The Stand/Headscratchers

• Captain Trips is 99.4% communicable and 100% fatal. Those who contract the disease die, period. Those who are immune simply don't contract the disease, and no one knows why, as we're shown with the experiments done on Stu. Yet late in the story, we see Fran's child by Jess (who had died of the disease) fighting it off. It's explained as the baby inheriting half an immunity, and so while he's not completely immune, he's able to "shift" his antibodies to match the shifting antigen of the virus. Setting aside the fact that the human immune system does this normally, hereditary immunity does not work that way! You can't inherit "half" of an immunity. Either you're immune, or you're not. Furthermore, this baby is treated as completely unique, which means that there were, previously, no children with one immune parent and one vulnerable parent? Not even from before the disease hit?
  • The baby isn't so much treated as unique, more so the first one born (and then survive) in boulder. Other children may have been born, but its heavily implied that he still needed a hell of a lot of medical care to survive, and a lot of those born would probably been birthed by amateurs in small groups, which makes it unlikely that they would get the proper care needed. Also this is more WMG but I always took it that the survivors weren't immune as such, but more that their immune systems were especially strong or suited to fight that particular kind of disease, and this was passed, in part, to Peter (or Abagail depending on your choice). Anyway, WMG over!
  • The most likely answer, out-of-universe, is that King didn't really understand heredity or genetics, and since the book was written in the 1970s, the understanding of genetics was probably much less than it is now. In-universe, though, it always struck me that the immunity seemed to be somewhat magical in nature - the only distinguishing feature of the totally-immune is that they have intense dreams (convenient for the battle of Good vs Evil in the book).
  • In-universe, the baby would have received a protective supply of Fran's own antibodies through the placenta and her milk. This could have provided just enough time for its half-immune defenses to kick in, that plague victims didn't survive long enough to have happen. No such protection was available for half-immunes born before the plague, because their disease-immune mothers hadn't yet encountered the superflu and didn't (yet) have a supply of antibodies against it.
• One thing that bugs me is how Captain Trips remains lethal for so long. The usual trend with viruses is that they tend to mutate towards longer-lasting but less lethal versions fairly rapidly, because that ensures that they hit more hosts. Captain Trips seemed to do some of that - it shifted from a "near-instant killer" to a longer-lasting form with incubation - but how come the lethality of it didn't change?
  • It's a rule, not a law? Alternatively, if that doesn't work for you, it ran through the available population of susceptible hosts to fast?
    • Plus, it's a manufactured virus...
      • Well no, that's not right. Yes, it was bred by scientists, it's essentially a hodgepodge between HIV and influenza, but that doesn't really change its properties in terms of mutation. This is something a lot of people don't understand about virus's, their one and only purpose is to reproduce and survive as a strain, not to kill. A deadly virus is not a successful virus as it KILLS its only mode of reproduction; man made or not a virus will mutate in order to survive, especially a virus capable of rapid and effective antigen shift (mutation) like HIV and Cap'n Trips and if survival means mutating to become far less deadly, then it WILL do that especially once hosts become scarce.
        • In that vein, how was CT an 'instant killer'? It's a virus, not botulism. If I recall correctly they said it killed them in 12 minutes or something in its original form. The fastest death for a viral infection was a little under 12 hours, and that's for very rare, very specific meningitis related encephalitis (swelling of the brain due to viral infection, so it's not even a direct killer). It is literally *physically impossible* for a respiratory virus to multiply fast enough to kill its host in less than a day let alone less than an hour.
    • "Near-instant", not "instant". "12 minutes for a kill" is extremely fast for any disease, never mind a virus.
      • 12 minute lethality is effectively instantaneous for anything besides suffocation, nerve gas, and trauma.
  • Don't forget that the virus is essentially just God's tool for bringing about the Rapture. Maybe it has such an insane kill rate because God wants it that way; Captain Trips is just supernatural enough to convince the faithful, but not so out there that it completely reveals His existence, which would defeat the whole "faith without proof" thing that He puts such stock in.
• Oh boy, where to start... How did Charlie Campion contract CT? He was a gate guard, he sat around in a separate kiosk outside and 150 meters above the actual lab! Was the virus so contagious that it ghosted through hundreds of meters of dirt and concrete to dust some hick patrolling the gate? In the same vein, how did it even get to the whole facility? Bio-weapon labs are independent of the building for this very reason. (.2.) Shifting antigen virus's cannot become airborne, the protein shell necessary to survive being outside a host body for more than a few minutes by its very nature excludes the possibility of a virus being of the shifting antigen variety; a bulky protein shell is basically a 'grab me' sign for T-Cells. (.3.) How is Captain Trips still around to infect shut-in survivors and newborn babies? Is it just floating around in the air? It killed all its possible hosts well into 99.4%, how is it still around? Viral residue? After a month? Has no one gotten around to giving the *maternity ward* a once over with Lysol? 4.) Who would side with Randall Flagg other than those who were strong-armed into it? 'Oh yeah, he's great! A good leader, very charismatic. A slight hiccup though, he may be SATAN!' People are wetting themselves whenever he smiles and the grass dies wherever he walks! Um... Red Flagg?
  • Thank you! The fact that the guard somehow got sick bugged the hell out of me.
  • Possible answers to four: The two people we see him actively recruit - Lloyd and Trash - he treats with more kindness and respect than anyone has treated them in their whole lives. It's only later that the abuse begins. As for the rest, they're a bunch of scared, lonely, traumatized people in a post-apocalyptic world. He gives them direction and leads them to a place where they have fellowship (on the surface, at least) and all the things they've come to depend on for survival as residents of 20th-century America. If nothing else, they think he's going to win.
    • Plus, Flagg's society is built on people being active and working together. He makes a bunch of scared, confused people do things to keep them busy, while maintaining a (relatively) logical 'be the best that you can be' philosophy, as is evident when he crucifies a man who takes drugs since he can't function while on them.
    • Is this really that hard to believe? People have been following evil, horrible leaders for time out of mind. Lots of people don't care whether someone nice is in charge as long as they believe he's a) powerful and b) on their side.
  • Campion was stationed in a tower on the complex grounds; not the main gate. Hermetically sealing off an underground base is a damn good way to asphyxiate anyone that might have to work inside of it. Not to mention that CT seems to make its way through the CDC's filtration suits in fairly short order.
  • In the miniseries at least, there are slow, lingering shots of the vents and pipes presumably releasing air from below before the release. Presumably CT was sent up through there as well as part of the containment breach.
• The nuclear bomb. One, nukes do not emit sufficient radiation when standing idle to actually be a threat to those around them. Two, a nuclear weapon will end up inert(due to lack of external cooling systems which prevent heat from breaking down the core) if separated from the maintenance infrastructure for more than a day or so. Three, it takes a whole hell of a lot to set off a 70's era nuke, due to them being manufactured with countless safety devices which prevent accidental triggering.
  • Answer to three: blatant and shameless Deus Ex Machina Nukina.
    • Exactly - while not "from a machine", it basically is God in action.
  • The bomb is set off by the Hand of God. In the story, a hand-shaped fiery supernatural force literally appears and reaches for the bomb. I'm sure you're correct about all of these technicalities, but according to the story god literally made it go kaboom because he wanted to.
    • Not quite. The energy was already there, emitted by Flagg to kill the protester from the audience. It just is turned into a hand shape (or what looked vaguely like a hand to one character for an instant before he died, perhaps moved by the power of suggestion and by the fact that it all happened so fast) and directed into the bomb by something else, presumed to be God, perhaps the will of the Beam or the Tower (Gan, also speculated by some to be the same as God). But yes, that's what set off the bomb.
  • I've only seen the movie, but weren't those solar burns? From riding across the desert for at least nearly two days with no sunblock, hat, or roof? The fact that there was pale skin under the goggles was kind of a hint towards that.
    • They might have been sun burns in the mini-series, but the way the book describes them, Trash is obviously supposed to be suffering from radiation poisoning.
  • He might have received the near-fatal radiation dose in the base itself somehow, one can't tell what the dying soldiers did there.
  • For that matter, how the hell did his ATV hold enough gas to drive such a great distance across the desert?
• Glen mentions that all the weapons of the old world are just laying around, waiting for someone to pick them up and use them. We're given examples of fighter jets and nuclear missiles. How is it that, in a world so depopulated that Boulder's chief medical agent is a veterinarian, Flagg's group can find enough people so highly specialized that they can service military jets? The nuclear weapons issue is even more ridiculous because even if you were so lucky as to find a survivor who knew anything more than that nuclear weapons make big booms when detonated, they would also have to know how to circumvent the complex security systems installed on them which are designed specifically to prevent any but a very select few to ever have the capability of arming them. It would seem to me that a world in which 0.6% of humanity survives, the only weaponry laying around which could be of any practical use to anyone would be small arms and simpler heavy weapons.
  • The nuclear weapon is found by Trashcan Man, who has a God or Satan-given ability to find and use things like that. As far as the security protocols and accelerometers go, bear in mind that in the end a nuclear bomb is just a bunch of explosive lenses around a plutonium shell, if the thing can go boom without damaging the lenses, the shell will implode and fission will result. It may not be the optimal yield, but it's probably enough. As far as the jets, the current US Air Force has 300,000 active duty personnel (most of whom are enlisted technicians of some sort or another) and there's probably several million retired or separated, along with the aviation branches of the other services, commercial aviation mechanics, and "other". So there's probably several hundred to several thousand people out there with functional knowledge of aircraft systems. Glen mentions early on that Flagg is going to get most of the technicians, simply because they're going to go where they're wanted most.
  • Also recall that Flagg has tasked the tiny number of pilots he has with training new pilots, and Trashcan Man kills them all for making fun of him. So it clearly was an almost extinct knowledge base.
• I never got what Glen meant when he called Flagg "the last magician of rational thought." Flagg and rational don't belong in the same sentence together. The guy causes pain and destruction based almost entirely on whim, starts using mystical powers without being much interested in where they came from, and every interaction he has with another person revolves around the inexplicable terror or magnetism his appearance inspires in them. If anything, Flagg's the champion of irrational thought.
  • Presumably Flagg's interest in using technology (including the sort that engineered the plague, presumably) to dominate and control society. To paraphrase Evil from Time Bandits, forget about committees, flowers and platypuses! Flagg would have started with lasers, eight o'clock, day one!
  • Been a while but I think he probably meant the last true wizard in the age of rational thought.
    • Indeed. Flagg is going to use the tools of the modern world to wipe out Boulder. That's why he was working on getting jets ready to fly, gathering weapons, and planning to cross the Rockies in spring and wipe everyone out. He's going for a secular solution, despite being a supernatural being. And when you consider Boulder's ultimate response(send out four men armed only with belief), the contrast becomes even clearer: the four men are opting for a supernatural solution.
• Do Fran and Stu really think that moving from Boulder back to Ogunquit is going to be a good idea in the long run? They're going to be a tiny, isolated group. Nobody is keeping up the roads, dams, or ditches, so they're going to be a tiny, permanently isolated group. Eventually the machinery around them is going to run out of fuel and spare parts, so they'll be a tiny, permanently isolated group doing manual labor all day long. There aren't enough of them to allow for anybody to specialize in anything (such as medicine or making new tools)--even if they could find the books and equipment, there simply won't be any time to spare from day-to-day survival. And who are their kids going to marry?
  • I always thought that it's ridicolously irresponsible. Stu brings up that they could get sick, and Fran says that there are "books and good drugs, we can learn to use them". Um... no, you can't. You can't learn medicine just from books. And this is a woman who have seen a man die from appendicitis, because there was no doctor around!
    • Agreed...you can learn first aid and some stuff, but not nearly enough to make it totally on your own, given they're without anyone else in the area...if it were really that easy, doctors wouldn't need years of medical school. It's true that our ancestors made it in the new world, but even they had communities to help, and most of us know from history class how high the death rate was during the Pilgrim days.
    • Add to that the fact that drugs only last a year or so tops, and then they lose their effectiveness. And it's not like they can make more.
    • Finally, Frannie's pregnant again. A vaginal birth after Caesarian is possible, but needs a doctor's supervision because there are still chances of problems.
      • The one theory I was able to come up with is that perhaps people would spread out fairly fast and more would come east, but even then, they're not guaranteed to meet up with anyone.
  • The other thing I thought of with Stu and Frannie is that not everyone in the country is in the Free Zone and not every single bad person in the country died in Vegas...they'd end up in trouble if they met a hostile group on their way East.
  • We're talking about a guy who was personally saved by God. He's maybe a little overconfident based upon that.

• If one of the major themes of the book is that the works of human hands inevitably turn evil, why are the dogs all heroes and the wolves villains? I would expect to find junkyard dogs following Randall Flagg and wolves staying the hell away from him.
• Why does the disease have the nickname 'Captain Trips'? I'm British so this may be an American cultural reference I'm not familiar with. Can someone explain it to me?
  • We're just as lost as you, my friend from across the pond. Another name for it in the story is "Tube Neck", which seems like it would fit better considering the symptoms. The closest I can come to an explanation is that the term "Captain Trips" originally came from a short story King had previously written about a disease with the same name which had affected the entire West coast of the United States save for a few teenagers in California(I think).
  • "Captain Trips" is/was Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead's nickname. Stephen King, we can only imagine, liked the band and decided it sounded cool as a disease.
  • From my searching (I'm an Aussie, so I'd never heard the phrase either), it appears that "Captain Trips" is a drug hangover (or something), ie. the bad morning you have after a night on what illicit substances ails you. That's mainly urban dictionary though, so no idea how reliable that is.
  • Nicknames for things don't always make sense. Someone at some point probably had a reason for calling it Captain Tripps, and the name caught on 'cause people have gotta call it something.

• Why can't Flagg remember who he is when he wakes up on a island at the end of the book?
  • He was just hit by a nuclear warhead. I think it's fair he was a bit disoriented.
  • Keep in mind, he shows constant forgetting of who he is, as well as multiple names and 'selves', throughout the entire book; the nuke was enough to cause him to go to another persona with the RF initials.