonder if I’d feel the same way if all episodes were released at once. We also finally get a scene with Alexander Skarsgard’s Randall Flagg. Skarsgard plays him as subdued, but enticing, which is a great way to describe the show so far.
About The Author
