THE MIST: The 2017 TV Series VS The 2008 Movie & The 1980 Book
*Spoilers Ahead*
Not entirely true to the original Stephen King 1980 book plot or the 2007 film, the new 2017 tv show The Mist offers a new take on the story, with new storylines and sub plots, while keeping some of the original elements of the previous versions of the story.
The Common Premise
The story is set in a small American town, Bridgeville, Maine (originally Bridgton, Maine), which is suddenly covered in a strange mist. If you’ve read a few Stephen King stories, nothing good ever happens in Maine! In the book and film versions, the mist appears after a strange thunderstorm, during which the power is lost, so most residents go to pick up supplies from town in the morning. In the tv show, we see the mist approaching the town slowly over a period of a day or so, during which everyone in town goes about their lives as usual and the electricity is actually only lost a couple of days after the mist arrives.
In all cases, the residents of the town find themselves in various locations, essentially trapped inside stores, with strange monsters roaming free outside and no way to communicate with their loved ones or call for help. Issues like limited supplies, ongoing rivalries and religious interpretations of what the mist is all about arise and our characters are called to find effective solutions. Of course, there’s also a lot of panic and monsters and a lot of people die in the process, because it is of course a horror story.
The Protagonist And His Family
In the book and film the main protagonist is David with his little son Billy, who get trapped in the local supermarket. David’s wife is left home at the start of the events and is killed off by monsters. While her death is uncertain in the book, it is confirmed in the movie.
For the tv show, a new protagonist has been created, Kevin Copeland. He finds himself at the police station when the mist arrives, then moves to the church and eventually heads towards the mall, in order to find and rescue his wife Eve and teenage daughter Alex, who get trapped at the mall from the beginning. Kevin seems strong and determined, the classic movie protagonist who somehow despite being an ordinary guy manages to fight monsters and other people and still survive.
A new sub plot about Alex getting raped the night before the mist has been written into the tv show and becomes a big plot device as the series goes on, with some characters blaming the rapist for the mist and the rest blaming Alex herself for allegedly lying about it altogether. While at the beginning we believe the rapist is Jay, the chief’s son whom she likes, we soon find out the real rapist is her best friend Adrian, who is actually mentally ill and eventually kills his father and tries to kill Kevin too.
Towards the end Jay actually sacrifices his life to save Alex, after her family is thrown out of the mall to die, allowing them to escape to the car. Kevin reverses the car towards the mall’s glass door, shattering it and thus letting the mist kill everyone inside.
Mia & Bryan/Jonah
Two new characters are created for the tv show to act as supporting characters to Kevin and help him in his attempt to get back to his family. Mia, a drug addict who kills a man at the beginning of the show and is put in prison for trespassing on her mother’s old house and Bryan, a soldier with memory loss, who is the first person to see the mist at the start of the show and runs into town to warn everyone. Of course the police chief doesn’t believe his story and puts him inside a cell next to Mia. When the mist arrives Kevin frees both of them so they can help him find his family and slowly a romance develops between Mia and Bryan.
While Mia’s story is all about feeling guilty about her mother and eventually overcoming it and wanting a better life for herself in the future, the moment she begins to be hopeful and trust Bryan (who by that point has found out his real name is Jonah), he abandons her, in order to find out who he really is and why his memories are gone. His backstory is never really explained and is left for the next season.
The Crazy Religious Lady
In all versions of the story, the main antagonist is an old lady, who starts from the sidelines and slowly takes control and gathers followers around her. In the original plot, Mrs Carmody is with the group in the supermarket and tries to convince everyone that the mist will go away if they offer a human sacrifice. When she tries to have the protagonist’s son killed she gets shot in the abdomen and dies.
The tv show introduces a different crazy old lady, Nathalie Raven. She is the protagonists’ neighbour and is shown to be in tune with nature. As soon as the mist arrives, her husband is shot in the head in front of her and she seeks refuge in the church, where she claims to communicate with insects and slowly turns the congregation to her side, leading up to a test of faith between her and the priest, with them going outside and the priest being dragged away by the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
After gaining full control of the situation, she convinces everyone that the mist is here as a punishment for Alex’s rape and that the only solution is to offer the rapist to the mist. While everybody agrees, all but the police chief and a couple refuse to follow her to the mall, so she locks them inside the church and sets it on fire before she leaves. Shortly after the couple is also left to be eaten alive by rats on the way to the mall. Inside the mall, she convinces the chief to let his son out in the mist, as they both believe him to be the rapist and wait for the mist to go away. At the end of the series, Mrs Raven dies with the rest of the people inside the mall, when the mist is let in.
Where Did The Mist Come From?
During the events of the story we find out about the mysterious Arrowhead Project, developed in the nearby military base. The book leaves a lot of the information about it up for speculation, the film explains it as an experiment to look into other dimensions and in the tv show it is not explained at all. However, Bryan/Jonah starts to have flashbacks about his time with the project and it is implied he played an important role in whatever experiments were taking place at the base. At the end of the first season, Johan and the last surviving soldier are on their way towards the base, hinting that the Arrowhead Project will finally be explained in season 2.
While in the book and film the mist seems to already contain certain monsters like giant insects and pterodactyl like animals, in the tv show the nature of the mist is not as fixed. While insects like moths and spiders do feature heavily, the mist appears to adapt to each person’s fears and character and create a nightmare designed especially for them. Kevin sees and fights other versions of himself in the mist, while Mia confronts her dead mother and Nathalie sees her husband and a particularly creepy baby who eventually kills her. My personal favourite was the priest’s death, by the four horsemen, reflecting exactly what he believed would happen in the apocalypse. While the question of faith is raised within the series, it appears that there is no real answer and each person gets what they believe in.
The Ending
So far the ending has been different in all versions of the story. Originally, some of the surviving characters drive away into the mist. It is never explained whether the mist would end, if it has covered the entire world nor do we ever find out what the Arrowhead Project was all about. This type of open ending is characteristic of Stephen King stories, where you usually don’t know if the events of the story you’re reading are in fact how the world ends. This is usually achieved through power failures and loss of any phone networks. Other common themes are people being trapped in a specific location, cut off from the rest of the world so that the reader never finds out what is happening outside that location.
The movie version of the story changed the ending into a more sinister version. In the last few minutes of the film, the main characters who have managed to escape to the car eventually run out of gas, without knowing whether the mist will ever go away. In order to avoid being killed by the monsters, they agree that David will shoot them so they can die quickly. As soon as he has killed all of them and is now waiting for some monster to come for him, the mist subsides, the army arrives victorious and the whole incident seems to be over, leaving him devastated at the realisation that if he had waited a few more minutes the others would still be alive.
The tv show of course is far from over, but so far most groups of survivors that we have seen are dead. The church group was burnt alive, the rest were killed by the mist monsters in the mall. Two working cars, one heading to Arrowhead and the other driving as far away as possible hold the remaining survivors, while the potential of more people hiding in their houses waiting to be introduced in season 2 still remains. At this point however, we are more or less at the point where the original storyline ends, leaving season 2 free to explore any different directions the creators want and allowing the tv show to stand on its own, without any ties to the original story.
As a teaser of a larger conspiracy and what is to come in the next season, in the last moments of the series, Kevin and his family reach the train station, where a train is approaching. Despite originally regarding it as their salvation, when the train stops they see the windows are all covered and when the doors open convicts with orange jumpsuits are pushed out by soldiers, leading them to believe that they are trying to feed the mist and opening up the potential that the mist was hardly an accident at all.
Where Does The Mist Fit Into Current Tv Programming?
The Mist is best described as if Stranger Things and American Horror Story had a baby, but the baby did not inherit any of its parents’ talent. There has been a lot of criticism about the violence, gore and graphic deaths in The Mist. While it is not uncommon for people to die in a horror show, be it on film or tv, the way you handle deaths can play a big role in how they are received.
A classic slasher movie will have a handful of characters that you expect to see die in horrible ways and it is in a way part of the fun. They are there to die and maybe one of the original group might survive in the end. Within the space of a two hour movie, most filmmakers only have time for the main events of the plot and not too much backstory and character development. Tv shows on the other hand are traditionally much better in developing their characters, giving everyone a backstory and helping the audience connect with them. When those characters die, the audience cares about it and is emotionally affected.
American Horror Story has managed to do this in every season perfectly. While we know that most of the characters will die and die horribly too, by that time we have already connected with them. They have a full personality, a story. In The Mist, the characters who die are not important. They are simply there to be killed in various ways and the audience doesn’t actually care. From the church group, the only characters that matter are Nathalie and the chief. None of the others are given much backstory and are only there as plot devices to show that Nathalie is crazy. In the mall we only focus on Eve and Alex and their interactions with the rest. We never see what the other people are doing so when they all die we don’t actually care.
Knowing that the main idea of the plot has been done successfully within two hours in the past, the lack of character development for the rest of the new characters feels like a big waste. Most of the extra time has been given to develop Kevin and his family, who all things considered are still not particularly interesting. In fact, the characters who get the best character arks are Mia and Adrian, who to put it very simply go from being bad to good and vice versa respectively.
Regarding the similarities with Stranger Things, the Mist is trying to create the whole monster government conspiracy plotline, inserting the character of Bryan/Jonah, who was the one who was experimented on and has escaped just like Eleven, the whole experiment leading to monsters being unleashed into the peaceful town and the ending implying that everything was planned in advance. However, Stranger Things gained a lot more points for the impressive child actors, the 80s nostalgia and the general atmosphere of the show, something The Mist lacks both in terms of the acting and any unique atmosphere.
The Verdict
As a Stephen King fan I did actually enjoy The Mist. Is it the best series ever? Not by far. But it is enjoyable nonetheless as a decent scary tv show with monsters. I can of course not deny that the series has its faults, particularly the fact that while a lot of the ideas are there, The Mist lacks its own unique style that would make it stand out the way Stranger Things or American Horror Story do. However, now that the show is done with the original storyline and all the undeveloped characters have been killed off, the remaining few characters are finally a good number of people to focus on in the next season so as to be able to pay sufficient attention to each one and also advance the story further.
I firmly believe that this series has the potential to become great in the following season (or seasons) and I hope the creators will take a lot of the feedback into account and push the boundaries beyond just being a standard American slasher in tv form. All this series needs is to find its own voice and it could really be great.
Score: 7/10
