\u201cThe Langoliers\u201d is one of Stephen King\u2019s best short stories. Originally published in the anthology \u201cFour Past Midnight,\u201d it was adapted into an absurdly awful ABC TV miniseries that aired in 1995, which is now somehow 31 years ago.<\/p>\n
The TV version flopped for two main reasons. The suits at ABC somehow trusted the guy who played the lovable goofball \u201cBalki\u201d on the ABC sitcom \u201cPerfect Strangers\u201d to play a psychopathic Wall Street speculator facing financial ruin and the special effects were created with the first generation of \u201ccomputer generated imagery\u201d (CGI).<\/p>\n
Neither Bronson Pinchot nor the CGI were the least bit convincing and three decades later, critics still pan the miniseries as one of the worst adaptations of a Stephen King story.<\/p>\n
Who cares? I do, because like most Gen-Xers, my understanding of reality was largely shaped (and warped) by the TV, movies and literature I consumed in my analog youth and still turn to for emotional and intellectual comfort food. Although it\u2019s terrible, I\u2019ve sat through \u201cThe Langoliers\u201d miniseries many times and lately I can\u2019t shake the creepy feeling that we\u2019re all living in a version of it with worse acting and better but even less convincing CGI.<\/p>\n
In \u201cThe Langoliers,\u201d a handful of passengers wake up on a red-eye flight to find that everyone else on the plane \u2014 including the captain and copilot \u2014 has disappeared.\u00a0 A twitchy weirdo in first class starts mumbling about monsters called \u201cLangoliers,\u201d and the strangers slowly realize that Bronson Pinchot is not to be trusted and they must band together to escape a nightmare scenario none of them bought tickets to endure.<\/p>\n
Who are the Langoliers? They\u2019re ravenous, faceless, interdimensional entities that devour the past and everything else in their path. For dessert, they scarf down idle souls who shirk their responsibilities in the present. Slowly, the passengers accept that the Langoliers are real, and they must stay ahead of them or be eaten alive.<\/p>\n
Luckily, one of the surviving passengers is an off-duty pilot who lands the plane at an airport in Maine. A crackling sound in the background signals that the Langoliers are coming. As the sound gets louder, the passengers see huge stands of trees leveled by the Langoliers\u2019 buzzsaw teeth. Read or watch the ending at your leisure.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t take much imagination to clock the metaphorical similarities between King\u2019s fictional binge-eating monsters and the real-world gluttons driving the data center invasion gobbling up huge chunks of land and threatening to erase small towns and rural communities in service to psychotic Wall Street speculators.<\/p>\n
With each new data center proposal, more and more idle souls among us wake up to the realization that the Langoliers aren\u2019t coming.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re here. And hungry.<\/p>\n
When I\u2019m not sitting through a data center conditional use hearing at Valley View High School in Archbald, I live in Old Forge. When I stand on my front doorstep and look to the horizon, I see lush, green stands of trees on the mountain above Alliance Landfill in Taylor. I don\u2019t love living 2 miles from a landfill, but the trees and wildlife around it make it easier to accept and mostly ignore.<\/p>\n
I reckon the same is true for my crosstown neighbors in Austin Heights. When Times-Tribune Staff Writer Frank Wilkes Lesnefsky broke the news<\/a> last week that a second data center project was proposed in Ransom Twp. near the border with Old Forge, people in Austin Heights reacted with the same alarm<\/a> as neighbors in Scranton\u2019s Keyser Valley did when Ransom received a previous data center proposal.<\/p>\n The new project would cover hundreds of acres of conservation and agricultural land reaching to less than half a mile from Austin Heights and about a mile from the Old Forge School District.<\/p>\n Suddenly, the data center invasion was knocking at Old Forge\u2019s back door. The natives rightly got restless and turned to antisocial media seeking allies. Soon, groups and individuals already organized against the invasion responded offering support and advice.<\/p>\n The conversation apparently got noticed in the real world.<\/p>\n The data center developer behind the purchase of the land hasn\u2019t responded to detailed questions posed by Frank via multiple emails. By Monday, websites detailing the data centers the company absolutely planned to build there were inaccessible.<\/p>\n Weird, huh?<\/p>\n Plans that change that quickly have a tendency to revert to their original form without warning or explanation. Whatever eventually happens on the land in question, its sale to a data center developer is a signal for Old Forge neighbors and people in towns up and down Our Valley to wake up and realize we\u2019re all on the same plane and must band together to escape a nightmare scenario none of us bought tickets to endure.<\/p>\n That crackling sound getting louder in the background is real-life Langoliers, and they\u2019ll devour everything we let them take.<\/p>\n CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, has arguably read and seen too much Stephen King. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook; and @chriskellyink on Bluesky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Langoliers\u201d is one of Stephen King\u2019s best short stories. Originally published in the anthology \u201cFour Past Midnight,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":250888,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[1590,2116,803,1559,1560,28,178,180,179,181],"class_list":["post-254464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-chris-kelly","tag-data-centers","tag-luzerne-county","tag-opinion","tag-opinion-columnists","tag-pennsylvania","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news","tag-top-stories-stt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}