Retro Review (of sorts) The Stand 2021

This contains massive spoilers...

People who've known me a while will know that I went through a healthy/unhealthy obsession with Stephen King between the late 1970s and the early 2000s. That obsession was accentuated regarding a couple of books; Insomnia - which I've read about six times - and The Stand - which, in one form or another, I've seen/read coming up to a dozen. I read the original paperback, twice. When I replaced it with a new hardback I read it again. Then I read it again when King released an unabridged version in the 1990s and read it again when I realised that one of my favourite books of all time was being made into a TV series.

That 1994 adaptation was... lacking in a lot of things, but it did have a surprisingly adequate cast - Gary Sinise as Stu Redman was really good, as was Ray Walston as Glenn Bateman; Miguel Ferrer added a serious side to Flagg's #2 Lloyd Henreid and an excellent Laura San Giacomo was a bit of a revelation as Nadine Cross. Not so good were Jamey Sheridan as Randal Flagg - he bought a certain shit-eating C&W hillbilly vibe that was really lacking in sinister or creepy; Molly Ringwald didn't work as Fran Goldsmith,  Rob Lowe was wasted as Nick Andros and Matt (Max Headroom) Frewer was as menacing as the Trashcan Man as Sheridan was as Flagg. The thing about the 90s adaptation was it suffered from a lack of money to make the 'supernatural' scenes feel real. The cornfields and Mother Abigail was handled well, but as someone who pretty much knew whole chunks of dialogue from the book, I struggled to feel any huge affinity with the four-parter. I also don't think I've seen anything directed by Mick Garris that I've thought was worthy of him getting more work outside of flipping burgers. However, it was told in a linear fashion and you got to know the characters almost as well as you did in the book. You understood inside the first two 90-minute episodes, who was good, who was evil and why and what motivated them.

Since 1994, I've probably read The Stand three times more and also read some Marvel adaptation as well - unless I imagined that - so when I heard someone was doing a new 2021 TV adaptation my initial reaction was 'I hope they get the bits right the 94 version didn't do justice to' - literally, that was my biggest worry. I'm not going to say I was ecstatic about the new thing; there's always an element of trepidation whenever something wonderful in book form is adapted into another medium. The thing is without reading the book again and without watching a single episode of the new version, I started to have one of those hindsight moments of realisation - which might be obvious to some, but flew way over my head until recently...

The Stand is an apocalyptic horror novel that promotes misogyny, belittles the position of women in such a post-apocalyptic world and emphasises the importance of men in the future any post-apocalyptic world has. It's all about the weaknesses of women against the strength of men and even when the women are portrayed as strong or wilful it's to emphasise the importance of the men folk and their ultimate wisdom... It might as well be called The Misogyny. 

In the novel there are three major female characters: Fran Goldsmith - young, pregnant, impressionable and largely redundant. Nadine Cross - weird, troubled, torn between good and evil, a bit 'dirty' without being too 'sexy' but obviously an evil bitch with no redeeming features, until it's too late and Mother Abigail - 108 years old and essentially just a cypher for God - there to tell the 'good' side that sacrifices have to be made, but all the women have to stay in Boulder and make sure the bairns and dinners are looked after. The Stand is all about men who stay strong, because if they don't they're either at or a risk and women who are always tempted by the apple offer nothing but peril to those around them; really, I'm not making this shit up. 

The peripheral female characters are all either slightly hysterical (Larry's early post-apocalyptic partner) or conniving lesbian feminists (Dana Jurgens who gets the better of Flagg by preventing him from killing her with his own hands). In retrospect, the book (and the original TV adaptation) was all about women making soup and eventually changing nappies, while the men got on with the real work, except in Las Vegas where it was all about the women discovering they have double-jointed jaws and exposing as much flesh as they can to ensure they can show as much the next day without bits missing. In many ways, women come out of The Stand a little less than the only dog in it.

The more I think about the underlying misogyny and the depiction of women as either helpless or conniving, the more I question what I actually liked about the Stand, because it is the characters that drive it forward. Flagg - the antagonist - is in many ways just a totem for the devil and his counterpart, a weak and feeble old woman - Abigail Freemantle - aren't really what the book is about, they just supply a reason for all the characters to be in the same or different places at the same time. 

Don't get me wrong; men don't exactly come out of this in a good light, but they do appear to be far more important and provide the underlying narrative. If you follow the journeys of the key protagonists, all of them are blighted by arseholes with penises. Stu has to contend with military men and then childish men (Harold Lauder); Franny spends her first half of the book stuck with Harold and the second half being Stu's cuddle monkey/beached whale. Larry is surrounded by domineering and weak women until he meets a stronger woman who is just as batshit crazy as the ones who he seems to have follow him around. Then you have peripheral, but important characters, such as Glenn and Ray, who are essentially drawn as so anodyne they don't really have anything to say outside of generalised cliché or patriarchal wisdom. 

Oh and you have Nick Andros, who has only ever been the main character in the book and always been seen as much less in TV adaptations. Maybe that's because he's a deaf, dumb and almost blind boy (he lost an eye to an arsehole man) who might as well have been born with a vagina given the way his disabilities made him seem like he had one during his travels. Nick is by far and wide the best character in the book; that might be because he's essentially got to face most of the hurdles that all the non-male characters face. In many ways he's both the strongest and weakest character in the book. He also seems to clock what's going on considerably earlier than all the others, so in many ways his death comes as a complete shock, especially the first time you read the book, because literally up until the point where he's anatomically deconstructed, he's the main man and while you know what Harold and Nadine have planned, you kind of think it's going to be extras who will die and possibly one of the core characters who ultimately are there to make up the numbers. Oddly enough, in a book that is really only vaguely 'supernatural', Nick Andros really was the antithesis of anything 'supernatural' and dealt with everything in such a pragmatic way, so, in hindsight, he had to die.

The thing that makes The Stand such a compelling read, despite all of the dated and unsettling depictions of women, is that while it is extremely long, it never really gets bogged down; there are enough characters to ensure there's enough excitement until we get to the arse end of the story. 

That brings us nicely to the new 2021 adaptation. When I first heard about this I was a bit excited as it was going to be a multi-part series - nine one hour episodes is three hours longer than the 1994 version, so I expected a lot of back-fill; a lot of character development and a lot of time spent on characters who were maybe neglected in 1994. It seems I could not have been further from the truth...

The Stand works best as a linear story; what flashbacks there were in the book were all short and pointed to events happening in the present, so imagine my surprise when the series opens with Harold and Teddy loading dump trucks up with dead bodies (cordwood) in Boulder, Colorado before flipping back and forth between pre-Captain Trips; during the plague and the immediate aftermath of it. It almost felt as though the director was accepting that everyone watching it will understand who was good and who was bad, except for most of the opening four episodes we see almost nothing of Flagg nor his team of shitbags charged with turning Las Vegas into Sodom. In fact, the most unsettling thing about the opening two or three episodes was how it was being released during a pandemic and felt a bit prophetic.

The book is essentially in four parts - the beginning, the middle, the end, and the epilogue, which weighs in at nearly a 6th of the entire book. The start of the plague (or book) is not drawn out too much; we got snap shots of the world crumbling but it wasn't really until it fell that we realise it had fallen. The middle is where we're introduced to other characters, get to properly know our main protagonists (Stu, Larry and Fran; Harold and Nick) and finally meet our good and evil totems. The end is really quite short; events take a weird twist after Harold attempts to take out the town with explosives and what in time is actually as much as five months is condensed in a very short space of time and then there's the epilogue which overlaps the end somewhat and then stretches into the distance. The epilogue of The Stand is arguably the most important thing about the book.

The 2021 adaptation throws out the linear narrative of the book (and the first TV series) and opts for jumping back and forth through times and this is where it fails almost from the word go. The entire point of the linear story King tells is to show how certain characters align themselves to specific sides, or have internal struggles with themselves that adds to the reader's understanding of what drives the main characters; by jumbling up the time frame you almost immediately get a sense that Harold Lauder is dangerous; something he didn't really become until months after the plague. He was always a pain in the arse, but that was down to his immaturity and the fact he was an asshole in training. The same could be said about Larry Underwood, the rock star come would-be saviour of decent people. Larry's driving motif is that he's 'not a nice guy' and he's done some shitty things all through his life culminating in a series of tragic events that define his character - the first time you read it you're never quite sure what side of the line Larry's going to fall. You need to live that with Larry (and with Harold) but you get neither in the 2021 version; it's hinted at, but you meet both of them as how they end up rather than watching their journey to either the good or the dark side.

The 1994 version cast Laura San Giacomo as Nadine Cross - it seemed like a daft bit of casting at the time, but she pulled it off extremely well and she was Nadine; everything about her acting was how you imagine Nadine in the book. The 2021 version pretty much screws the pooch straight away; by casting Amber Heard you were immediately alienating a largish percentage of your target audience and Johnny Depp fans. Heard is a divisive actress and Depp fans hate her so much they managed to get The Stand rated less than a horrendous 4.0 on IMDB even before it came out. Heard is also far too attractive, sexy and utterly unbelievable as Nadine. Giacomo was also a very hot young thing when she played her, but you wouldn't have thought so. You could believe that San Giacomo's Ms Cross was a virgin, that she'd lived a really sheltered life and that she was saving herself for some odd figure from her dreams, the one who would return for her after the plague. Heard is actually just a mannequin and a quite wooden one at that. You do not believe she's saved herself for Flagg and where in the book and original TV version she was often seen as 'not 100% Team Freemantle' by many of the rest of the cast, in 2021 her strangeness isn't even looked at; in fact when events eventually play out the way they do with Harold, you almost get the idea that the survivors of Harold's ill-fated assassination attempt were slightly surprised that Nadine was part of it.

Another annoying thing about the 2021 version is it actually did look at some of the bits that were omitted from 1994, the problem was it also didn't include many of the key issues throughout the start and middle that defined the characters and actually made you care about them. By the time Nick is blown to pieces in the book, you are heavily invested in all the good guys, which is why his death is a real gut punch. You didn't see that coming; not Nick, he was the leader even if he couldn't speak or hear or even see properly. You didn't see it coming, which made the next 200 pages all the more intense. In fact, the first two times I read the book, I breezed through the next 200 pages so much that at times, on read #3, I was not remembering loads of it. I was focused on whether Stu was going to live, I wasn't bothered about Glenn, Ray and Larry walking into the valley of the shadow of death; their gooses were long cooked, it was whether Stu would survive to get back to Fran and her baby he was not the father of and whether that baby would survive Captain Trips.

In fact, by the time Nick's original co-traveller Tom Cullen - spelled M-O-O-N - finds Stu, you really don't give a shit about the other three or whatever happens to Las Vegas and Randall Flagg. Of the two best, most rounded characters in the book, one was dead and the other was dying; the rest was just bullshit. And oddly enough that was why The Stand worked so well, despite its misogynistic overtones. You knew how it would end but you were now so invested in the remaining characters it was more important to find out if they survive everything.

The '94 version featured former Max Headroom actor Matt Frewer as the very important character called The Trashcan Man. Frewer was crap in it, but really outside of Headroom, Frewer is crap in most things, but Trashie was there from the beginning; you got his full uninterrupted story and a total psychological profile of him. It was clear from the very beginning how valuable Trashcan Man would be for Flagg, but it was also quite clear the profoundly opposite effect he had on everyone else; he was also very much an Agent of Chaos and one neither good nor evil had much control over. The 2021 version has a much better Trashcan Man; utterly bonkers, totally fucked up and yet they didn't see fit to introduce possibly the fourth most important character in the book until we were in the home straight of the new version; episode 6 to be precise.

By episode 8 - the one I'm currently at and penultimate episode - it is clear that the 2021 version is outrageously of considerably poorer quality than the original. Despite more time, arguably better casting and an acknowledgement that women were an inferior species in the book and the first adaptation; it still manages to feel like an utterly soulless and unnecessary remake. 

In 2021's version Las Vegas is hedonism in extreme; it looks like anarchy but there is obviously some form of hierarchy stopping at Lloyd - who is now just a complete cock - and then Flagg. Lloyd Heinreid was played by Miguel Ferrer in the original; he was actually quite a clever crook who simply got in with the wrong guy - he knew this but he was high on loads of drugs so he didn't care. A man who could well have run his own crime syndicate if he'd been born somewhere other than Hicksville meant that Ferrer was a great choice. I can't be arsed to look at IMDB to see who plays him now, but dear God he's about as scary and conveys as much gravitas as a fucking wombat in a clown suit.

I expect the final episode will be Tom and Stu battling their way back to Boulder through the winter to be reunited with the Free Zone and resume life as not one of the leaders, but one of the people. The entire series is watchable like a car crash, but it's so facile and shallow you really couldn't give a shit about the characters and some of the liberties King's own son, Owen, has taken in adapting the original are almost sacrilegious. So much more time, so little effort. As lockdown filler it's on a par with cutting your genitals off with a spork. 

A Wonderful Lack of Sleep

Remembering Insomnia...


Shortly after Christmas 1994, I started reading what would eventually become one of my favourite novels. I have read it four times since and have just started a fifth.

I have recommended this book to a number of people and every single one of them have felt it is the author's best work (although none were that well-versed in his stuff) and a book they were glad they read.

I have seen this book described as 'science fiction' and as 'horror', 'fantasy' could also be attached to it and I'm sure it falls into all of them categories, yet I don't think of it as any of them. The fact it is written by Stephen King also doesn't automatically mean it should be pigeon-holed - some of his best work hasn't got a ghoul, monster or malevolent spirit anywhere near them. In many ways it could be considered one of the strangest of King's oeuvre and yet also the most revelatory in his exploitation of his own shared universe.

Recently, I found out that this book is considered the 3rd worst Stephen King book, in a poll, involving fans. The fact that Pet Semetary was in the top 10, perfectly explains to me the pointlessness of these kinds of polls and the opinions of supposed die-hard fans. That said, the same die-hard fans are getting excited about a Dark Tower series of films, despite the fact the series ended up being an enormous waste of useful words and the films of Stephen King are not likely to feature that heavily in an award-winning retrospective, with only one, maybe three, notable quality exceptions.

Insomnia has never been made into a film. Is called 'boring' by King fans and it doesn't have much of a happy ending. It hasn't been made into a film because it's possibly the most complicated single story of any King novel. Boring is a subjective concept, but I can understand how there's far more discussion and less action than your average blockbuster, but perhaps these people lose sight of the fact that the main character Ralph Roberts starts the book in his 70s or his beau Lois Chasse is also a septuagenarian. Or perhaps these people, who find it boring, have never known what it's like to actually get to know someone; because that is the first thing about this book that makes it endearingly wonderful; it takes its time getting to know the main characters and because of that you become emotionally interested in their adventure long before their adventure starts getting weird.

As for the not having a happy ending, it reminds me of the huge box office failure of the adaptation of a King written short story The Mist, which probably would have been one of the US's top sales hits had it not been for the utterly bleak ending. US audiences hated it, yet it received amazing reviews all over the world. In the short story of The Mist it concludes with the protagonist contemplating the worst; in the film he does the worst, it has no redeeming qualities. The difference between it and Insomnia is the latter does have a happy ending; it just doesn't have the happy ending that the reader wants.

Essentially, it is the tale of two lonely old people, both have lost their long-term partners and are both winding down their last days on earth. The focus of the story initially falls on Ralph who, after the death of his wife, begins to suffer insomnia and then exhausts everything in trying to cure it. It becomes as much of an obsession as his wife's terminal illness had become and before long what appears to be his sleep deprivation begins manifesting in peculiar ways - Ralph starts to see 'auras' or an arrays of strange 'lights' emanating from tops of peoples heads. Some are healthy, some are anything but, and some are unlike anything else. Not only is Ralph hallucinating strange things, he also appears to be getting younger and fitter again - although he initially dismisses it as part of the sleep psychosis he must be suffering from.

If waking up every night at 3am, regardless of what time he goes to bed, is bad enough, he begins to see three oddly rotund figures - without auras - that Ralph nicknames the 'Three Bald Doctors' and eventually there is an encounter between them all, but not before Ralph discovers that Lois is also having trouble sleeping and also sees strange things. Lois is also looking 'well fit'.

Eventually they discover that there is something wrong with the order of things and it might be to do with Ralph's young neighbour Ed, who has a wife and young daughter that the old man and his late wife had taken a shine to, as they had no kids of their own. Wrapped up in his own troubles, Ralph has paid little attention to Ed's young wife; not noticed the bruises or the unhappy child.

Now, there is no real way to convey the general weirdness of the book without having to go into minutiae. To King fans much of the weirdness is easily explained - the book is set in the fictitious Derry, home to It and setting for a number of King's most popular books. There are odd characters on the periphery of the book who are strange anomalies, one or two pop up in other books - something that often happens in King's wild and wacky shared universe. There are also two cracking elements that prove to me how clever Stephen King is as a writer - although whatever place Insomnia was going to inhabit in the author's magnum opus The Dark Tower, may well have been changed due to the hit and run accident the writer was involved in during the late 1990s.

The book's initial antagonist is one of the doctors' who has gone rogue and represents the chaos in the grand scheme of things - he is the 'random', the reason for the unexplained, the unprovoked or the unexpected death. But this is normal - the two orderly bald doctors are quick to explain this to Ralph and Lois when they become embroiled in the madness, the problem is it has become clear that the bald doctor of the random is indiscriminately cutting peoples life forces under the direction of some other antagonist.

The true villain - and the first element of genius - is The Crimson King: the named-but-not-seen major villain in the (then) unfinished Dark Tower saga. Many of his Constant Readers, myself included, believed that Insomnia was a dry run; an attempt to tell the Dark Tower's story in a contemporary setting. This was either because King had grown bored with it at that point, or because he didn't know if he would finish it so he wanted to do an allegorical version - one that scholars could paw over in the future trying to find clues. Whatever the reason behind King's use of the Dark Tower antagonist, the references to and brief appearance of Roland of Gilead and prophesying the future, they appeared in a book that apparently had nothing to do with The Dark Tower's own labyrinthine continuity.

The second and most brilliant, yet most tragic is Patrick Danville - a boy whose appearance in the book is ridiculously marginal, but it actually the entire reason the book takes place...

Insomnia isn't about the metaphysical battle on different planes of existence between two OAPs and their helpers from a much higher level of existence in battle against a mythical villain and a psychotic former colleague. It's really about obsession and how to turn people into things they aren't. The back story in Insomnia, one that beats heavily throughout the book, is the forthcoming arrival of women's rights activist and pro-abortion campaigner Susan Day. While it never is the focus, it's always there in the background like a tooth beginning to decay. Yet even this thinly-veiled Pro-Life/Pro-Choice debate isn't the story. The Crimson King has recruited Ralph's neighbour Ed Deepneau to sabotage the big rally being organised in the Day's honour, but why? What could a prominent Pro-Choice campaigner possibly have to do with a powerful villain of an alternate King universe?

Ed is taking flying lessons because he is going to fly a plane loaded with explosives into the football stadium that Susan Day is going to speak at and Ralph and Lois have to stoop him from doing it - the rest of what I've talked about is just a red herring... except for Patrick Danville.

Ed might think he's just killing a woman who believes that babies should be illegally harvested, but his real target is Patrick, because Patrick will save the life of someone in the future who will go on to change the world and if the Crimson King can prevent that from happening...

I'd say 'ironically' but frankly there was nothing ironic about the way King (Stephen, not the Crimson one) almost shoehorned Danville into his Dark Tower finale to try and close an opened circle (that he seemed to have conveniently ignored).

It was like this brilliant idea from the future was saved for us to read about it further one day but it ended up being a plot device on a bad Chuckle Brothers sitcom instead... This book had been set up as a cornerstone - a key element - in the battle between The Crimson King and Roland and his Ka-tet only to be forgotten about, then, as said, shoehorned (no other way of describing it) almost like an afterthought.

Anyhow, to save the day Ralph makes a deal with the evil bald doctor and it's from this point on where you know, even without the knowledge of having read it before, that there's going to be tragedy on the horizon and the kind you have no control over.

Insomnia is bonkers. It has oddly benign characters, who seem to exist outside of the normal world; different levels of existence, where time moves much faster; it teases us with the elixir of youth and then explains that all you have to do is not sleep; and it has lovely and wonderful characters that should easily remind you of your own grandparents or of someone's, at least. The story is considerably more complex and entwined than you think and, it has this jaw dropper of a moment when, as stated, it was all to save the life of someone who would save the life of someone else - so the great wheel of Ka needs to revolve.

And then there's the tears. The first time I read the book I howled at the end. The second time, armed with the knowledge of how it ends, I howled even earlier. The same with the third time and the fourth, but by this time you feel the hitching at the point where Ralph makes the deal with Atropos and yet you also know that Ralph is being everything he has already proved; he is being the best damned hero ever created by Stephen King and the best damned hero has to die being a hero otherwise it would all have been for nowt. [When Ralph makes a cameo appearance in Bag of Bones a few years later I think I blubbed again]

Insomnia is a dense, at times overly complicated, story about obsession, possession and desire. It has wonderfully rounded characters with believable lives and wholly individual voices. There are elements in this book that King has, sadly, never re-examined - such as Dorrance, one of Ralph's more 'knowledgeable' acquaintances and as I said, there are elements of the story that we do revisit in the future, but I can't help feeling not in the way most of us expected (a criticism levelled at the bastard offspring of The Dark Tower far too often), especially the reduction of Patrick Danville to tortured patsy to allow King to interpret an ending for his bloated folly (you can tell it pissed me off).

For me, this book isn't a tale about lack of sleep, it isn't even the encapsulation of the entire Dark Tower series before the author had his epiphany and screwed it all up, it's about the last of the selfless society; it's about friendship, love, honour, relationships and how they ebb and flow and it's about sacrifices. It is heartbreaking: especially when Lois pleads with Ralph in the final chapter - every time you read it you want her to convince him, because you want Ralph to die of the old age he's had reversed, not at the hands of the crazy bald doctor who had it all planned out. But, you see, he wouldn't have become the greatest character King has ever written if he'd just lived happily-ever after.

Ordinarily I'd just put it down to my own personal desire to not conform to the norm for liking this novel so much, but every person who has read it has felt the same way about Mr Roberts and about the story. I know someone who didn't really understand what it was all about but was hooked on the adventures of these two septuagenarian X Filers and the real-ness of them.

If you ever see it in a second hand book store, or you fancy paying full price, you won't be disappointed and it might also make you wonder just how 'off key' some of King's stuff is. One reiterated word of warning; don't allow the blatant cross-over tempt you into the world of The Dark Tower, because that way leads to anger, disappointment and serious levels of disbelief.

The Rainbow

A Televisual review.

Every so often, something comes along that cries out to be talked about. Invariably, this is something special; or an event that polarises opinions, but merits discussion. In the modern world this tends to be a media based thing - films, TV, music, books - something that comes along that warrants attention.

And every so often something comes along that is just so bad, it beggars belief that whatever it is actually came into being. One perfect example of this is SyFy's new television show Haven. I've been watching TV for over 40 years and I don't think I've ever seen a TV program so unbelievably bad as this.

'Haven is a supernatural drama television series loosely based on the Stephen King novel The Colorado Kid.' Or at least that's what its Wiki entry claims. The key word in that sentence is loosely because any link between this TV series and the novella by King is tenuous at best. The original Colorado Kid story was essentially an unsolved mystery story about a body that turns up on the estuary sands of a Maine coastal town called Haven. The story explains the long and drawn out process to find out who the man was and then how and why he ended up thousands of miles from home, dead and with no identification. It has no real ending apart from the hypothesis of the FBI agent investigating the incident (in many aspects it is very similar to King's From A Buick 8 in the the way it is told). That's it. That's the premise of the 170 page thriller.

Haven, the TV series, has the following in common with the book. Dave and Vince, the editors and owners of the local newspaper (albeit considerably younger and less professional) are present, so is the chief of police, George Wournos and, of course, the town itself. That's sort of where the similarities end. It should be noted that The colorado Kid was a mystery novel and there was no hint, at all, that something supernatural was working in Haven.

Haven's premise is that an FBI agent is sent to Haven by a mysteriously black (as in race) FBI chief (not disimilar to Anna Torv's boss in Fringe) to investigate the death of a suspect. She discovers that the town is very similar to the way Agent Stephanie McCann, from the book, found it - quaint, antiquated and like something out of Murder, She Wrote. But there are some strange things going on in this sleep little coastal community; things that appear to be attributed to 'The Troubles' - whatever they might be, and trust me, 7 episodes into a 13 episode run and we're still not even clear what anything is in this town.

The new agent, Audrey Parker is portrayed as a difficult woman who lives on her own and has a troubled, if not slightly mysterious past; as in she was orphaned and never knew her parents and we haven't yet discovered why. She quickly solves the case assigned to her, but not without discovering the local deputy she's been paired with is a bit odd. He's either being paid to be an emotionless cypher or the guy who plays Nathan Wournos (son of the chief) cannot act to save his life and no one has bothered to notice. Nathan suffers from a condition that means he feels no pain at all and it seems that physical malady has turned him into a cold block of emotionless cop, or so I hoped.

Before the end of the pilot, Audrey is shown a newspaper clipping by Dave and Vince of the local paper; in it is a picture that looks like the blond Audrey, but with dark, possibly red, hair and holding the hand of a child. It sits under the headline 'Who is the Colorado Kid?' but as there are others in the picture and it looks like a crime scene, Audrey can decipher nothing more from it.

Also, it needs mentioning that no one in the cast has ever been seen before, apart from the guest star of the week; which started with Nicole Boer and fizzled out, presumably becauser the budget, or lack of it. However, Eric Balfour is one of the three main stars of the show. Balfour has been in Buffy, 24 and a host of other films and TV shows; you'd recognise him easily because he normally dies in most of the things he appears in because he's the punk kid who's got death written all over him. Balfour plays Duke, a man of questionable morals and a thorn in Nathan's side, for reasons that I think they've attempted to address but failed miserably.

So sets the scene for new mystery subplots, designed to draw us in to this bizarre new world. However, the story, about someone gaining revenge in an odd fashion is so full of holes that it would struggle to hold anything - jelly included. The opener also tries the formula of setting someone up as the likely antagonist, onloy for them to be killed, maimed or incapacitated by the midway point, thus hoping to throw the viewer (as well as the cops) off the track. Now, with the first episode this was quite clever, but as the same plot device has now been used for the last 7 episodes, you now watch it and immediately rule out the chief suspect, just by the way he acts in his first scene - the guilty looking guy didn't do it!

Over the space of 7 weeks, I'd hoped that the series would start to move along. It hasn't spectacularly. What we have had is a succession of weird happenings a week: a succubus styled woman who drains the life from men to produce perfect babies within 48 hours; animated stuffed animals, butterflies of death, a woman who has the power to draw voodoo pictures of people, waves of rotting produce and a host of others so weird I've completely forgotten about them. Each episode's story is pretty rank and you hope that the bits in between will reveal what Audrey's connection to the woman in the photo is, or what Nathan's real problem is (hinted at, but not revealed), what the Troubles actually are and any of the little things that keep getting hinted at. But no, we get dialogue that is so trite its unbelievable. We don't even get progression of a subplot; all we get is the same information told again.

There is a Medical Examiner, who appears, like Dave and Vince, to be old enough to tell Audrey what's going on, but instead of explanations or hints, we get: 'The Troubles are back again' or 'You're not a local until you've been here 30 years and even then you're not' and lots of other pointless gems of wisdom that, oddly enough, King uses in his Maine set stories. Frankly, if I was FBI agent Audrey Parker I wouldn't be quite so obliging and if she's a crack FBI agent, like she was portrayed in the pilot, how come she's allowing everyone to give her cryptic clues without trying to follow them up or even, God forbid, question the people concealing glimpses of the woman in the picture, who now it seems is most likely Audrey's mother.

I get the impression that the writers are trying a little too hard to be enigmatic and have lost sight of what they originally intended to do. Or, they might be two 12 year olds, because some of the writing is so bad it makes you wonder why SyFy bought it in the first place! I appreciate the program is made on a really small budget, but that doesn't excuse the unbelievably poor and badly written scripts, or the fact that the editor of the show quite conceivably didn't read the scripts before assembling the finished rushes. There have been at least 3 occasions where the script refers to things that haven't happened yet; most tellingly in an episode where stuffed animals are gaining revenge on those that shot them. Audrey turns to her partner and says something along the lines of, "there's something fishy going on here; we've got two animal attacks in the space of 24 hours." Which would have been okay had they not been sitting in their car outside the place where the first attack took place and where the actual second attack doesn't take place for another 24 hours. It just sort of makes you want to know what substances the producers were on when they allowed this thing to be aired on cable TV.

There is another startlingly bad bit ofm plotting during ther latest episode. The two cops suspect a girl of being involved in the strange events taking place, so they stop in at her art class and ask for an interview. She lies to them almost immediately and they confront her on it and then Audrey suggests that perhaps going down to the station would be a better place to talk, away from her art class. But the girl's attitude changes and she says that unless they're planning on arresting her, she's not going anywhere and she's not talking to anyone and she storms back into her art class. The two cops; one of which is a crack FBI agent, look at each other, shrug their shoulders and leave! This is a town where weird shit happens all the time and they suspected her, yet she shouts at them and they back off. God, I think in the USA, the term and practice Probable Cause is used whenever possible. In this part of the world, the police walk away when a girl shouts at them!

In fact, the entire show feels so staged that even though as long as a week might pass during an episode, it's like whenever the camera isn't on these people they just cease to exist. Any character development is ignored; but I'm not entirely sure what it's ignored for, because nothing else much happens. Every time a character appears it's like they've never been on the show before (or in the town) and they show it. I'm surprised some of the actors aren't looking into the actual camera and smiling while they say their lines with much skill and passion.

Balfour is the only real actor and it shows; his scenes at least feel as though there's a pro on the stage; the problem is his character is so changeable that you have to wonder whether the writers actually have character studies and sheets or if they're doing it from memory only after a heavy night on Bolivian Marching Powder and Tequila Slammers!

Emily Rose, whom plays Audrey would be an ideal choice to play a 30-year-old Buffy Summers; its like she's sort of based Audrey on Buffy as an older woman - she's full of wise cracks and witty retorts and she's blond and athletic, even if she doesn't stake vamps or have super powers. Nathan, played by Lucas Bryant, is as dull as brown crimpolene trousers, yet the actor would probably make a perfect Roland of Gilead, with a little grey around the temples and a couple of fingers missing. As the son of the sheriff, who, it seems is based on the Mayor of Amity from Jaws, he's about as effective as a chocolate teapot and even his father doesn't seem to think he's up for much; so far this has been one of the few consistent things. He's not useless and he's not a bad cop; he's just not much of anything really and even though the writer's have given him a love interest, the actress who plays her acts worse than Bryant. It's like she's got a gun pointed at her head every time she speaks and she's supposedly French Canadian, however, her accent ranges from outrageous in a Monty Python kind of way to almost English in a Liz Hurley kind of way - she's also another one of these people who seemingly knows things. I just wish one of the main characters would just come out and ask someone what's going on, rather than sitting around all day mulling over shit and talking about who's the best pastry maker in the town.

Haven is rancid shit. It's got the hallmarks of going down in history as possibly one of the poorest made TV shows of all time; but it has one thing going for it - the scenery. The show is filmed in Nova Scotia and while parts of it look like bleakest industrial Cornwall and other parts like Northern Scotland, it is, for the most, quite spectacular and with its sparsely dotted houses and idyllic locations, it makes you want to go there and make a TV show that's better than this. And, to be honest, if you had a camcorder, about $50 and a car you could probably make it far better.