In the television production of Stephen King’s The Institute, Avery Dixon is a ten-year-old telepath who has been snatched from his home in Salt Lake City and taken to a facility for psychically gifted children. In the book, however, Avery is specifically a “Mormon from Orem.”

(Spoilers follow!)

Combined with his religious upbringing, Avery’s telepathy sets up a potentially interesting scenario that is unfortunately never explored. Instead, Avery’s religion serves only as a way to emphasize the demographic and geographic diversity of the children held prisoner at the titular Institute. Unlike King’s Jewish characters in other books whose religion plays a tangible role in their personality, motivations, actions, and interpretive lens for understanding the world, Avery’s religion does not constitute any aspect of his character. He is the smallest kid in his fifth grade class, loves his family, likes playing with Legos and G.I. Joe, and is kind of dopey when we first meet him, but his Latter-day Saint childhood has no discernible effect on how he thinks or acts.

And that is a disappointment (just as the treatment of a minor LDS character in Stranger Things was a missed opportunity). The lived experience of a 10-year-old LDS boy with an extraordinary talent for telepathy raises some questions worth addressing. Does he see his talent as the Priesthood making itself manifest before being conferred? The whispering of the Spirit? Personal revelation? The gift of discernment? Near the end of the book, Avery senses that his parents are dead; what are his thoughts about eternal families? As a “Mormon from Orem,” Avery should come equipped with an interpretive scheme for understanding his psychic talent, and failing to explore it denies his character the depth it deserves.

There is a similar problem with Luke Ellis, the main protagonist, a veritable child genius who is heading off to MIT at the age of twelve. While held captive in the Institute, Luke and Avery form the older brother-younger brother constellation that appears repeatedly in King’s work, perhaps most famously in the characters of Bill and Georgie Denborough in It. But King also seems not to fully understand Luke, as there is a glaring gap in his interiority. As a decidedly secular science prodigy, how does Luke deal with repeated first-hand evidence that he lives in an irrational world where telekinetic events happen around him? Of course children can come to accept all kinds of oddities as simply existent matters of fact, but Luke is supposed to be a genius. He can argue religion with his parents, but he accepts without protest their suggestion not to talk about his episodes of telekinesis. As with Avery, Luke’s psychic ability should be something deeply concerning to him, but Luke hardly gives it a second thought.

As a book, The Institute was enjoyable. As television, it is watchable but not very good, and the series departs from the book in numerous ways. In addition to shifting Avery’s hometown to the religiously more ambiguous Salt Lake City, both Avery and Luke are visibly older on TV than the ages the book gives them. While the book frequently alludes to religion, the television version of The Institute barely mentions it at all until Episode 5, where Luke explains the story of Samson to Avery (although Avery’s religious upbringing should make him the one who is more familiar with the story).

Luke: Do your parents ever read the Bible?
Avery: Oh yeah, a lot. But they were always feeling a lot of other things, things they weren’t supposed to.

The television series fares significantly worse than the book at discerning the thoughts inside religious believers’ heads. The one time the television series overtly brings up religion, it injects the threadbare trope of “religious people are repressed hypocrites who don’t actually believe what they say.”

But who is fooling whom here? Avery and his parents and everyone else in the book inhabit a spooky world where it’s possible to move objects with your mind, read people’s thoughts, and know the future before it happens. King has previously commented that horror is the genre most compatible with religion because it accepts that supernatural phenomena are possible, identity can persist after death, and good can occasionally win a round in its fight against evil. King has little regard for organized religion, and the various pastors and religious leaders who show up in his books mostly have little to recommend them. But Avery’s parents aren’t figures of this type. From what little we know of them, they are supposed to be good parents who love their child and are loved by him in return. In the world of The Institute, their belief in the supernatural is moreover completely correct and empirically verifiable.

I won’t object to the television series’ erasure of Avery’s Mormon identity, because it barely exists in the book to begin with (although it should have; it would have been interesting). I do object to the TV series injecting a stale trope of religious hypocrisy in a way that runs directly counter to the characters in King’s book and the world in which they live.

King introduces the story of Samson in The Institute with an epigraphic citation of Judges 16. Later in the book, Luke resolves to bring down the Institute just like Samson brought down the temple on the heads of the Philistines – twice, actually, so we won’t miss the point, and Luke gets another reminder late in the book. One of the book’s twists is that Avery usurps this role by literally bringing the Institute down on top of himself. But Avery isn’t much of a Samson figure. While he grows beyond the dopey child we first meet who still sleeps in a race car bed, he never develops Samson’s rage or self-destructive thirst for vengeance. Instead, in the book and even more so in his television portrayal, he is very much a child Jesus who gives his life for his friends. King acknowledges the change: “A little child shall lead them,” as one of Luke and Avery’s friends tells herself. But what in Avery’s past has brought him to this point? If a Mormon child displaces a vengeful Samson through an act of redemptive self-sacrifice, his parents and Primary teachers should get some credit for how the choice was made or what it means, but neither the book nor the television series acknowledges the debt.