Ray Walston as Glen Bateman in the 1994 TV miniseries.
Glen Bateman is a main character in the novel The Stand. In the TV miniseries, he is played by Ray Walston.
Character Biography
Glendon Pequod Bateman, B.A., M.A., M.F.A., is an elderly widower from Woodsville, New Hampshire; at the time of the superflu outbreak he is fifty-seven years old. Prior to the plague he taught sociology at the town's community college.
Bateman is the first survivor encountered by Stu Redman after his escape from the Stovington Plague Center. A cheerful, eccentric misanthrope, Glen is intelligent, keenly observant, and very talkative. He enjoys amateur painting (at which he is terrible), and suffers from terrible arthritis in his joints.
Bateman was disliked by his teaching colleagues — a feeling he describes to Stu Redman as both "heartily mutual", and well-grounded in the "strong possibility" that their assessment of him as a lunatic was dead on. While part of him may indeed be "dancing on the grave of the world", Bateman is not so far removed from the need for companionship to resist adopting the only surviving dog in Woodsville (despite his clearly not being a dog person.) He is also, for all his cynicism and disparaging remarks about humanity, warm and generous towards Stu.
Initially Glen refuses the offer to leave Woodsville and travel with Stu looking for other plague survivors. But he does reluctantly qualify the refusal by stating that if Stu comes by again, he will probably give in and "jine up" with him. Shortly afterward, Stu returns to Woodsville with Fran Goldsmith and Harold Lauder; true to his word, Glen becomes a member of their group, travelling with them to Hemingford Home, Nebraska, and later the Boulder Free Zone.
As a sociology professor, Bateman is in a uniquely informed position to observe the whole of human civilization going down in flames — and then, to predict the various permutations that will result when it tries to re-form itself from the ashes. After being elected to the Boulder Free Zone Committee, he becomes the Zone's recognized expert on the subject.
After Harold Lauder attempts to assassinate the entire Committee by detonating a bomb at one of their meetings, Stu and the other three surviving men on the Committee (Larry Underwood, Ralph Brentner and Glen) are told by Mother Abagail to go west in a suicide mission to confront Randall Flagg.
As the oldest member on the 700 mile-plus "walking tour of Colorado and points west", Glen suffers the most physically. But his presence, his ironic wit and constant stream of gentle good humor are a source of encouragement to the others. His offhand Biblical quote, "I will fear no evil", later becomes a mantra for Larry and Ralph when they are brought before Flagg.
When Stu breaks his leg in the Utah badlands and has to be left behind, Glen leaves him the opiates he has been using to make his arthritis manageable. He discreetly advises Stu to take a lethal dose of the pills if it becomes apparent that there is no hope of rescue or relief in sight.
Glen is captured with Larry and Ralph just west of Fremont Junction, Utah. He is transported to a jail cell in Las Vegas, where he finally meets Flagg face to face, and is unimpressed to the point of hysterical relief. Glen refuses Flagg's offer of release in exchange for thanking him on his knees. He openly mocks Flagg, and for some reason this renders Flagg unable to use his powers to kill him; he has to order Lloyd Henreid to shoot him to death.