‘The Stand’ Showrunner Explains How Stephen King’s New Coda Came to Life

After 43 years, the ending to one of Stephen King’s most iconic novels has been changed. CBS All Access’ take on The Stand has finally premiered its coda, an entirely new ending written by Stephen King himself that gives Frannie (Odessa Young) her own, long-awaited stand. To fully understand what went into bringing this never-before seen or read addition to screen, Decider spoke to The Stand‘s executive producer Benjamin Cavell and visual effects supervisor Jake Braver. Spoilers ahead for the ending of The Stand. 

Before writing had even started on The Stand, Cavell and his team knew that King had been thinking about a continuation to this particular story for at least 30 years. It all came down to Frannie. Every character in The Stand gets a stand, their moment to shine and choose their alliance in this warped battle between good and evil, Mother Abigail (Whoopi Goldberg) and Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgård). Everyone except for the very pregnant Frannie, who stays back in Boulder instead of joining her friends at the fight in Las Vegas.

“It wasn’t clear whether [Stephen King] was necessarily going to write it for us, or maybe he was going to just sort of tell us what it was and send us off to go take a shot at it,” Cavell explained. “But after he read the first couple drafts that we generated, he really liked it and he said, ‘OK, you guys clearly know the show you’re making, clearly have a vision. It feels like it’s really doing justice to my book’ … That was beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, such an enormous vote of confidence.”

To construct the coda, King asked Cavell where he was ending the miniseries. He then wrote Frannie’s new story from there. When approached by King, Cavell and his team only had two requirements for how they saw this new ending unfolding: they had to get Frannie and Stu (James Marsden) back together in Boulder; and they had to show the return of Randall Flagg.

“We didn’t even know necessarily who he’d be presenting himself to, but all we knew was we wanted Flagg presenting himself to a new group of followers. Essentially to be left with the sense that, as is true to the King universe, the wheel keeps turning,” Cavell explained. “Between Stu arriving back in Boulder and that moment of Flagg presenting himself to these new followers it was like, ‘You tell us.'”

The coda feels distinctly like one of King’s short stories. The episode picks up in a world after the battle in Las Vegas. Frannie, the only one of Mother Abigail’s faithful left, has been running Boulder seemingly for weeks. During this time she gives birth to her daughter, who contracts Captain Tripps and becomes the first known person to recover from the disease. Life is sad, but things are slowly getting brighter. Finally, when she’s on the brink of losing hope that she’ll never see Stu again, he returns.

As quickly as he arrives, Stu is swept off on another adventure. Frannie decides she wants to raise her child back in Maine, which means a cross country road trip for this young couple. Watching Frannie and Stu travel together is sweet. For once you can bask in the clear chemistry these two characters have, Frannie as her whip-smart and slightly eccentric self and Stu as her rock. But once they attempt to stay the night at an abandoned farmhouse, things go from peaceful to dark.

You can feel the dread creeping in through every corner of the screen as the couple separates so Stu can find supplies. On her own alone with her baby, Frannie decides to try out the farm house’s well. Within minutes she falls in, almost dying. It’s in that near death that she reunites with the man of her nightmares, Randall Flagg, while Stu and a reincarnated version of Mother Abigail try to pull her back to life.

“Mother Abigail and Flagg are so much dark mirror images of each other or sides of the same coin,” Cavell said. “[King] was very excited to be to be able to show Mother Abigail, or some form of the same entity that is Mother Abigail, to reappear.”

There’s a fitting irony to Frannie’s stand that feels distinctly King. Frannie, this woman who has lived through the end of the world, the terrors of Randall Flagg, and has led one of the last tribes of people throughout these monstrosities, is almost ended by something as simple as a well. It’s a choice that mirrors the master of horror’s knack of finding the terror in the ordinary. Oddly enough this small well served as a major obstacle for the production crew as well.

The Stand has more than its fair share of impressive visual effects. This is a series that created a literal Hand of God for its second to last episode, a moving, seemingly conscious cloud of lightning that decimated Las Vegas. Those cool effects are all thanks to Jake Braver. The next challenge after depicting radiation poisoning and making Alexander Skarsgård literally fly? The well.

“When we all read Stephen King’s draft, immediately, we started talking about the well. How do you shoot the well? It seems very simple, but you can’t actually shoot in the well,” Braver explained. “We actually ended up at five different wells to film it. It was one of those things that we met on the page and all totally underestimated, and then cut to there’s like a stage with three different well sets on it and then there’s one location and there’s one in the jungle.”

So much about this deceptively ordinary set piece proved to be a headache. How deep was this well? Eight feet could easily kill Frannie, but four would seem too shallow. “We very much wanted to do a thing where she was in serious peril, not just because she’s fallen and she was injured but also, there’s literally no way to get out,” Braver said. “We really tried to film it in a way where you felt that. You didn’t really quite know from the initial fall through of how deep the well was. But it didn’t really matter because it’s not a place you want to be regardless.”

“I have to credit Jake. The moment of her actually falling into the well and you see her just fall and kind of go through the board, but you don’t follow her down. She just kind of falls out of the scene and there’s something both horrifying and also so small feeling about it,” Cavell added. “I just loved the way that moment was shot. That was a Jake thing.”

Several times throughout The Stand‘s run its visual effects department could have cut corners or added in unnecessary flourishes. But Braver’s devotion to getting the well fall just right speaks to an ethos that was formed before the miniseries was even greenlit.

“We were talking about how the effects had to be driven by the story. Cool shit, just for the sake of cool shit, gets bland rather quickly,” Braver explained. “So we wanted to make sure — and the Hand of God, perfect example — that the things you were seeing, the effects of having the cloud or the lightning or the ball lightning, were driving the story forward and telling stories. That goes hand in hand with, as Ben said, the mantra of if can’t do it well, with our time, budget, what have you, let’s revisit a way to do it that works. I was very lucky to have the support of Ben and [Executive Producer Taylor Elmore] through that sort of willingness to take one step forward, take a step back, look at it if your concepts aren’t improving, and figure out what was really working for the story.”

The Stand officially ends not very differently from how it begins. After Frannie is saved by Stu and a young girl who is the reincarnation of Mother Abigail, she returns to her family. As Flagg and Mother Abigail reveal to her, we know that Frannie and Stu will later go on to have a happy life and a family of five. Yet the wheels of this universe still turn. Good and evil are still at war. Mother Abigail is still alive. And in the final moments of The Stand, Randall Flagg appears in the flesh to present himself to a tribe that’s been isolated from society.

If it wasn’t for The Stand’s history, you would think the series was preparing itself for a sequel. “You never say never, especially if Stephen King calls and says, ‘Hey, I have an idea,'” Cavell said about the possibility for a continuing series. “But we’re also very proud of the adaptation and really feel like we made the show we set out to make and told the story of the book in the way we set out to do it. So I don’t think we feel like there’s a burning need, like a part of the story that we haven’t told yet… If somebody who is named Stephen King has an idea for how they will expand this universe or how to bring it into some other part of the universe, yeah. I’m sure we’re all ears.”

Watch The Stand on CBS All Access