Spoilers follow

Frannie and Stu head east to find the ocean, but Flagg was not destroyed in New Vegas and has a final trick up his sleeve.

Directed by show runner Josh Boone and written by the source novel’s author, Stephen King, this new ending earns plaudits for adding something different, while also highlighting one of the show’s major shortcomings.

The pacing of The Stand has frankly been all over the place. The best part of an episode can be spent on a fairly minor incident while really significant characters get little screen time, leaving us indifferent when they meet a grisly fate. If this series was 26 episodes long (even 13!) you could legitimately spend an hour on a tagged-on coda. But when there’s only nine episodes, you’re devoting over 10% of the run time to this epilogue.

King’s interest in writing this is no doubt to scratch the itch that he had previously expressed – namely that Frannie never gets to make a stand in the book. The other committee members make the trip to New Vegas to confront Flagg, but Frannie is left behind because she’s pregnant. In this addendum we follow Stu and Frannie on their trip to the latter’s home town in Maine, stopping off at Mother Abigail’s old home.

Stu goes into town and Frannie falls down a well – that much is revealed in the episode title. In a state of delirium she meets Flagg, who reveals the extent of her wounds. Spurning him, she then meets Mother A, who tells her of the part she needs to play in repopulating the planet. Stu returns and descends the well (the Chekhov’s gun rescue winch established earlier in the episode) and recovers a badly-injured Frannie.

The resolution sets up a whole other line of questions – hey, if you can do this now, why didn’t you do it earlier? – but I don’t resent spending some time with these leads rather than the Vegas caricatures. Oh, and it’s nice to see the Epilogue from the text of the Complete and Uncut Edition being included, with Flagg’s naked arrival in a primitive society, showing them who’s boss.

Verdict: In isolation, a solid hour, very much a lost chapter from an already lengthy book. But as a whole, this season has not met the potential it promised, and if someone asked me whether to watch its, I’d likely steer them towards the 1994 mini-series. 8/10

Nick Joy