The Dark Tower/Headscratchers

• One thing about the end always bugged me: So, Susannah goes of to live in an alternate dimension where Jake and Eddie are still alive. In the new world, they're brothers. Sounds good, but...in the new world, they're the same age as the Eddie and Jake that Susannah knows. In the main universe, Jake was brought into Mid-World about a decade before Eddie was, and when they began the quest Eddie was in his 20s and Jake was 13. So they should be about equal in age by this time. I understand that it's an alternate universe, but how could this affect when people are born?
  • And also...if the Kat-tet are the same ages in the alternate universe as in the main one, then isn't it only a matter of time until Susannah runs into an alternate version of herself? Isn't this going to cause some drama...?
    • Yeah, it might. But it doesn't matter to me. They're together, and they are in a normal world, which is way better than Roland got. It might get weird if they ran into alternate versions of themselves, but that's not really what the book is about, is it?
• If Jake, Eddie, and Susannah come from an Alternate Universe in which Stephen King does not exist, why is it that when Eddie and Roland look through the second unfound door on the beach in The Drawing of the Three and see through Detta's eyes, Eddie remembers a scene from The Shining, a movie adaptation of a book by Stephen King?
  • It's possible that a version of The Shining was written by another author in this universe (Stephen King may be unique in the multiverse, but Dean Koontz ain't.)
    • There was actually a hoax perpetrated on eBay a while back, where someone offered for sale - and then withdrew - a first edition of The Shining with the name Richard Bachman on the front cover.
      • Which is probably the answer--in the universe Eddie et. al. are from, Bachman wrote books sufficiently similar to King's oeuvre to cause similar movies.
        • That's not it. Richard Bachman is Stephen King's pseudonym.
          • Perhaps Richard Bachman exists in their universe, and uses "Stephen King" as his pseudonym?
            • Not the first time I've heard that theory. I've even seen fanfics about it.
  • If you've seen The Shining, and read the book as well, they're different enough that Kubrick might just have made the movie without the book existing at all.
    • That's what I thought; it was a subtle Take That. King's annoyance with Kubrick's changes is legendary.
    • Or maybe the events at the Overlook Hotel really happened in the alternate universe Eddie came from, and the scene he remembered was from a documentary about the tragedy.
    • Or more likely, a fictional film based on the real-life events.
    • I always assumed that in the world Eddie came from The Shining was an original screenplay.
• Was Farson consciously in league with the Crimson King, or just manipulated by Walter towards CK's ends?
  • Wasn't it implied Farson was Walter originally? Though the recent comics seem to show them to be different.
    • The revised version of The Gunslinger has Roland considering how Farson was an alias of Marten (AKA Walter) in a flashback. The last book, however, has a scene from Walter's point of view where he thinks back to working with Farson. I suspect that the first reference is incorrect, and was due to Roland being misinformed.
      • Or else Walter/Flagg/etc. was Clark Kenting again. He's done it before as Marten.
      • Regarding the original question - Farson uses the Crimson Kings eye glyph, so he probably was in on the conspiracy.
• The body swap between Jake and Oy. Yes, I understand they have a close relationship and all, but there was never any indication that either of them could do that before they just did.
  • Did there need to be? It's a King novel. Stranger things have happened, and it's not like they just walked into it like they'd been doing it for years, either. It was strange for everyone.
• There are many, many problems of detail that are most succinctly explained by "King didn't have a series bible and screwed up".
  • On the plane with Eddie, Roland sees a stewardess in pants and the narration mentions that he could "see the place where her legs became her crotch, something he had never before seen on any woman who was not naked". Then, in Wizard and Glass, Roland meets Susan when the latter is wearing riding breeches.
    • Ah, but Susan did end up naked.
    • Those must have been some loose riding breeches.
  • Maybe each book is from a separate cycle.
    • This is actually a fairly popular theory among the fanbase and would explain some of the detail errors quite nicely.
      • Alternatively, King just made mistakes. Yup, that's it, King just messed up when he wrote it. Simple as that. But remember that a very crucial part of the story is the natural fallibility of writers and story tellers.
      • When King revised The Gunslinger he said in the intro that he had decided that it was time to begin the overall revisions (emphasis mine). He hasn't got around to revising the rest yet and probably never will, just as he'll never finish The Plant.
• When the Crimson King became trapped on the Dark Tower's balcony why didn't he simply jump off of it and renter the tower. He had already made himself immortal so there wasn't any chance of the fall killing him.
  • The Dark Tower itself was basically a big ol' hunk of pure magic. It doesn't have to follow normal rules of gravity.
  • Maybe it was an overbuilt balcony for use in bad weather?
  • It was also possible that A)The Tower trapped him there, and wouldn't let him jump, and B)If he did get out and re-entered that he would just end up on another balcony (or possibly the same one). The Tower has always seemed to be on Roland's side.
    • Come on, that was the least of the problems with the King's appearance in the seventh book! That whole climax pretty much ruined the whole series. It was all, The tower is closer...The tower is closer... on the back of each book for seven omnibuses...and after all that build-up that crappy cop-out. Why does everyone complain about the epilogue when the climax was the worst thing that King ever wrote?
      • First thing is that King doesn't plot. He's said as much in his books -- when he does, he produces crap. So the whole Dark Tower cycle is one Ass Pull after another. As far as stuff breaking the suspension of disbelief is concerned, I have far bigger complaints with the deus ex machinas that crop up again and again, to such a point that King starts self-referencing it and making a joke out of it at Dandelo's house. So you have to forgive some of the rambling for that if you're going to read the book. The second thing is that everything in Roland's world is being affected by the failing of the Beams. It would not have made sense for the Crimson King to be unaffected by it all -- if it had and he'd just been waiting around for Roland to show up, people would have been complaining that he was doing an Orcus on His Throne. Roland's quest isn't so much about good vs. evil as it is order vs. chaos -- the ultimate goal is to keep the Tower standing and thus prevent everything falling into chaos. The Crimson King's status by the end of the novel is a very, very nice subversion of the standard End of Level Boss that most fantasy goes for. It's consistent with the universe around it. It's consistent with Roland's character at each point. It does not resort to Aunt Fucking Talitha's cross as a Chekhov's Gun to take out the King. It's a bloody and final confrontation, as Stephen King warned us all it would be. I don't regard it as the worst thing he ever wrote; I reserve that for kiddie sex in the denouement of It. The climax works.
    • Except that it's Blatant Lies and makes King nothing more than a cocktease. The last line of the revised Gunslinger said that Roland would face the CK "in some unimaginable final battle". Then six books later we finally get to their confrontation and find out, so solly cholly, that's in a future iteration of this cycle that you'll never see! Cue Nelson Muntz's laugh. I don't know which is worse: if this fake-out was done on purpose or if it wasn't!
      • Well he said an "unimaginable final battle", didn't he? How many of you were imagining the confrontation to be just Roland shooting grenades out of the sky thrown by a gibbering and insane former-king while some Idiot Savant Reality Warper erased the crazy bastard out of existence? No one? I rest my case. Blatant Lies, my ass.
• Randall Flagg's incredibly lame death, and the equally lame backstory that was revealed along with it, bugs the absolute crap out of me. Screw the banality of evil, Flagg was a badass, and King let Mordred Deschain kill him just to give Mordred some credibility as a threat...
  • Then he have immediately lost his credibility by being killed by a talking wombat. Besides, he would have died from radiation sickness anyway. And don't forget about incredibly stupid Crimson King. Actually the author states it's intended - he wanted to show that evil is prone to self-destruction and that Roland is his own worst enemy. Still, he chose the lamest way possible to achieve this.
    • Oy was killed by Mordred- it just gave Roland the chance to wake up and then blast the living shit out of him.
  • Randall Flagg is pretty much one of my favorite literary characters, and that scene hurt like you wouldn't believe. Worse, Mordred was kind of a cool character, albeit with somewhat contrived origins, and he had potential which was absolutely ruined by that scene. Way to shoot yourself in the foot, King.
  • I personally thought his death was brilliant, as was Mordred's and the Crimson King's. Steve didn't want to show villainy as cool or even capable of overcoming good. He wanted to portray evil as exactly what it is: Initially appealing, but an ultimately empty and pathetic choice. Flagg died due to his own arrogance, Mordred died because of his inexperience, and Los died(or rather, was erased from existence) because he was insane and incapable of good judgement. Remember, people: The Wizard is just a bumhug. He was shown to be this as far back as The Stand, when his control began to wane and revealed that while he was good at launching a plan, he was terrible at keeping it in motion. Just like a real-life sociopath.
• Just to be sure, Randall is Flagg is Walter is Marten? that seems what it was set up like.
  • Yes. But not Farson.
  • Roland guesses at one point that Flagg might have been Farson as well, but the books never make it clear. The comic series shows Farson talking to Marten, and makes Farson out to be more an incarnation of the Crimson King.
• Also, Remember the Purple Grass? what the fuck happened to that?
  • I think that was just supposed to represent the Tower itself.
  • The rose is in an abandoned lot. The purple could be paint?
• Was this Inspired By the 19th-century poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came?
  • ...yes.....reading books is a wonderful thing? Clearly not...
  • I was just wondering, if so, why it isn't mentioned here or The Other Wiki or somewhere.
    • Because it is mentioned both here and in the other wiki. Jeez, it's astonishingly obvious.
      • Including the entire poem in the End Notes to 'The Dark Tower' might have been a hint...
      • Another hint would be King mentioning that it was inspired by the poem...
• In relation to the errors mentioned above, it -is- a big part of the book that reality itself was crumbling like a big...crumbly thing.
• If the wheelchairs worked so well in that realm Eddie stole from, why not try a car?
  • The highways are all jam-packed with derelict cars. They wouldn't have been able to get anywhere through all that.
  • Also, a wheelchair is a very simple device, compared a car. Internal combustion engines aren't as simple as a pair of wheels. And then there's the matter of fuel.
• It is very unclear to me that Roland even knew where the heck he was going before he found The Beam. Confusing.
  • He didn't. That was why he was running after the Man in Black, to find the Path of the Beam.
  • Even after his meeting with Marten, he still doesn't know exactly which direction to travel. When Eddie asks him about it at the start of the third book, he says he's waiting for the jawbone to speak again. But ka leads them to run into Shardik the bear first.
• I can see why Roland let Jake help in the fight against the child-stealing robots. But I don't understand why other kids were present at the battle. I know the robots are efficient...but hide the kids anyway! It doesn't make sense.
  • The multiple kids were to prevent the robots from distinguishing that only one person was moving along the path via scent, and thus see through the ruse. It was pure bad luck that the kids were in the line of fire when the shooting started; they were supposed to be hiding off the road, but one kid broke his leg and they couldn't get him away fast enough.
• This has more to do with the Dark Tower comics than with the main sequence of seven books, but I'll post it here since there isn't a separate page for them. My question is, why does anyone in-universe think John Farson is some leader for democracy and liberation? The comics give literally no indication that he's ever actually implemented any of it in the areas he's taken (and it takes him years to complete the fall of Gilead and the Affiliation). Even worse, he's not shown as particularly "good" or charismatic - the guy walks around in an evil-looking red mask and black attire, for Ka's sake. Yet he's apparently popular enough in-universe to have earned the title of "the Good Man", and there seem to be a bunch of people who are totally direhard supporters of him throughout the Affiliation because of what he's supposedly trying to do.
  • The only explanation I can think of is a combination of "the grass is greener" and them not having the internet. People always tend to by swayed by a particularly charismatic man with new ideas (mind we've only ever seen him in "war mode"; maybe on other occasions to sway people he puts on a suit and tie and is all sweetness and honey). And as word travels more via messanger than wifi, perhaps words of his "goodness" have been exagerrated as word has spread.
  • Reality Is Unrealistic. Real Life is full of tyrants who have been hailed as great liberators. It doesn't seem all that unlikely that people who some alternative to the rule of the gunslingers might fool themselves into thinking Farson was it.
    • Che *ahem* Guevara.
• The Beams created by the Great Old Ones are really weird when you think about them (even though they're supposedly technological in place of the magical beams). On the one hand, Roland describes them as being like lines of force, such as magnetism, gravity, etc. On the other hand, they seem to be almost like physical constructs that can "snap" in two like a rubber band, since the Breaker process apparently involves finding "cracks" and "crevices" in the beam, then expanding them.
  • Even funkier is that the Beams themselves, if not the Tower, appear to be sentient. But the Old Ones didn't make the Beams themselves, those had always existed, what they made were the machines at either end of every Beam that were supposed to help maintain them.
  • I think the cracks and crevices are not literal, they're just a way of describing what Breaking feels like to the psychic Breakers.
  • To be precise: the Beams and the Tower arose with the Prim. However, as the Prim receded and magic slowly went out of the world, the Great Old Ones figured out the existence and purpose of the Tower and the Beams and set about utilising them. To maintain the Beams they built their machines, and knowing the way the Beams and Tower sustained one another they tried to mimic that process by having the machines maintain the Beams and draw power from them as well. But since the Beams and Tower were creations ultimately of magic and not science, they began to degrade. Then the Crimson King's Breakers came along busting several of the Beams which added to the strain on those that remained. Since the Old Ones' technology was partially powered by and depended on the Beams, as the Beams failed, they, too, failed.
• Roland is a descendant of Arthur Eld, that is, King Arthur. But King Arthur only had one child. So Roland's ancestor is the original Mordred! That could actually explain a few things.
  • Well, King Arthur could have other children we don't know about. Also, remember that there was said that other gunslingers, like Cuthbert and Alain from Roland's original ka-tet, also come from the Arthur of Eld bloodline (read: from Arthur's numerous concubines).
  • Somewhere, Roland is described as "long descended from the get of one of Arthur's many gillies," so yeah, a descendant of Arthur but not necessarily of Mordred.
• The initial description of Blaine the Mono, a supersonic monorail, goes on at some length about sound of its approach. But the train is travelling at supersonic speed, so you shouldn't hear anything until it passed.
  • Sound vibrations travel faster through solid material than through gas. Even though Blaine is going faster than the air vibrations, he might still be outraced by the vibration of his track.
• Why, why in the hell did Susannah have to just throw Roland's gun away like a piece of trash?! That bugs this troper so damn much. That object has so much history and love in it, and just thrown away like some dime-store toy...
  • History, yes, but very very bloody history. And love? Have you and I been reading the same series? Roland's guns have always been portrayed as an instrument of death, whether for a righteous purpose or a wicked one, they are still objects designed to kill. And kill was what they did. Susannah throwing the gun away was symbolic of her shedding her role as a gunslinger, and by extension a tool of the White, in order to pursue a normal and happy life as a regular New York woman. Besides; it's pretty heavily implied that, like her memories of the whole journey, the gun will eventually fade from existence. It no longer serves the Beam. It has done it's part and is thus no longer needed. Just as Susannah had done her job, so had that instrument of death done.
  • More specifically, it's invoking the King Arthur legend, particularly given the barrels of Roland's guns are said to have been forged from Excalibur itself. Excalibur, too, was thrown away into a pool of water by Sir Bedevere, the last of Arthur's Round Table after the battle against Mordred, where it disappeared and is presumably waiting for Arthur's return someday. He, too, had some doubts about getting rid of it and had to be commanded by Arthur to do so. If you look at the imagery that King chooses for Susannah disposing of the gun, it's more or less the same.

• How the FUCK can Randall Flagg be killed by a regular spider thing.He survived a NUKE at the end of The Stand.He's also powerful wizard and has a quasi immortality and can reincarnate.I think a thousands of years old wizard like him would be able to defend himself from weak Mordred.
  • (a) Overconfidence. (b) Saying Mordred's a "regular spider thing" is sort of like saying a tank isn't much more than some dinky sort of farm tractor. Mordred is the last of both the Prim and the Old Ones' technology merged together, he's like nothing else in the world. (c) Flagg did defend himself, or thought he did -- by wearing the "Old Ones net" that was supposed to block out telepathy. Not his fault that it didn't work or that Mordred would be able to paralyse him (d) It's implied that Flagg teleported, or had a moment or two to teleport, away from the nuke in The Stand before it went off - in his case, going to another level of the Tower. Not so in this case, he'd been stopped in place and controlled by Mordred.
    • (e) He did survive, and will be back in a later work (unlikely, but still....)