TVSquad

(S01E04) "The End of the Whole Mess" is one of my favorite Stephen King short stories for two reasons. One, it's written by a protagonist who is slowly losing his mind as the story progresses, much like an earlier short story of his titled "Survivor Type" (from the Skeleton Crew collection). The other reason I like it so much is that it's very unstereotypically King. It's a very touching and very human story about misplaced good intentions, those same intentions that pave the road to Hell, as the cliche goes.

In the story, the teller is Howie Fornoy, a freelance writer. In the TV version he's a documentary filmmaker and he tapes his final moments on Earth rather than writing about them, which makes sense, this being a television episode after all. Howard is played by Ron Livingston, and his younger brother, Bobby, is played by Henry Thomas. The two brothers are intelligent kids with intelligent parents, but Bobby is especially so. Howie describes him as a kind of wandering genius, someone like Da Vinci or Einstein flittering from one interest to the next like a compass trying to find True North. Bobby finally finds his True North when he and a team of researchers discover a town in Texas called La Planta where the water contains proteins not found anywhere else, including one only found in the human brain. It turns out the water acts as a kind of "calmative" that renders the entire town and its people completely passive and nonviolent.

I was impressed with this adaptation, as it managed not to lose any of the urgency of King's original story. This is one of those rare occurrence when an adaptation of his work actually translated well to the screen, and both Livingston and Thomas are great in their roles. Thomas as Bobby is tremendously bittersweet, a genius who, at his core, is still a naive child who can't understand why people are so mean to one another. The episode alludes to 9/11, which King's original story does not, of course, having been published in the 90s. The actually time when the story takes place is unknown, however, except that it's probably in the not-too-distant future.

Bobby wants to cure the world of war and killing by dropping gigantic amounts of the "magic" La Planta water into a volcano located east of Borneo that's set to explode just as Krakatoa did. This will "seed" the water around the world and make everyone "nice," or so Bobby fantasizes. What actually happens, and what Bobby doesn't realize until it's too late, is that the water also gives people Alzheimer's, and the epidemic quickly spreads throughout the world. Bobby and Howie try to avoid the inevitable as long as they can, but in the end, Howie injects his brother with the water, and then doses himself and tries to get the whole story on tape before he succumbs to the effects.

Having read the original story, this episode didn't hold any surprises for me, but I was still gripped by the story, nonetheless. Four episodes in, it's clear that Nightmares and Dreamscapes is going to have some hits and misses, but this is definitely a hit, and I hope to see more episodes like this one before the series ends its run in early August.