TV Review: Station Eleven, season 1

TV #4 of 2022:

Station Eleven, season 1

Nearly two years into a real-life pandemic — one which delayed this very production — it’s maybe hard to believe that a tale about that sort of devastation and its aftermath could register as remotely feel-good. And the general premise here, of a roving troupe of Shakespearean actors tangling with a cult decades after the world ends while nonlinear storytelling fleshes out their respective backgrounds, might sound a bit silly. But this miniseries, like the Emily St. John Mandel novel it’s based upon, is full of profound moments of human dignity enduring past apocalypse and personal trauma. Meditatively returning to lines like “I remember damage” again and again, it’s reduced me to tears of anguish and relief several times over the course of its moving ten episodes.

In the final analysis I think I prefer the original written version, but it’s clear early on that this adaptation is approaching the project with a somewhat different goal that undoubtedly makes for better television. On the page, Station Eleven is preoccupied with the unseen connections that bind us to one another unknowingly — a statement on humanity even before global communication networks break down in the wake of a near-fatal flu. The readers come to realize so many of those links that the characters never do, and yet “dramatic irony” seems too mean-spirited a name for the effect. We’re not sneering at anyone’s ignorance; we are pulling back to an omniscient view that reassures us of a deeper pattern of meaning to apparent chaos.

That might be difficult and too cerebral for a show to pull off effectively, and so instead those ties are deepened and made explicit on screen. In print, Jeevan and eight-year-old Kirsten have one brief encounter on the evening of the last normal day, when he’s an audience member trying to save the life of her King Lear costar having a heart attack on stage. They exchange a few words and then part, with the book continuing to check in on each’s subsequent journey. Here, he walks her home when no one else is available, and she winds up being with him and his brother as the epidemic rages across the land. Setting up strong pairs of characters is a recipe for good TV — I’m reminded of how Game of Thrones altered its own source material in season 2 to regularly place Arya Stark in a room with Tywin Lannister — and in the Jeevan/Kirsten dyad, Station Eleven finds its emotional core. Suddenly, the timeline of her grown self in the Traveling Symphony has an extra tension of poignant uncertainty to it: what could have possibly happened to separate her from him? In a neat reversal, the protagonists now hold key information that we don’t.

Perhaps the program goes overboard on those linkages. I’m not entirely sure I’m sold on our heroine eventually teaming up with the Prophet figure, for instance, and it does make the universe of the setting seem unrealistically small for everyone to already know each other, producing an insularity that doesn’t exist in the text. But the payoff of catharsis when absent loved ones reunite is worth the gamble, in my opinion. Likewise, identifying the adult Tyler, Elizabeth, and Clark with corresponding roles in Hamlet reveals a keen insight to unlock their previous dynamic in ways that Mandel has left obscure. (You don’t have to have read any Shakespeare to enjoy this series, just like you don’t have to have read the book first. But in both cases, it might help.)

I’ve simply adored this experiment so much, and even though it’s finished the story of the novel, I feel that these writers could easily expand the concept into future seasons. With the way the narrative weaves back and forth throughout time, there’s plenty that could still be told in every era: whatever follows these events, the days preceding the fall, and Kirsten’s childhood in between. I have no idea if renewal conversations are on the table at HBO Max or not, but I would return for another trip around the wheel in a heartbeat.

[Content warning for suicide bombings, amputation, and gore.]

★★★★★

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