Station Eleven - Death, Hope, Family, Theater, And Spacemen at the End of the World
It must be hard to feel hopeful at the end of the world. Hell, it must be impossible. There’s just nothing out there. No chance for civilization, no lifeline to a better tomorrow. No pick-me-up on the end of a death sentence. It’s just the fucking end man. And maybe you had a year to spend on a boat if you wanted to see the other side of it. But that would have mostly just been absolution, it really wouldn’t have gotten you anything except a little more life. The end is the end and you just need to decide what to do with it. Such is the case with the survivors who made it through the Georgian Flu and lived to see the other side. Only to find out that the other side required even more humanity in order to survive.
Station Eleven, as a series, has threaded an unbelievable needle. They’ve taken a story layered in almost every human emotion, set across decades of time around a few characters, interwoven their story into ripples of human existence, and come out the other side mostly unscathed. That is pretty god damn hard to do. But they made it seem pretty effortless. It’s a story about finding purpose when there isn’t a reason to, about adhering to hope when there’s little out there. It’s about continuing to create just for creating’s sake. And it’s about clutching hard to those around you because those around you might not be there for long.
Based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven tells the story of what happens when there is nothing and no one left, and how the survivors each hold on to something different in order to retain a piece of humanity. For some it’s love. For some it’s hate. For some, it’s the past. For some, it’s the future. Whatever the characters have found within themselves to persevere, it comes with a cost and price. That price is the understanding that the past kind of really doesn’t get you shit. You can cling to it for a bit, but it ain’t coming back and the quicker you understand that the easier it is to move on. Learn from it? Sure, maybe all good. Think it’s walking back through the door? No chance.
Station Eleven is one of the most imaginative and daring adaptations of source material I’ve ever seen. I feel comfortable saying that. It’s beautiful and tragic. It sits on the edge of science fiction without ever crossing over into it. Like the chrome-face shimmering of the spaceman from the Station Eleven comic that operates around the margins of the story, different characters see their own idea of hope reflected in the anonymity. It takes its themes from a space opera without ever having to go there. We, like Doctor Eleven, are almost glancing down onto the wreckage, the damage if you will, to get a window into what this world could be like.
Unlike most stories about the end of the world, in which the thought experiment plays itself out in the logistics of survival and the razor’s edge of life and death, Station Eleven offers up something wholly unique and singular. Following the Traveling Symphony on their trip around The Wheel, the never-ending circle of stops brings them to new towns to perform Shakespeare when that dude should have long been forgotten. It’s a precarious balance, maintaining the levity of performance with the need to knife up when the Red Bandanas arise.
But it’s so important to see this because while unlikely to ever “really” happen, their “needing” to perform gives a solid understanding that survival for survival’s sake isn’t living, it’s just escaping death. It’s their version of maintaining. So while it would seem silly, in a post-apocalyptic world that Gil would be holed up working on his short game or that there would be a basement of a department store that had turned into a partying, prenatal asynchronous birth group, it makes sense in the context of hope. Would people really be out there performing Shakespeare long (long) after the last light of the world turned off? Probably not, but by imagining that it *could* happen is to recognize that humans aren’t as bad as they’ve been made out to be.
Stories about the apocalypse, whether they be movies, series, books, whatever, often concern themselves with force-feeding us the idea that to retain humanity in the face of death is to protect those around you with a fierceness so primal that we think we are seeing humans at a base level. Maybe that’s the real case. I don’t know. I haven’t stood at the edge of the cliff close enough to know. But in Station Eleven the spirited idea that before folks shuffled off this mortal coil, they took pause to recognize that foregoing safety for spirit was the true art of being human. It’s a lesson many these days could and should lean into.
Is Station Eleven realistic? No, in a lot of ways it’s silly. That all of these characters would have been connected in a for-real, end of days, pandemic through a theater troupe and a comic book is only the kind of thing that could happen in a writer’s room. And that’s kind of the point. In this story, the puzzle all fits together perfectly in a way only finely crafted prestige television can. The interconnected character arcs, that spread across continents, right down to the most micro-level (the pilot’s name was Hugo for Christ’s sake) is why we watch television, why we take in stories, why we need someone to write them. Fuck, Frank remixing Tribe’s “Excursions” because he had a ton of time to kill is crazy until it isn’t. This is the reality of pandemic, it’s not just good enough to keep on, keepin on. That isn’t what life is about.
There’s a moment during the penultimate episode, "Dr. Chaudhary", in which Jeevan realizes that he’s not only an amputee, but he’s also now been weirdly tasked with the real midwife legwork of having to help deliver a bunch of synchronized births. It was one of the greatest scenes ever created, with Jeevan witnessing the literal rebirth of the world through the eyes of a dude way out of his depths. He’s the nervous father to a bunch of total strangers, but he handles it with such innocent aplomb that he’s forgiven for having lied about being a doctor. Hell, it’s the moment that he actually ends up being a real doctor in this new world. The reinvention of self, stumbling through a new world order is exactly what made this scene, and the show in general, so great.
Look, the final episode of Station Eleven wrapped a bow so tightly on everything that you’d be forgiven if you did an eye roll or two. Is there any chance Tyler, Elizabeth, and Clark would ever actually get on stage to perform Hamlet together? Tyler had just blown up the tower and Clark was fresh off the burn unit. There’s no way. But again, not the point. Retrofitting an apology and redemption via Shakespeare 20 years after 9 billion people died is what they were going for, and it man did it ever fucking play.
I loved every single thing about Station Eleven from the music, the cinematography, the acting, the daring story, the non-adherence to time, the ability for characters to connect with their past selves, the rogue nature of its character arcs, the reconnection of Jeevan and Kirsten, the art, the artistry, Alex’s birth story, Tyler’s redemption, Lisa Loeb’s “Stay”, the logistics of A to B, the before and the after. It was just about perfect. And I’d like to think that if/ when we hit the end of the world, when it’s all burning, we’d at least have a friend and comic book to cling to.