This was published 2 years ago
Haunting TV series reveals a post-pandemic world, but not as we know it
Station Eleven
★★★★
It might seem like poor timing for a series set in a post-pandemic world, but Station Eleven, based on the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel, portrays a surprisingly buoyant vision of a world in which 99 percent of humanity has been wiped out by a deadly flu.
The story begins as the fast-acting Georgian flu takes hold, during a production of King Lear, in which its star, Hollywood celebrity Arthur Leander (Gael Garcia Bernal) succumbs mid-performance. Audience member Jeevan (Himesh Patel) rushes to help, and comforts eight-year-old actress Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), traumatised by witnessing her hero die.
Himesh Patel as Jeevan and Matilda Lawler as the young Kirsten in Station Eleven.Credit: Stan
As events rapidly escalate, Jeevan takes Kirsten home to the high-rise apartment of his brother Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan), where the three hole up as the world often literally - crumbles before them. Much of the story though, takes place 20 years later.
Directed by Hiro Murai (Atlanta), Station Eleven’s post-pandemic landscape is at first familiar – people scavenge abandoned shops, cars and trucks are now pulled by horses, everyone is suspicious of strangers – but what is slowly revealed is not a Mad-Max-style dystopia.
Kirsten (played as an adult by Mackenzie Davis) is now an actor with the Travelling Symphony, a troupe of actors and musicians who travel the Midwest performing Shakespeare to those who remember it, and to “post-pans”, those born in the past 20 years.
A motley crew who have created their own “family”, their motto is “because survival is insufficient”, a quote not from Shakespeare, but from Star Trek; humour and pop-cultural references still exist in this new world. When a newcomer auditions for the Symphony, he doesn’t deliver a Shakespeare monologue but a rendition of Bill Pullman’s stirring speech from the 1996 action film Independence Day.
When she’s not performing, Kirsten (played with a kind of defensive melancholy by Davis) finds solace in a graphic novel, Station Eleven, given to her by Arthur and written by his ex-wife Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), who dedicated much of her life to the project. Miranda (her story also told in pre-pandemic storylines) wrote the comic, about the destruction of an imaginary earth 1000 years in the future, for herself, and only printed a couple of copies.
But it becomes an important cultural artefact after the collapse; as well as seeing in it echoes of her own experiences, it’s Kirsten’s sole connection to her life before and particularly to Jeevan, from whom she became separated when still a child. Leander also gave a copy to his son, Tyler (played as an adult by Daniel Zovatto), who interprets the comic’s story in an entirely different – and dangerous – way, which I won’t spoil here.
As in the novel, from which showrunner Patrick Somerville (The Leftovers, Made For Love) describes this as an “aggressive adaptation”, the storytelling over 10 episodes is non-linear, jumping between characters pre-pandemic and post, and eventually revealing their connections. Memory, fate and the nature of time trouble almost every character, but hope is what keeps them going.
Fans of the book may not enjoy the changes (and some moments are overly sentimental) but the heart of this haunting, sprawling story (its impressive cast also includes Lori Petty, David Cross, David Wilmot and Caitlyn Fitzgerald) remains intact: art can be a unifying force, a way of connecting the past and present, and can offer transformative experiences, no matter what the exterior world has become. Art, says one character, is “civilisation”.
Station Eleven is available on Stan from December 17. Stan is owned by Nine, the owner of this masthead.
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