Stephen King's Dark Tower Series Ruined My Life
Skip this if you don't want spoilers. Or if you don't want to know about love, life, ka-tet, and massive disappointment.
Stephen King, an author you've probably heard of, got the first book of the Dark Tower series published in 1982, the same year I was born. It was called The Gunslinger. It was about a cowboy from another world chasing after the evil man in black. And while it was a simple little chase story, a world was created that gripped people's imagination. Characters had begun to be crafted that would become legendary. And a goal and destination was set that needed to be seen through the end: The gunslinger needed to save the world by reaching the Dark Tower.
King delivered more. The Drawing of the Three, The Wastelands, and finally Wizard and Glass in 1997. Three books that continue the story from 1982. Except the last book there didn't really continue the story. It took the story back long before the events of the first book. So the last time the story was continued was in 1991. Honestly, I had to look those dates up and that felt like cheating in a very weird way.
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Okay, so that little bit from above was written in 2017 and didn’t find its way into the first book. And that’s fine because I can use this book series with the A Song of Ice And Fire book series with the Game of Thrones TV series along with the Dark Tower movie. Spoilers follow for all of that.
You motherfuckers are so afraid of having a truly happy ending. The movie sets up the hero Roland the gunslinger to possibly make his 19th trip up to the top of the Dark Tower which is the middle of creation or something like that. Because it’s all been falling apart for basically everyone’s whole lives. That’s slightly exaggerated. All of creation has just been getting worse for a long long while because some dude had gone crazy in a perfect place. We’re really paraphrasing.
But the point is the end to the madness. The lifting of the veil and the mists. Not being afraid that your soul is going to get stuck in a piece of wood or in a bathtub after you die. Letting go of fear and embracing what seems strange. So, Roland climbs to the top and blows his horn and basically enlightenment spreads. People stop doing a whole lot of stuff. Big, massive positive changes begin to happen and it all starts instantly. Slowly at first and then more rapidly as more and more people figure out how to listen and accept their authentic self and stop the destruction and separation and hatred and fear. What needs to be rebuilt is rebuilt better than ever. What needs to be torn down is dismantled and reconstructed into what is most beneficial for all. In a way, nothing is recognizable. So we don’t know what is recognizable, because we’ve stepped through and up. Poison is antidoted and toxicity is dispersed. Things get very clean and colorful.
Like, okay, great. Creating nightmares is fun and all and we all think the dark is scary because we pretend the unknown is scary. But the unknown isn’t always scary. It’s exhilarating, exciting. Even life affirming. But the point is we commonly agree dark is scary so dark things are scary and it’s all very fun but also very basic and very played out.
Let’s look at Game of Thrones, the TV show. The final season had as much money as God and were given as much time and resources to complete the show as fulfillingly as possible. But the people creating the show didn’t care about going that direction. So they did a thing that would satisfy their egos rather than fulfill the spirit of anything.
I was connected with my Higher-Self as the final season was airing. I watched the third episode, the biggest most climactic battle, the army of the dead versus the united army of the living. This was eight years in the making-not long when considering how long stories take to get told, but a decent amount of time has been invested-and there were millions of people eagerly waiting to see what would happen.
The show was known for its “realism.” Main characters were not protected by “plot armor” and horrible tragedy could strike at any moment, for all characters, good and bad. And amazing things could also happen. Divinity and magic were both real.
I had the thing in my chest turned on and responding to many things. My being felt so very alive. I tuned in to the show as it was premiering. The intro and music made my chest feelings expand with joy. I recently learned there is a possible “angel” in the opening credits for that season, the ball of light, basically.
I watched the episode through the eyes of an innocent child with the mind and body of an adult. The episode had great visuals and teased killing off every known character featured in it. My biggest question I had for the episode was if the good guys were going to prevail in the battle or not. The bad guys would win often in the show or at least events would take a sharp turn, turning the resolution into something not seen coming. But that hadn’t been quite true for the last couple years, at least. But since this was wrapping long lasting events up things were back to being unpredictable.
Everything in the episode felt epic to me, fire and darkness and zombies all over the place and dragons and more fire and zombies and then the good guys win. I was thrilled because I was completely opened to the idea of the bad guys winning and killing half the good guys who then would have to run to more bad guys for help or something. It wouldn’t have been a feel good ending. But it was a feel good ending, yay, and I really didn’t expect it.
Because looking back, and even at the time, many people didn’t like it. And honestly it isn’t a very satisfying episode that captures the spirit of the show. But it answered the only question I had for it, which was if the good or bad guys won. The big bad guy, who the audience wanted to know more about after watching him and his army for eight years, got stabbed and killed by an assassin character that had never seen him before, who never interacted together. And that was that for the biggest threat in the show. To a lot of people it was anticlimactic. And couple that with the rest of the episode having very silly and nonsensical decisions made the overall experience for a lot of people not a great one. Which sucks, in an empathetic way, because I had a good one. At that time, I even ended up watching the episode a few times. And I think that was just for me to see the bad guy die again and again. It was this little girl, the youngest main character, a trained killer from her lived life, killing the most ancient evil boogeyman the world had ever seen. I loved it. I thought it was fine. It wasn’t how I would do it however. It doesn’t matter how I’d do it, as my thoughts as a fan are close to those of many others.
A thing the episode did over and over was show catastrophic peril for characters and then cut away from it and then the next time you’d see the character they would be in a different situation or position. It was like the old cliff-hangers, like the animated Batman show, boosting the drama. I never liked it. Neither did Kathy Bates in the movie Misery.
The rest of the season wasn’t liked by the fans any more than this climactic episode or what came before it. And I don’t blame anyone for their dislike. It had such a disgraceful ending to a beloved series. But the end of the books have still not been written yet.
And that takes us back to the Dark Tower series. After seven books, it had an ending that I personally believed was terrible. The story became a loop, and the journey was so horrific to me that starting it over did not seem like a reward. On the start over, King changed minor things at the beginning, allowing the idea that things are going differently.
I guess you could say the whole point overall was the forgetting the face of the father, which is an expression used in the series. And with no beautiful ending being created by the author, it’s his own intentional forgetting preventing him from describing the colors and the forms and the shades and shapes of divine correction. When you’re not imagining that, you’re doing it wrong. I’m absolutely guilty of that, so don’t feel judged.
A Dark Tower movie was made. It changed around even more stuff from the original books. It wasn’t a hit or a success for any number of reasons. Again though, when I originally saw it, my expectations had been lowered to such a point that I enjoyed it because they killed the bad guy in it. Yay. They took seven books and gutted everything and wrapped it up with a couple of gunshots. Classic American storytelling. And they left room to keep telling fun adventure stories. The movie didn’t have the nightmarish ending the book series had. And it also didn’t have the multi-dimensional-universal healing/fixing/correcting that ended up being teased as the payoff in the original series.
It’s that multi-dimensional-universal healing/fixing/correcting bit that people are always stepping back from. Like, I guess it’s a fear of divinity. The closest to an everything gets fixed ending that I’ve seen has been the Battlestar: Galactica reboot in the mid 2000s. And that gets fixed by creating the world/reality that we’re currently living. Now that’s neat.
Heck, there’s even been nine friggin’ Star Wars movies now and all of them avoided the re-creation of paradise, or a return to paradise. It tells the story of a fall from order, a rise of darkness, light shines bright again, and then darkness returns and light shines bright again. There is no rise or return of the light or the good stuff even though that’s always a selling point, just never imaginatively delivered on. That movie Return of the King kinda did it though, in a way, with characters going off in their different directions after their adventure was over. What comes next does not always have to be a repeat of what has already happened. Because that’s not always how it goes.
Here’s a stab at the divine healing that’s always teased but often never told: A blinding white light erupts from everywhere, from all things. The light overtakes all. In the light colors begin to appear. They float and dance. They enter all and enter everything. The light flashes as ever color as each enters everything. A near infinite light show that lasts as long as it needs to. When all the colors have gone into all things the blinding white light begins to fade away. Everything is vibrant as all is newly invigorated with divine bliss. Everything is seen clearer in every way after being freshly integrated with divine bliss. Everything is exactly known and everything is to be itself as all is invigorated and integrated with divine bliss. This divine bliss is the essence of essence, the greatest gift/form/state forever and ever.