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For this most spooky of seasons I decided to branch out and actually watch something. The Langoliers TV miniseries appealed to me from its "liminal spaces" vibe and being a Steven King work, so I watched it.
Seeing that 3 hour mark at the start almost put me out of it; perhaps watching it as two hour and a half long specials would have been better.
The plot follows a group of people taking a long flight to Boston. Several characters are introduced who sleep on the flight; to then suddenly wake up with everyone else on the plane missing. Thankfully one of the sleeping passengers is a pilot. Half of the episode is the characters (and the dorky classic Steven King writer self-insert character) trying to figure out what is happening. When they eventually land the plane, they realize that the world is dead and everybody is gone too. This is the main draw of the series imagery and where the liminal space vibe comes from. Not just an abandoned airport, but the lack of any kind of communication, electricity, movement, even smell and sound is messed up. The characters eventually figure out they went into the past; but the "past" just exists as like a separate dimension always falling just behind of the present. This introduces the concept of the Langoliers themselves, the namesake monsters, who essentially act as the cleanup crew of time who remove the past by eating it. I actually really liked this concept and explanation of otherspaces/liminal dimensions/the backrooms as it has a more realistic reason for its existence and monsters that actually have a purpose beyond just being a spooky entity.
Questability? Actually really high. I think about quests of getting trapped in another world, alternate dimension, or messed up timeline all the time. Like waking up one day and everyone forgetting you exist completely; your wife sees a stranger and screams as you come down for breakfast. Your ID card is blank. etc. What would or could you do? These concepts scare me a lot because I know if I ended up in them the likelihood of me figuring out how to get back or even the concept that you can "get back" at all could just be completely null and void.
Obviously you couldn't rip it one to one but the idea of ending up in a world where nothing works except the few things brought with you is a terrifying concept that immediately made me think of what might happen. The food in the dead world doesn't nourish people, so obviously only the food on the plane would be fought over, with cannibalism eventually happening. Plus if you could say explore this dead world but only a fraction of regular tools really worked or had usable batteries from the few bunkers or landed planes or whatever, that further increases the survival element. I was also very surprised by the ending, as I expected to end more like the Mist or other Steven King stories. It was very slow and kinda cheesy but I ended up liking it more then I expected.
