The Stand -- No Wonder Flagg Lost
I was sitting watching The Stand again, and it hit me. No wonder Randall Flagg lost. Was there any chance he could win with the people he had on his team? I was like, didn’t any good bad people survive the plague? Aside from Lloyd, all of Flagg’s people seemed to fit two categories: morons and crazies.
He apparently hand picked Trash Can Man, himself. That guy was all kinds of crazy. I doubt he could sit at a table and hold a decent conversation for five minutes. All he could do was burn or blow stuff up or chant incessantly, “My life for you.” I mean, did Flagg seriously think this dude was a good member to have on his team? Is it any surprise that he eventually blew Flagg and all his followers to smithereens? It was only a matter of time.
The Rat Man was another crazy, although he managed to maintain his crazy better than Trash Can Man. Still, both of them would make perfect inmates up at Juniper Hill [the mental hospital from IT.] I wouldn’t have wanted to be in Lloyd’s shoes if The Rat Man ever found out Lloyd was nibbling on a rat when he was in jail and was hungry. I think it would have sent him over the edge learning Lloyd was the real RatMan.
And then there was Psycho Barbie the psychotic chick that Nick and Tom met. After failing to get in Nick’s pants she tried to convince Tom that Nick was trying to poison them. Then the crazy lunatic started shooting at them. Even Flagg didn’t think much of her. Called her the bat-faced girl.
Then there were the out and out morons that didn’t act like they had two brain cells to rub together. Like the guy sent to kill the Judge but not mark his body, but the fool wasn’t able to do that. So Flagg went all enraged Bird Man all over his butt, probably pecking his eyes out.
Even when Flagg had the chance of a potentially good member being added to his team he screwed it up. Crazy Harold was creepy, but he was smart. He would have been a good addition to Team Flagg. He could have gone to Vegas and gotten romantically involved with Psycho Barbie and may have curved some of her repulsiveness and added to Team Flagg’s brain trust. But what does Flagg do? He sends him off a cliff, instead. How dumb was that?
And while Nadine wasn’t crazy or a moron, she really didn’t want to bed down with him. If Larry had cooperated she would have gladly escaped her fate. Flagg should have picked someone like Psycho Barbie to implant his demon seed in who would have gotten off on it and thought it some great honor. After Flagg ripped Nadine’s insides apart having sex with her, she sure didn’t want to repeat the experience and couldn’t wait to jump off that balcony.
It wasn’t even necessary to send sacrificial lambs to Flagg to make a stand. What did they really do to put a stop to Flagg? Nothing. They didn’t convince any of Flagg’s followers to turn against him; they were already doing that on their own. Probably seeing what happened to Nadine after having sex with him and her jumping out the window did more to turn them off Flagg than Larry and Company did. The one that actually took down Flagg was Trash Can Man and his bomb. Without Trash Can Man Flagg would have still reigned and plotted to take out the Boulder crowd.
That’s why it still pisses me off that Larry died. He died for nothing. He and Glen and the other guy whose name I can’t recall didn’t do anything to take Flagg down. They spouted some God stuff to prove their faith in Mother Abigail’s cause, let themselves be captured and that’s basically all they did. If they hadn’t been there, the same thing could have happened. Their deaths were unnecessary. But by sending the sacrificial lambs there, Stu could go back and proclaim how the sacrificial lambs had taken down Flagg without really knowing what happened there.
Seriously, if you look at Mother Abigail’s disciples and compare them with Flagg’s the deck was stacked against Flagg. Mother Abigail got the lead characters and Flagg got the glorified extras. And even the glorified extras on Team Mother Abigail were of a better quality than Flagg’s. Flagg’s people were like scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Seriously, you’re telling me not one good bad person survived the plague? Someone that was both evil and smart and would have been a real threat to the good guys? Only the bad crazies and simpleton’s survived? Of course, maybe if they did survive, they were too smart to join up with Flagg.
Let’s be honest. Flagg wasn’t the brightest bulb in the package, himself. He’s the one who picked Trash Can Man to be on his team. He let Lloyd screw a spy and not even give him a head’s up so Lloyd could have been careful of what information she found out and could have been trying to get information out of her. He was such a braggart and show-off he really couldn’t see the forest for the trees.
On the surface, Flagg come off as this big evil menacing presence that needed to be taken down. But when you take a look at Flagg’s team and Flagg himself you see he was never really any big threat and he never had a chance of winning. Like I said, the deck was stacked against him from the start.
It might have made things more interesting if the playing field was more level. If the people on Team Flagg were more of a force to be reckoned with. And if Larry and company had done more to take Flagg down then just stand there in a demonstration of blind faith.
