“The Langoliers” opens with a red-eye from Los Angeles to Boston and a plane full of people who simply are not there anymore. Ten passengers wake to find the rest gone, leaving behind personal belongings and even surgical implants. It aired on ABC over two nights, May 14–15, 1995, at 1½ hours each. It is not a good miniseries. It is a fascinating one, and those are different things.
Trailer, via CheesyPeteza.
A Plane Full of Empty Seats
The premise is pure Stephen King, from the novella in the four-part anthology Four Past Midnight. Tom Holland wrote and directed. Mitchell Galin and David R. Kappes produced for Laurel Entertainment. What the passengers get is a horror story about time itself — they become accidental witnesses to the mysteries of time, and the mystery does not explain itself kindly.
The survivors are a strong roster. Brian Engle (David Morse) is a pilot deadheading home after his ex-wife died in a fire. Nick Hopewell (Mark Lindsay Chapman) is an MI6 assassin on his way to a final mission. Laurel Stevenson (Patricia Wettig) is a schoolteacher who answered a personal ad. Don Gaffney (Frankie Faison) is a tool-and-die worker going to meet his first granddaughter. Albert Kaussner (Christopher Collet) is a violinist headed to music school in Boston. Bethany Simms (Kimber Riddle) is a rebellious teenager bound for Worcester and convinced she is bound for drug rehab.
Bob Jenkins (Dean Stockwell) is a mystery writer with a gift for deduction. Dinah Bellman (Kate Maberly) is a blind girl traveling for surgery to restore her eyesight. Rudy Warwick (Baxter Harris) is a sleepy businessman. Craig Toomy (Bronson Pinchot) is a bond trader, and the least stable person on the aircraft.
Brian and Nick find the cockpit empty, and Brian takes the controls. Craig demands an explanation, then has a psychotic episode. Dinah, a telepath, enters his thoughts. That is the engine of the whole thing: a man coming apart while a blind girl watches from inside his head.
Bangor, Maine, and Nothing Alive
Brian cannot reach air traffic control or any other flight, so he redirects from Boston to Bangor. Craig is furious — he insists he has an important business meeting. What they find on the ground is worse than the empty plane. The airport is deserted and without power. Matches will not light. Sounds have no echo. Food has no taste. Everything is dull and lifeless.
Bob works out that the plane passed through a time rip and landed in a past moment empty of people and energy. Dinah hears a strange crackling in the distance. That sound is the clock running.
Craig gets worse. He hallucinates his abusive father. He finds a gun in an airport locker and takes Bethany hostage. Albert counterattacks and is shot — and the bullet falls harmlessly to the ground. Nick ties Craig’s arms and says they have to leave before the source of the noise arrives. Restrained, Craig tells Dinah about the Langoliers, the monsters his father warned him about, the ones that chase and eat lazy children.
The Cast Does the Lifting
Maberly got the part after a call asking her to audition in New York with a day’s notice while she was in England. Sue Martin, who is registered as legally blind, taught her to act blind and use a cane. That detail matters, because Dinah is the one who has to sell the psychic material without it turning silly, and she mostly does.
Wettig took Laurel knowing the role risked the “sensitive listener” parts that had already stereotyped her. She told the press she “should probably resign myself to it.” She is right about the trap. Laurel exists to receive information for most of the runtime.
The cast plus extras exceeded 150 people, and you can feel the scale in the airport sequences. The empty terminal is the best thing in the production. It is also the cheapest-looking, which is the tension the whole miniseries lives inside.
What the Crackling Sound Is Worth
Here is the problem. “The Langoliers” has one great idea and three hours to fill. The first night is genuinely unnerving — the disappearing passengers, the surgical implants left behind, the slow realization that the world outside has gone flat. The monsters are the weakest part of the story. King’s concept works as dread. It does not work as a creature.
Pinchot is the other issue. Craig Toomy is written as a Type A bond trader with a father in his head, and Pinchot plays every note at full volume from his first scene. It is a performance with no floor. Stockwell, by contrast, is the reason to watch. He gets the deduction scenes, he gets Albert as a Watson, and he makes exposition sound like a man thinking rather than a script explaining.
The miniseries also has a real insight buried in the mechanics. A world without echo, without taste, without fire is a world where nothing you do leaves a mark. That is a better horror than any monster, and the show knows it before it forgets.
This is a 5.9 of 10. Worth watching once for Stockwell, for Maberly, and for the airport. Not worth defending as a whole.
Key facts
– Score: 5.9 of 10 (Metacritic 59/100)
– Network: ABC
– Aired: May 14–15, 1995
– Episodes: 2, at 1½ hours each
– Created by: Stephen King, from Four Past Midnight
– Written and directed by: Tom Holland
– Cast: Patricia Wettig, Dean Stockwell, Kate Maberly, David Morse, Bronson Pinchot, Mark Lindsay Chapman, Frankie Faison, Christopher Collet, Baxter Harris, Kimber Riddle, Stephen King
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.