Originally Posted by
kpaul
I posted this on the Reddit but wanted to post here to get your thoughts.
Richard Farris = Randall Flagg or someone else?
The year on the silver dollars was 1891, the sum of the numbers is 19. Besides the common links like this one, this book has me veering down a new path of ideas.
The colored buttons on the box represent either 8 of the 13 glass orbs of the Wizards Rainbow, or possibly the beams that hold the tower. There are 6 beams and the box has 6 buttons in the middle, with the red, and black buttons to the sides.
The chocolate animals that Gwendy got from the box all represent the Guardians of the Beams, the main one being Maturin aka the Skoldpadda, aka the turtle. This box with the "Black 13" button and the turtle in the same box strikes an uncanny comparison to the Mid-World Lanes bowling bag that Jake found in the abandoned lot. They used the bag to carry "Black 13" around in, and later discovered the tiny scrimshaw turtle hidden inside. Good and evil in the box, and in the bowling bag as well.
This one raised some questions for me. The box has good (the chocolate guardians), and evil (the red and black buttons). Farris chose her to be the custodian of the box for now because she was the best choice at the time. He knew she would have the willpower to not use the buttons. Somehow this best served his purpose/goals for the time being, rather than the opposite which would have been death and destruction. That's only saying that he didn't want death and destruction right now, not necessarily later.
When Gwendy asks who gets the box next, Farris replies "some boy in California, but you don't know him..." Who might that be, and is it because he knows that boy will be a button pushing maniac?
Gwendy only pushed the red button twice, but mainly focused on the coins and the chocolates(Good). Farris told her in the end that Jonestown was because of Jones, and that her friend committed suicide for her own reasons. Leaving the only action the box might have done is insta-melting the guy who killed Streeter like in the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
So if her button pushing did not cause those things to happen as Farris eluded to, then one possible conclusion is that when the buttons are pushed, the actions take place in another world(Mid-World or Keystone World perhaps?) If this is true, then what actions happened in thise worlds, and did those actions affect Roland's Ka-tet?
This made me immediately think about the Leatherheads at the end of Under the Dome, where those infant alien beings were just playing with an inter-dimensional x-box the whole time.
Next question my mind was stewing around was about the silver dollars. They used silver dollars in "It" to defeat Pennywise that one time, but have no idea if this correlates to Gwendy's silver dollars.
So then it makes me think about Flagg in a completely different light(if in fact, Ferris is Flagg, which I think he is). If you have read Insomnia, one of the three bald doctors named Atropos is an agent of the random, whereas Clotho and Lachesis are agents of order. This made me think of Flagg acting much like Atropos. It would appear that his intentions are not always just one sided. Is he is on board with the agenda of the Crimson King or not? Does he play both sides, and if so to what end? Is he the chaos element that keeps everything in check?
Or, could Farris be a twinner of Flagg??? Only this one being more helpful in nature versus evil and destructive?
Anyway, just some ideas I have going on at the moment.
Would love to hear your ideas!