Editorials
What’s the Right Way to End the World?
Comparing how the finales of Carter’s ‘X-Files’ and Morgan and Wong’s ‘Millennium’ both explore the end of the world in different ways
With the highly anticipated return of The X-Files having now come and gone at this point, it’s left many people—hardcore fans and casual watchers, alike—asking questions like if this return was worth it in the first place. While discussions over the series’ merits and detriments have been highly catalogued, another topic that’s been brought to the surface are the pandemic-like events that Chris Carter chose to end the tenth season on. The controversial move left a lot of people scratching their heads, but long-time fans of Chris Carter’s body of work were also noticing that the plotting bore a lot of resemblances to another highly contentious finale of one of his shows, that of Millennium’s second season, “The Time is Now.” A finale that he worked incredibly hard to scrub the record of.
Millennium is not a show that is on many people’s radars, and admittedly, a lot of the people that stuck with it were just due to residual X-Files fan fervor. The show had an infinitely bleaker perspective than The X-Files did, an arguably less engrossing mythology behind it, a heavy Biblical background, and it was lacking the balancing act that was created through Mulder and Scully’s repartee. Frank Black’s sounding board and moral center was a yellow house. When Millennium was heading into its second season, Carter was too encumbered not only running the fifth season of The X-Files, but also readying the series’ feature film. In his stead, Carter appointed Glen Morgan and James Wong—two voices that were an integral part of The X-Files early seasons, and contributors to Millennium’s freshman year—to be in charge of shaping Millennium’s second year as he stepped down.
While Millennium is not a very good show, it’s second season is, and it’s absolutely worth checking out when you’ve got the time. It’s kind of incredible how much Morgan and Wong are able to shape this dour series into a serviceable, creepy vehicle that legitimately has something to say about the nature of evil and the end of times. The series’ biggest story point was that the impending millennium was ultimately going to signal the apocalypse, with the mysterious “Millennium Group” trying to police and monitor instances correlating to this event. While Carter mostly kept his foot off of the apocalypse pedal, Morgan and Wong drop a brick on it, with their finale full-on embracing the end of the world.
The conduit to bring about all of this is a deadly virus that is unleashed that kills 75 percent of the world’s population (just look at that promo ad for this finale and try to not get excited), including the main character’s wife, putting some very real consequences on the table. Morgan and Wong are dealing with the highest of stakes and it’s the payoff to what the entire show has been leading up to, with it being exactly what you’d hope for. Adversely, in The X-Files’ “My Struggle II,” Carter introduces an eerily similar pandemic that appears to be killing most of the population, except for those that are alien abductees or have alien DNA.
Furthermore, Carter’s plague does have a slap-dash cure to it, but a highly implausible one at that, and especially one that couldn’t really save what’s left of humanity. In “The Time is Now” the episode makes a point of how there is no cure here and that this is just a virus that wipes out whatever’s in its path. This stays in touch with the bleak theme of the show as well as the shadow corporations that are behind it all.
With Carter’s current attitude towards pandemics, it’s not surprising to see that when Millennium returned for its third season (with Morgan and Wong gone, to boot), it was Carter who retconned all of this effective apocalypse material. Carter retroactively greatly reduces the threat of the breakout (to a mere couple thousand casualties!)—in a means that doesn’t make any sense, no less—in a fashion that I fear will likely be done on The X-Files too, since the show can’t continue to operate in a mostly-dead world. It’s just legitimately insulting to an audience to be all, “Yeah, that stuff that you all saw happen didn’t actually happen,” and it’s the best strategy that he comes up with here. Morgan and Wong take big swings, but mean it, whereas Carter does them for big flashy moments, not thinking through the consequences. It’s a big finale moment to tell us that the world is dying, but in the light of day of a premiere, it’s all too easy to pull back on that.
What’s also crucial here is how the news of a population decimating pandemic is introduced and dealt with on a show. In “My Struggle II” Carter chooses to illustrate his doom and gloom through tacky news reports, heavy exposition, and last-minute developments. A lot of this death happens off screen and within minutes, with this sort of thing being exactly what would have benefited from a classic X-Files two-parter. Never before has the series tried to cram so much in, in so little time.
Over on Morgan and Wong’s Millennium, sure there is exposition, but the series executes this much more with raw emotion, Biblical good and evil, and letting this story have an entire season to breathe rather than a mere episode. That being said, in this episode alone, they straight up show you a mind breaking in half (in what’s the Lynchian thing I’ve seen on TV this side of Twin Peaks). These guys devote ten minutes to psychological mind fuckery to convey the feeling of the apocalypse, choreographed to a breathtaking soundscape that’s—no question—one of the best thing I’ve ever seen on television, while The X-Files gives you Joel McHale talking to a camera and the expectation to fill in blanks during commercial breaks.
Granted, Wong and Morgan supposedly attempted such a ballsy finale because they thought it was pretty likely that the series was going to be canceled. That being said, I sincerely doubt they would have abandoned this plan had they stayed on as showrunners, or that they didn’t have an idea of where they were going with this direction. Millennium would have been an entirely different beast after this point, but a show all about the apocalypse obviously needs to address the apocalypse at some point.
With the creative, different, disturbing way that Morgan and Wong presented their pandemic, it really makes you think how they would have put together “My Struggle II” if they were given the opportunity. Morgan and Wong were apart of the few select people that Carter brought back for The X-Files’ revival. In fact, they even share the executive producer credit with him, in lieu of Fran Spotnitz, so it’s clear that there’s no bad blood in the waters, and that he still values what they have to say creatively. Carter still very much seems to be calling the shots though. His instincts on the matter seem completely counter intuitive to theirs, but with the backlash Carter himself saw this year over The X-Files’ return, maybe in some twisted symmetry they’ll be the ones penning or directing the next premiere, cleaning up Carter’s mess. Only this time, I’m sure they’ll actually be improving on the matter.
Five decades ago, Stephen King published the story of a bullied girl with telekinetic powers and forever changed the world of horror.
Carrie follows a high school misfit who seeks revenge for a hideous prank by psychically destroying her senior prom. The name Carrie White has become synonymous with the concept of a formal dance thanks to a flawless adaptation from Brian De Palma. Now fifty years after the film’s release, Mike Flanagan is putting his own stamp on the troubling story.
Rather than a feature film, the writer/director will expand King’s relatively slim debut novel into an eight-episode miniseries for Amazon Prime set to premiere on October 7.
Flanagan is no stranger to the world of Stephen King. A long-time Constant Reader, he first made waves with his daring adaptation of Gerald’s Game (2017), a novel many fans considered un-filmable. His underrated Doctor Sleep merges the disparate plot of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with King’s original source material, and his 2024 genre-bending tearjerker The Life of Chuck faithfully executes one of the author’s most metaphysical novellas.
He’s currently mired in pre-production for an expansive adaptation of The Dark Tower series, keystone to King’s connected universe, and Warner Bros. recently announced that Flanagan will helm a new version of The Mist, King’s 1980 novella which sees a small Maine town overrun by otherworldly monsters.
Considering the vast array of the author’s previously unadapted material, an obvious question arises. Why reimagine Carrie in 2026? Noting the timeless nature of the content, Flanagan expressed his desire to bring the story of a bullied girl into modern times, mirroring his approach to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. He explained, “The only way to approach it was to build something new out of the ingredients of Carrie. Otherwise, there’s really no purpose in trying to retread ground that’s been so beautifully walked before.”
His miniseries will maintain the novel’s bloody bookends while delivering “big surprises” along the way.
A New Prom Night Nightmare
The roughly 60-second teaser introduces Summer H. Howell as Carrie White just before the moment of catastrophe. Standing in a prom dress, she smiles at her applauding classmates with an ominous crown perched upon her head. Moments later, Carrie unleashes a rage-filled scream into the night air while promgoers rush for the exit doors. But careful examination of this scene shows Carrie wearing a different, albeit dirty dress as she seems to telekinetically punish her peers.
In an exclusive first look with Entertainment Weekly, Flanagan explains that in his version of the story, “the events of that prom are going to be completely different.” An open trunk emitting a crimson glow does hint at the pig’s blood dumped on Carrie’s head, but it’s likely Flanagan’s formal dance will be a different kind of horror altogether. Despite these changes, the series may end with the widespread destruction outlined in the source material. Unlike any previous adaptations, King’s novel ends with the near-total destruction of Chamberlain, Maine. A flaming street in Flanagan’s trailer promises similar carnage no matter what prank sparks Carrie’s deadly revenge.
The Monstrous Addition of Social Media
On the opposite end of this fiery conclusion is an extreme act of bullying that brings together the story’s main cast. King’s novel begins as Carrie gets her first period while showering in the girls’ locker room. Completely unaware of the concept of menstruation, the sheltered girl thinks she’s bleeding to death. Her classmates respond with vitriolic rage. Led by ultra-mean girl Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), they mock the terrified teen while pelting her with tampons. Glimpses of this disturbing event reveal that Flanagan has excised the scene’s nudity while adding a seismic update. As Carrie sobs in the shower stall, Chris and her friends film the breakdown with their phones.
Other scenes note the presence of social media, bringing King’s fifty-year-old story into the digital age.
Flanagan’s adaptation promises to explore the destructive power of social media, an often invisible entity with a potential for harm rivaling Carrie’s own powers. While King’s tormented heroine suffers in front of a small group of girls, Flanagan’s version of the incident will likely become a viral video, potentially circling the globe on social media. Similar to Katt Shea’s criminally underrated The Rage: Carrie 2, which includes elements of revenge porn exploitation, Flanagan’s modern retelling will distinguish itself by exploring the nebulous cruelty of online bullying, a force ten times more powerful than the irl pranks King first envisioned.
A Completely Reimagined White Family
In addition to modernizing these canon events, Flanagan hints at updates to Carrie’s oppressive upbringing at the hands of her mother, Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan). Dead before the novel begins, we never meet Carrie’s domineering father Ralph, known to carry a bible alongside his gun. Flanagan’s White household will be an altogether different beast. In his version of the story, Carrie and her mother have been hidden away in the unassuming home, forced out of hiding by Ralph’s unexpected death. Perhaps we will finally meet this elusive man whose shadow hangs over his wife and child. Considering the White family’s fundamentalist lifestyle, this reimagining hints at tradwife culture and a home ruled by staunch patriarchal control.
Whereas King’s Carrie has been tormented by her classmates since Kindergarten, Flanagan’s Carrie will be a wide-eyed newcomer to public school, eager to make friends and engage with her peers. We glimpse Carrie cozying up to Chris and the equally popular Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) as she navigates a new social scene. Of course, we know this kindness is part of an elaborate plot designed to lull Carrie into a false sense of camaraderie, setting up an atrocious act of public humiliation. These brief moments of feigned compassion put Sue’s own complicity into question. Will Flanagan’s version of the character find the courage to defend Carrie from vicious bullies or will she succumb to peer pressure and join in the mob mentality?
Perhaps the biggest deviation from King’s original text is the relationship between Carrie and her mother. King’s Margaret White is a horrifically abusive religious zealot whose worldview has been hardened by internalized misogyny. She shames Carrie for menstruating, locks her in a closet to “pray,” and regrets not killing her child in infancy. She’s also responsible for Carrie’s social ostracization. Known to berate her neighbors for their “sins,” Margaret forces her daughter to live by an extreme code of conduct and disallows any potential friends lest they corrupt the girl with their worldly ways.
Flanagan’s version of the character is perhaps just as much a victim as Carrie herself. Also trapped inside her home, his Margaret is overly vigilant, her own trauma manifesting as strict control. Describing a more sympathetic depiction of the iconic villain, Flanagan explains, “Our Margaret White is a woman who fiercely loves her daughter and wants to protect her from this world … [She] doesn’t know how to do that and thinks the way to protect her is to close her off; not punitively, but to create this private utopia.”
Despite this potential softening, Sloyan’s Margaret may still have a sharp edge. Though she has appeared in many Flanagan projects, from Hush (2016) to The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), she is best known for her role as the abhorrent Bev Keane in the poignant saga Midnight Mass (2021). Perhaps inspired by King’s Margaret White, Bev is pious and sadistic, willing to punish anyone who does not adhere to her warped approximation of Catholicism.
Flanagan specifically wrote Margaret with Sloyan in mind, likely remembering the actress’s eerie ability to create deceptive empathy and shift our allegiances on a dime.
Expanding Stephen King’s Telekinetic Universe
While most of King’s story deals with an unthinkable prom night in Chamberlain, Maine, large sections of the semi-epistolary novel see experts debating the nature of telekinesis. Do Carrie’s frightening abilities represent a new phase in human evolution or is the prom night carnage merely a fluke? King settles the debate with a shocking denouement in which a young mother recounts her infant daughter’s ability to dangle her crib toys in midair. We’re left to wonder if she will become another tormented girl who surprises the world with metaphysical strength.
Flanagan plans to build out this brief scene while amplifying themes of female empowerment. After introducing our main cast of characters, episode two will open with an unrelated story in which we meet another girl with the TK gene. Each subsequent chapter will expand this world, building out a roster of telekinetic young women. Considering King’s fondness for stories about powerful kids, often described as possessing “the shining,” Constant Readers will no doubt have their eyes peeled for various Easter Eggs nodding to the author’s vast catalogue.
Giving Carrie Her Own Voice
Perhaps the most striking distinction in Flanagan’s new trailer is the extent to which we hear Carrie’s voice. The sneak peek is fully narrated by the titular prom queen as she demands accountability. “I want to know why,” she explains while detailing Chris’ elaborate plan. Aside from the aforementioned coda, King’s book essentially ends with the aftermath of the prom night tragedy, leaving little time for Carrie to reflect. His shifting narrative does bring the reader into her fragile mind, though not before she’s been cowed by relentless cruelty. We watch Carrie sink into bloodthirsty revenge, but never hear a considered desire for justice or repair.
Flanagan’s original monologue allows Carrie to voice her pain and mourn the life she could have had. We’re also treated to a mug shot-style photo of Chris with a bruised and bandaged face, implying that the mean girl will have to answer for her senseless sadism.
Flanagan is known for filling his series adaptations with heartwrenching speeches that cut to the heart of his thematic intentions, and this teaser seems to follow suit. After years of fans, critics, and scholars analyzing Carrie’s pain, perhaps his modern retelling will offer the titular anti-hero a chance to finally speak for herself.
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