Station Eleven

Remembering
Damage

Station Eleven
USA December 2021 - January 2022
Ten episodes Paramount

Warning: To the spoilers, we're the spoilers.

It’s rare that a piece of art comes along which is so overwhelming in both its emotional weight and technical brilliance that I am at a loss as to how to convey a sense of it to others. But that’s how I feel about the ten episode mini series Station Eleven, based on the novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel (which is now hopefully en route to me from ebay, so I can read it). I don’t know what the differences are between this show and the source novel but, I soon will and I’ll post a separate review of that book in a month or two, I suspect.

Station Eleven is set before, during and after a devastating global pandemic (all at the same time). In the present, the flu virus has got out of hand and mutated into a lethal and unforgiving killer, which wipes out the majority of the world in a couple of weeks. If you catch it you’re dead (or, as somebody in a broadcast at one point says... we weren’t ready for something with a 1 in 1000 survival rate).

The story is not presented in a linear fashion (although, it does get more linear towards the end) and it tells the story of separate pockets of characters who all have links to each other over their past or future lives, which you discover over the course of the ten episodes in some quite astonishing ways, as the narrative hops from one character in one time zone to another and slow connections gradually dawn on the spectator.

Primarily we start with the death, on stage, via a heart attack (or possibly from the flu as it happens the first evening of the outbreak) of an actor called Arthur Leander, played by Gael García Bernal (don’t worry, because of the nature of the structure of the thing, Bernal is in quite a few episodes in flashback... depending on your point of view in the story). Jeevan, played by Himesh Patel, is the first to realise that Arthur is dying on stage and rushes up to try and help. Instead, he helps one of Arthur’s co-stars, eleven year old Kirsten (played brilliantly in her younger iteration by  Matilda Lawler) escape the area but problems arise and he can’t get her home, so he holes up with her at his brother’s apartment to try and wait out the unfolding disaster... while everyone they know dies from the virus. Arthur gave Kirsten one of five graphic novels, written and artworked by his ex-wife Miranda, played by Danielle Deadwyler. The book is called Station Eleven and tells of a spaceman, Doctor Eleven, who presents a conundrum to the people who read it and helps them find purpose in their struggle to survive ‘the before’... both the pre-pans (aka pre-pandemic) and the newborns who use half remembered fragments of it as their ideological basis, without getting too much into the complexities of the show, to fuel their possible terrorist campaign against those who came before.

Other figures and actors of note are the brilliant Mackenzie Davis as the post-apocalyptic survivalist, grown up version of Kirsten, David Wilmot as Arthur’s best friend Clark, Daniel Zovatto as The Prophet (his connection to these people is made clear at one point about half way through the show), Caitlin FitzGerald as Arthur’s other ex-wife and, as the composer and founder member of a post-apocalyptic travelling Shakespeare company, The Travelling Symphony, who wander the world putting on shows for various small, surviving communities, we have actress Lori Petty (it’s nice to see Tank Girl in something again).

And it’s actually a simple story in some ways, about the people who are left behind and the connections made through various lives which come together at certain points but, if it wasn’t told in such a rich tapestry of imaginative and mutually supporting edits, which spark big emotions on the realisation of their connections, then it probably wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. My understanding is that this structural concept is taken directly from the novel and so I’m guessing the series creator, Patrick Somerville, did a really good job here at keeping it somewhat close to the spirit of the source.

You’d think, from the through line, that the show would be something of a one trick pony but it’s not. I’m leaving a lot out of my synopsis because there are lots of ideas and situations which you need to discover for yourself. Characters fade to the background and then return in episodes which highlight just what happened to them, when they fell out of one of the other character’s lives. So, for instance, it seems pretty clear from episode two that a main character is dead... even though you know you’ll see him again in flashback. However, much later in the series, you find that he’s not and that he has a kind of rebirth in some ways (no, I’m not talking about Arthur... he stays dead) and you’re on tenterhooks throughout the whole last episode as the two characters who lost each other 19 years before are miraculously in the same place against all odds... and still manage to miss each other in the same room (and I’m not going to tell you what happens right at the end but... you’ll want to stick around... I wonder if this is one of the deviations from the novel?).

There’s lots of Hamlet too, if you’re into that kind of thing (I’m really not into Shakespeare myself). And possibly way too many Star Trek references throughout the show although, I was pleased that one of the earliest exhibits in Clark’s Museum Of Civilisation is one of the recent, new wave Mego Mr. Spock action figures.

There’s also some great next level stuff happening where, for instance, Doctor Eleven turns up in a few cases as, presumably, someone is seen in a mild hallucinatory state, although the interpretation is perhaps best left to the audience... or, for example, an episode where both the younger and older versions of a character are interacting in the same space. It’s all rather brilliant and it’s all held together with some nice (if mostly unknown to me) needle drop songs and a really beautiful score by Dan Romer (sadly only released as an electronic download and not on a proper CD. What a stupid thing to do!).

That being said, my one and only criticism of the show also comes from the score, although it’s possibly not Romer’s fault. There’s definitely a case of temp trackitus in the show as a couple of scenes in a few episodes were clearly, it seems to me, cut together initially with passages from Mica Levi’s astonishing score to Under The Skin and the producers maybe didn’t want to leave it out. So Romer creates (and I suspect was forced to create) something very similar to the specific cue I’m thinking of for certain sequences in this show. And what he’s done is good but, for a little while there I almost thought they’d needle dropped the original cues in, it’s that close. Consequently, in certain scenes where I was supposed to be feeling a certain sense of tension, it just popped me straight out of the narrative to figure out where the cue initially originated came from. Which is not the best way to manage the music (or the composer) of your show, I reckon.

But yes, asides from that one thing and the possible sense of a rushed reunion for two of the characters near the end, I’d have to say that Station Eleven is easily one of the greatest pieces of art in television history. I’d recommend this to pretty much anyone interested or enamoured with film and televisual history and, frankly, it’s a huge crime that this show isn’t available on DVD or Blu Ray at time of writing. Instead, it’s been hoarded away by some TV and streaming channel to be the carrot for subscriptions rather than being allowed to flourish in the wild. An absolutely brilliant and, certainly, epic experience. More than worth your time.