Hello everyone and welcome to the Stephen King cast, One Man's Musings on the Works of Stephen King, and I'm alive! I'm alive, everyone. Don't worry,

I'm still here. I know that it's been a while. The last episode that I released was in October.

I did not mean to fall so behind, but honestly, life and work. Work has been very busy, and I've needed to make sure

that I am as focused as possible on that as possible to make sure that that's running smoothly,

which it is, in case you were wondering. But I'm back today, not to continue my examination of the endings of the works of Stephen King,

which I will get to.

I'm not finished with that mission yet.

But no, today I'm going to talk about that first episode of The Stand, which dropped on CBS.

But first, for all new listeners, welcome to the Stephen King cast.

This is the latest episode in a long-running podcast

that dates back to 2014, in which I set out to examine each of the works in Stephen King

in the chronological order of publication, to just go through a deep dive analysis of the themes of each of the works, how they interwoved

with one another, the patterns that we see from work to work, what it says about Stephen

King at the time of the writing of each piece and what and what the motifs were.

But I have done that.

And since then, I have been looking at each of the endings of the works of Stephen King.

Because if you're listening to this podcast, you are a Stephen King fan,

and I'm sure that you have heard the criticism that Stephen King does not know how to end his novels properly. So what I've been doing, I've

been really examining that. So I've gone back to the beginning, and I am making my way through

each of the books once again, but this time focusing purely on the ending and applying a series

of questions about that particular ending to determine

whether or not it actually meets the criteria of being a good ending or if we are not looking

...