Stephen King fans — possibly the majority, definitely the loudest ones — want Mike Flanagan to drop everything and lock in on one project.

“Just make The Dark Tower already” is becoming to Flanagan what “just finish the book” is to George R.R. Martin. It’s King’s magnum opus, spanning decades and genres, and Flanagan is the preeminent SK adapter of our time, giving us excellent takes on Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, The Life of Chuck, and now Carrie. The 48-year-old writer/director obtained the Tower rights in 2022 and has given occasional updates on the slow but steady process of translating an eight-book series intertwining with King’s entire oeuvre.

**HEAVY SPOILERS FOR THE NEW CARRIE SERIES, now streaming on Prime Video**

“The way the Dark Tower universe is connected, you’ve got characters in there that are all over the place when it comes to studio ownership,” Flanagan recently said to Entertainment Weekly. “So the development process on it has been epic. It, of course, has taken much longer than I’d like it to, but I work on it all the time.” He told the Flanagan’s Wake podcast that the scripts for Season 1 are “wonderful” and SK is “very happy with them.” (King, 79, did also stump for the bafflingly abysmal 2017 Tower movie, though he eventually backpedaled a bit.)

Since Flanagan got the Dark Tower rights, he has: written and directed The Life of Chuck; penned a screenplay for DC (the upcoming Clayface); released The Fall of the House of Usher as his final Netflix show; done Carrie; and shot 2027’s The Exorcist: Martyrs. Now he’s working on a third adaptation of King’s The Mist. Having seen (and recapped) Carrie, I’m convinced he’s not stalling — he’s building.

Carrie — which dropped all eight episodes this week on Prime Video — turns a theoretically unnecessary remake into a huge step in the right direction. The Mist could follow suit. EW’s Nick Romano specifically posited to Flanagan that Carrie could “eventually become a backdoor entry point” to The Dark Tower. Flanagan took this head on: “I may have asked this very question several times along the way. It’s certainly not impossible. There are characters in the Tower canon who would serve a very specific purpose in that story, who audiences wouldn’t necessarily recognize because they only exist in certain books.”

The 2002 adaptation of Carrie saw the pushed-too-far prom queen actually survive. The idea was to make the TV movie a backdoor pilot for a series following the adventures of Carrietta White and Sue Snell. Flanagan’s show ends, like that rendition, with Carrie riding shotgun, escaping Chamberlain not with Sue but the new character Emaline. Flanagan’s wish is for a three-season arc that presumably explores Carrie’s “place in the larger universe,” her unrealized membership in “a sorority of very gifted women.”

He’s definitely taking the on-ramp to The Dark Tower. Let’s dig into some specifics and predictions.

Carrie Ending Explained: How does The Dark Tower already bleed into the new Carrie?

Both Sue Snell and Tommy Ross bear the number 19 in their athletic pursuits, which is the magic number in the Tower and the rest of King’s work. That sick bastard Billy Nolan has the eye of the Crimson King — the ultimate multiversal evil — tattooed on one arm. On the other, he’s got ink that looks like the evil spider-baby entity Mordred. The latter could be more of a wink to Constant Readers, but the eye feels like the real deal. How does one get the Crimson King’s sigil on their body in Chamberlain? Billy’s place of employment is Sombra Hog Farm. Sombra Corporation is one of several nefarious corporate entities aligned in the Towerverse. Another, LaMerk Industries, runs the construction site where Ralph White dies. (Also the factory where the baseball boy is horrifically slain in Doctor Sleep.)

Does Carrie White ever come up in The Dark Tower?

In a meta touch, the novel itself is referred to a few times in the last couple books, including someone talking about what it’s like to “be the butt of the joke every time, to always be Carrie at the fuckin prom.” But as an actual human being? No, Carrietta is never referenced.

So what role could Carrie play? 

We’re in fully adaptive territory, which was the whole point of the Carrie series: Flanagan & Co. overtly remixing and remolding King’s work for the first time. Gerald’s Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck were devoutly faithful, but neither the author nor the filmmaker were interested in a new take on Carrie if it was anything less than an inventive big swing. (The case will be the same with The Mist. “I love [Frank] Darabont’s film, and there’s zero point in remaking it,” Flanagan said. “Which is why I’m going in a different direction.”)

In his EW interview, Flanagan brought up 1994’s Insomnia. A gifted child-artist’s life is saved in that heavily Tower-connected doorstop, and Patrick Danville reemerges a decade later in the saga-closing seventh book as an adult. He’s still an artist, but he’s no longer simply doodling the last gunslinger, Roland Deschain, and the Tower — his talent has become multiversally crucial. “Carrie White could achieve the same narrative purpose pretty cleanly,” Flanagan said. “You could say the same, though, of [Doctor Sleep’s] Abra Stone, you could say the same about Danny Torrance. How the various Stephen King worlds can connect is always on my mind.”

Danville is a tricky comparison since he’s a thin character whose purpose in The Dark Tower VII lands with a bit of a thud. Carrie, meanwhile? Emaline tells her in the Season 1 finale, “You’re a god. You’re a fucking hurricane.” In Carrie, Firestarter, and Doctor Sleep, young girls with psychic abilities are coming into power so strong that it could one day break the world. 

This is reflected in one of King’s early drafts of Carrie, highlighted in Caroline Bicks’ essential 2026 book Monsters in the Archives: My Year of Fear with Stephen King. Though King tweaked this before publication, Carrie herself once had the thought, “I AM GOD.”

The role of the boy from Insomnia is a little too niche and doesn’t sync up with Carrie’s powers. The bottom line is she’s going to devote her energy to the forces of good (the White; great synchronicity there) or evil (the Red). I’m not sure which it’ll be. If we’re swapping her for an existing tie-in character, I’d guess the telepathically gifted, deeply conflicted Ted Brautigan from Hearts in Atlantis. Ted emerges in Tower VII for a pivotal role with more backstory than Patrick Danville. Brautigan is a Breaker.

If Carrie becomes a Breaker, what does that entail?

The Dark Tower is the lynchpin of the multiverse, the axis on which all worlds turn. It’s stabilized, kept standing, by six “Beams.” The Crimson King’s ultimate goal is to bring down the Tower. He uses the concentrated energy of people with psychic powers to corrode and ultimately destroy these Beams.

The idea of Carrie as a Breaker — or at least a part of the Towerverse — has been bandied about for years. In the very first episode of the pioneering Stephen King Cast back in 2014, the host — who goes by Constant Reader — said:

“As we all know, there are other worlds than these, and it wouldn’t be hard to imagine Roland and company…[running] into an alternate reality’s version of Carrie, who came from a world where Chris convinced Billy that they shouldn’t slaughter the pigs. Or even better, a world where Carrie was raised by a Margaret White unburdened from mental instability. Understandably, this sounds like fan fiction, but King referenced so many other of his characters, I find it to be a missed opportunity for him to somehow include the girl that put him on the map in the first place.”

Constant Reader also posited that the bad guys could “mention how they missed snatching the most powerful Breaker,” and how Carrie’s return could offer redemption after the destruction of Chamberlain. As we know from her final night with Margaret on the new show, she does long for God’s forgiveness.

Where/what is that mystery mansion at the end of Episode 1?

I see three options:

1) We don’t know, it’s something new.

2) It’s related to the Institute.

3) It’s in Blue Heaven, also known as Algul Siento, specifically Heartbreak House/Damli House.

No. 1 seems most likely, so we’ll come back to that. No. 2 is highly unlikely — the Institute, introduced in its eponymous 2019 novel, is a place where superpowered kids are “prepped for use as psychic drones.” Their cumulative power is purportedly used to enact/prevent events that threaten the apocalypse. The facility is a prison, one where posters like “Just Another Day in Paradise” and replicas of the kids’ bedrooms are meant to put a happy sheen on things. But the children are tortured and bullied to identify, hone, and corral their powers.

Flanagan himself told EW that Carrie “might be pursued by the Institute.” I don’t think he would’ve just blurted out his master plan. He also said she may have “arrived on the radar of the True Knot,” the roving psychic vampires from Doctor Sleep.

Blue Heaven, located in the desolate Thunderclap in the gunslinger’s world, gives off the appearance of idyllic luxury with the freedom to roam. But another one of its names — the Devar-Toi — means “big prison.” Breakers are deceitfully recruited to spend a life sentence working to obliterate the Beams and bring total darkness to the multiverse. It’s not a situation where the Breakers themselves are traveling around finding other Breakers, even to assist their superiors, as we see Caitlin and her two unnamed associates doing for Kate Siegel’s character.

But that mansion itself is very Blue Heaven. Damli House contains the Study, described thusly in Robin Furth’s The Dark Tower: The Complete Concordance:

The new Carrie shows women lounging and looking at tablets while books lay around in neat stacks. In TDT VII, we read how “you sat down, maybe picked up a magazine, looked at pictures of models and margarine, movie stars and motor cars, and you felt your mind rise.” The Breakers enjoy “the feeling of sitting there, of smelling the good wood and good leather.” Sounds exactly like what we saw, except for the fact that three of these maybe-Breakers show up in Chamberlain.

Unfortunately, I’m not able to find a single Easter egg or clear reference in our brief time in the mansion, despite the obviously deliberate decor.

This brings us back to option No. 1. Is this mansion part of a non-evil version of Blue Heaven? One where the opposite of Breakers gather? There’s no faction like this in the novels, nor is it clear what the inverse of a Breaker would even be. 

Who could Kate Siegel be playing in Carrie? 

Siegel narrates the show’s intro segments and interviews survivors in Chamberlain, and we don’t see her face till the finale. IMDb lists her name as Adelaide, though it’s never spoken. When she stops Margaret White’s heart, it’s book-accurate, with most of Carrie’s lines given to Siegel. I don’t think this nods toward the character being a grown-up version of Carrie who’s traveled through time or anything, but I also don’t think it’s just a cutesy transposition.

“I have a knack for gifts…for giving people what they’ve always really wanted,” Adelaide tells Margaret. “And do you know what you’ve always really wanted, Margaret? Darkness, and whatever god lives there.”

As Margaret begins the Lord’s Prayer and gets to “thy will be done,” our interviewer interrupts, “My will, Margaret. My will.” 

Nearly word-for-word from the book, and yet it feels like something you’d hear from the Man in Black — a.k.a. Randall Flagg, Marten Broadcloak, Walter O’Dim, etc. etc. In the aforementioned, best-unmentioned Dark Tower movie, the Man in Black (played by Matthew McConaughey) kills multiple characters with two simple words: “Stop breathing.” 

The idea of gender-flipping Roland Deschain’s archnemesis is a popular one — I’ve campaigned for Gerald’s Game star Carla Gugino based on her work as the many-faced Verna in The Fall of the House of Usher. One guy on Bluesky wants Samantha Sloyan as Marta Broadcloak. But who better to play the No. 1 baddie, in the Herculean undertaking that is The Dark Tower, than Flanagan’s own wife and creative partner?

Am I getting a little carried away based on a couple menacing lines and the nefarious display of Adelaide’s psychic talents? (Besides stopping Margaret’s heart, she seemingly erases Sue’s memory of Adelaide’s associates appearing at the prom.) Yes, I am. Yet she’s clearly important, and Flagg is a trickster who’s perfectly comfortable disguising his malign intentions. And not to keep going back to that 2017 movie, but Flagg is directly in charge of that iteration of Blue Heaven.

All I’ve seen Flanagan say so far is “if there’s more [story] to tell, it would be really at the top of my list to try to dig more into Adelaide and see what else Kate can do with it.”

Who is Emaline in Carrie?

No idea, honestly. She’s either working with Adelaide or against her. “I am not stealing you away or keeping you in the dark,” she tells Carrie in the finale’s last scene. “I am escorting you to safety, from the monsters on our heels, and it is my fucking honor. Who am I? I am your friend.” 

That’s all we’ve got for now. That and the fact she’s an astral projector, like Doctor Sleep‘s Rose the Hat and Abra Stone.

Will religion continue to be a throughline?

Should Carrie enter Mid-World, Christianity will follow. Though its lore and mores aren’t carried over wholesale, Christ is frequently referenced, often as “the Man Jesus.” In the saga-opening The Gunslinger, fanatical preacher Sylvia Pittston is more than a little Margaret White–ish, with both mentioning “star Wormwood” from the Book of Revelation. Pittston rails against Satan and sinners, and mentions all sorts of Biblical entities including Moses, Samson, Damascus, Golgotha, the Children of Israel, Jezebel, King Ahaz, and the trio Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Christianity’s not as big in Mid-World as it is here, but it’s part of the fabric.

Could Stephen King help steer this endeavor?

While he probably won’t get directly involved in the show, he did just publish Other Worlds Than These the day before Carrie dropped. The capper to King’s Talisman trilogy authored with the late Peter Straub has also been touted as his final trip to Mid-World, and the events and characters of The Dark Tower are referenced throughout. George Beahm, author of numerous books on SK, called TDT “one large canvas that remains unfinished, because he’s always adding to it.”

In the last few years King has still, very visibly, been playing in Mid-World. And while he might say he’s done…well, he’s said that before.

Zach Dionne writes Decider’s Streamin’ King column and makes King things on Patreon.