‘The Stand’ Episode 5 Recap: What Happens in Vegas…

We’ve hit the midpoint of The Stand, and now skulking and spying are the order of the day. Making use of a storytelling structure that already has us primed to accept crosscutting from one plotline (and timeline) to the next, “Fear and Loathing in New Vegas” tracks the parallel clandestine missions of several characters, in a clever bit of tension-building business that spans much of the episode.

In Las Vegas—excuse me, New Vegas—Dayna Jurgens finds herself drawn into the new society’s upper echelons, as she works to find out what Randall Flagg and his minions are up to and make it back home to Boulder to report her findings; she mostly gets caught up in failed threesome attempts with Flagg’s right-hand man Lloyd Henried and his girlfriend Julie Lawry (aka the woman who shot at Nick and Tom Cullen last episode). Tom himself is in Vegas as well, consigned to the cleanup crew for the city’s bloody gladiator fights. (More on that later.)

Boulder has its fair share of skullduggery going on as well. After successfully staging Teddy Weizak’s body to make his shooting death at Nadine Cross’s hands look like a suicide, Harold Lauder promises to take up Weizak’s plan to set up a drive-in—the perfect place to gather a large number of people and then blow them all up. Harold does his fair share of snooping when he’s invited over to Stu and Frannie’s for dinner. This itself is just a cover for Larry to break into Harold’s house and look around; Larry nearly gets caught when Harold returns, and after noticing that one of his chess pieces has been left askew, Harold uses security cam footage both to catch Larry in the act and to spy on Stu and Frannie in their bedroom using a hacked babycam.

Before all this goes down, Nadine comes to Larry with an offer: herself. “I want you to fuck me,” she says bluntly—this is the only way to free her from Flagg’s desire and destiny. Larry, being a Nice Guy, turns her down, saying she’ll regret it in the morning. He’s more right than he knows.

And all the while, Mother Abigail prays to her God to divulge the sin for which she is being punished, in the form of the disobedience of her own right-hand man, Nick Andros, who helped put together the spy initiative. By the end of the episode she’s gone, leaving a bare-bones note and a community that could tear itself apart without her holding it together.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say any of this is particularly pulse-pounding; the competing missions are not constructed to unnerve you the way, say, The Americans or late-season Breaking Bad‘s cat-and-mouse games do. But they do successfully convey that this society is on the brink, and that the bad actions of individual characters, inadvertently or not, could spell disaster for Boulder.

Harder to swallow is the vibe of New Vegas.

As depicted in this episode, largely through the eyes of Dayna Jurgens, it’s as if on the Vegas Strip did Randall Flagg a stately pleasure dome decree. People in fetish gear fuck freely in public. Everyone’s drunk, and some are doing blow right out the open. It’s a bacchanalia—and it’s being staged around a gladiatorial pit where slaves are made to fight each other with chainsaws.

In other words, it’s the nightmare scenario of people who used to want parental advisory stickers on Marilyn Manson records. Is it a plausible setup for a dystopian society run by a demon in denim? I’m not so sure. Where did he find all the hardbodied models, male and female, who are gyrating and pole-dancing and having sex out there? Does no one find the blend of hedonism and ultraviolence a little much? Could a new society really coalesce around that particular kernel?

The funny thing, and I use funny very loosely here, is that we’ve scene what an American dystopia would look like just last week. And while there is a certain cathartic venting of violent desires, it’s against perceived enemies to the desired order of things, not randos dumped into a thunderdome scenario while onlookers hump each other. It seems to me that the pitch Randall Flagg made to Lloyd Henried in prison—don’t you want the chance to get even with the kind of people who did this to you?—is a much more compelling and plausible way to structure New Vegas. Everyone there is attracted to the darkness Flagg embodies, so promise them the chance to extinguish the light (specifically in Boulder)! Turning the place into a sex club with a death-match arena in the middle just rings hollow. It’s a Hollywood idea of what fascism looks like.

That said, I do like how Flagg himself was portrayed in this episode, even though none of his people seem all that afraid of him. (About the worst he affects anyone is killing Lloyd’s boner when Julie keeps dropping his name during foreplay.) Having his giant face on a jumbotron suddenly stop and look directly at Dayna even as his speech keeps playing on is an effective, understated scare, while having him fake his own death at her hands only to pop up and credit Stanislavsky himself for teaching him how to act is a great bit that points to Flagg’s dark sense of humor at other people’s expense. Aleksander Skarsgåd has largely chosen to underplay the character; when Dayna kills herself before he can extract the identity of the third spy from her, he doesn’t rage around his office, he simply plops down on the couch and sighs, like he just got a stressful email at work. This Flagg is cool, calm, and collected—a strong contrast with Mother Abigail, who in this episode is angry, desperate, sorrowful, and, finally, MIA.

Oh, and “Don’t Fear the Reaper” plays over the closing credits, a hat tip to both the book (which uses the song’s lyrics as an epigraph) and the 1994 miniseries (which used the song over its grim opening credits to great effect). Insert cowbell joke here, if you absolutely must, but just know I’m reporting you to Flagg for it.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch The Stand Episode 5 ("Fear And Loathing In New Vegas") on CBS All Access