Here’s the meaning behind The Dark Tower phrase “All things serve the beam.” From The Stand to IT, Stephen King is an author who knows how to compose a novel that’s epic in both scope and page count. That certainly applies to his fantasy series The Dark Tower, which launched with the first book The Gunslighter in 1982. The basic plot follows gunslinger Roland on a quest to reach the Dark Tower itself and take down his nemesis The Man In Black, AKA Randall Flagg.
While that might make it sound relatively straightforward, The Dark Tower is a series that is comprised of eight books with an endless array of characters, locations and mythology. It’s a daunting series to begin but it’s drawn a passionate fanbase too. Those same fans waited decades for a movie to bring Roland’s journey to life, with director Ron Howard once planning an ambitious adaptation that would tell across movies and TV shows. In the end, Nikolaj Arcel took the reins for 2017’s The Dark Tower. Despite Idris Elba doing a great job as Roland, the movie itself was largely a dud that sanded down the harsh edges of King’s creation. It’s underperformance also killed off what was intended to be a franchise.
The Dark Tower series spawned a lot of famous sayings and phrases, including The Gunslighter’s very first sentence “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” Another saying is “All things serve the beam,” which needs a bit of context to understand. The Dark Tower itself is essentially the center of the universe in the books and holds it all together, including various multiverses. The tower is held up by six beams, and if they fell, the tower would fall and destroy existence itself, which is Flagg’s goal.
The Dark Tower’s “All things serve the beam” can be taken to mean that everything is fated and happens for a reason. In a neat easter egg, the phrase was heard in 2017’s adaptation of Gerald’s Game from Netflix, where Carla Gugino’s main character Jessie – who is tied to a bed and hallucinating – is told by her “ghost” husband Gerald that “All things serve the beam.” This is in a reference to her seemingly inevitable death.
Following the failure of the 2017′ movie Amazon greenlit a pilot for a Dark Tower TV series. The cost of producing the show combined with the complexity of the material appears to be the reason the show didn’t move forwards, despite the promising pilot.
