The Stand Finale Preview Released

The finale of CBS All Access‘s The Stand debuts on Thursday, offering viewers a “coda” to Stephen King’s iconic story as written by King himself. Now, a new preview for the episode offers a look at the world after last week’s showdown with Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgard) in New Vegas through the eyes of the Boulder Free Zone Committee member who had to stay behind, Frannie (Odessa Young).

In the preview shared by TV Insider, Frannie addresses her new baby in voice-over, talking about how life continues though she questions if anything ever really permanently changes.

“I wish I could tell you every story has a happy ending,” she says. “Truth is, most stories don’t end at all, not really.”

The episode is something that will close out The Stand‘s story in a way that differs from what fans of the book are familiar with. Executive producer Benjamin Cavell previously said that the episode will give Frannie her own “stand”, something King wanted to do for 30 years.

“He wrote a coda that is our ninth episode. It will be completely new to the entire audience,” Cavell said. “I can, and will say, the big reason he wanted to do the coda was, he was thinking about for [the past] 30 years that Frannie doesn’t go on ‘the stand’ in the book. She’s seven or eight months pregnant, and can’t walk across the mountains to face the Dark Man. It always ate at him that she was one of the heroes of the book, and she was never given her ‘stand.’ The coda is his planned attempt for the last 30-years to give her her ‘stand.’”

Young herself has previously said that she feels “lucky” getting to update Frannie and her story.

“I feel extremely lucky!” Young told Marie Claire Australia. “At the time that we were shooting, it didn’t actually hit me that that’s what was going on. Then, the more I started to think about it I kind of realized that there’s something that is so beautiful about The Stand as a piece of work in general and that it has been a living, breathing organism since it was first published in the seventies.”

She continued, “King has updated it since then in the nineties, and then there was a mini-series which gave it a new life. So I just loved the porousness that this was. I love how King, as an author and a storyteller, can respond to the people who are digesting his work and keep it active. It means that the story is bigger than anybody can ever really put their fingers on. And so being a part of that, to be tasked with a really kind of colossal undertaking of being Frannie in this new iteration in which King has such a pretty heavy influence on, to the point that he wrote it—it feels pretty phenomenal.”

The final episode of The Stand debuts on CBS All Access on Thursday, February 11th.