Station Eleven

Terminal Act

Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781447268963

A few months ago I was absolutely bowled over by a new TV miniseries which I watched twice. It was a ten episode show called Station Eleven (reviewed here) and, by the time I was through it the first time, I realised I would have to read the original source novel, which was written by a writer I’d never heard of called Emily St. John Mandel.

And now I have and... well, for starters, it’s great.

I think sometimes it depends what iteration of a piece of art you are exposed to first as to which version you respond to better. I have a Twitter friend (thanks Laura) who said she preferred the book and I suspect, although I may be wrong, that she read the book before seeing the TV show, which was not developed or worked on by the author but by a fellow writer and friend of hers, from what I can understand. As for me... I think I’m just about coming down to preferring the TV show myself but, to be honest, it’s a really hard call. There are major differences between the two... and also many more similarities... but both are carrying the same kind of spirit within their respective media.

I’m not going to go over the basic plot again but it takes place before, during and after a pandemic of Georgian Flu has wiped out the majority of life on Earth and we get scenes of a whole bunch of characters from different times in their lives, their stories slowly developing as they brush against times and places important to other characters, to build an overreaching story arc, of sorts. The novel is split into nine sections - those being 1. The Theatre, 2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3. I Prefer You With A Crown, 4. The Starship, 5. Toronto, 6. The Airplanes, 7. The Terminal, 8. The Prophet and 9. Station Eleven... each of these subsections being split into various chapters which generally take on one or two of the characters at a time.

And I think this is a case of the TV show expanding things or taking different directions from the novel in pursuit of a ten episode adaptation and actually improving them... while at other times missing some other specific story beats, which it could perhaps have done with.

For instance, the novel starts off with exactly the same scene as the TV show, with Arthur Leander dying of a heart attack on stage and Jeevan jumping up from the audience to try and save him... also trying to comfort the younger version of Kristen, the same day that the Georgia Flu hits the city. However, unlike the TV show where Jeevan and Kirsten are bonded by the experience and the two of them start off and spend the first year or two in the apartment with Jeevan’s brother, Frank... here they part ways for good. Kirsten can’t remember in the book just how she survived the first year of the pandemic. And Jeevan holes up with Frank and has other experiences separate to hers.

So there is no amateur play adaptation of the graphic novel Station Eleven in the book, put on by Kirsten, Jeevan and Frank as there is in the show. Indeed, Station Eleven is actually a deluxe comic book of two separate issues in the novel (I’m imagining one of those square bound format style graphic novels which were all the rage in the mid-1980s now, like Batman - The Cult or Blood - A Tale). Someone on the internet said that Jeevan is a far less important character in the book than in the show but, I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. He’s just a slightly different character and he does, in fact, touch other’s live (both in negative and positive ways), even if nobody remembers his name. For example, in a newspaper article from the time of the death of Leander, he’s mentioned as ‘a member of the audience’ and everyone post pandemic who reads that surviving newspaper article years later can vaguely remember him.

And he does survive in the book as he does in the show, although we are not treated to that brilliant sequence where he’s helping about 15 to 20 women give birth on the same night in a makeshift hospital upcycled from an old, abandoned supermarket. One the other hand, we do see how he once, quite negatively, touches Miranda’s life in this... on the night that she decides she needs to divorce Arthur Leander, when we become acquainted with one of the professions Jeevan has worked in over the years.

And I knew I was in the hands of a really great writer from very early on in that, Mandel really makes you feel the emotional resonance of the characters by the phrases and choices of words she uses to put across their moments. For instance, there’s a scene in the first section where she could have just said a specific character started to cry... instead, she says this, “The lights over the sea blurred and became a string of overlapping halos.” which is frankly a much better way of getting your message across, I think.

Another thing she does, to keep a sense of continuity going over the rapid ping ponging from different time shifts, is to introduce the occasional themed section, inserted into the narrative as a juxtaposition with whatever character you happen to be following at the time. So, for instance, one of these devices is an interview that Kirsten gives to a brand new, amateur newspaper in one of the new post-pandemic communities, fifteen years after the outbreak of the Georgia Flu. And, later, it makes its way into the airport to Clark (who is a lot thinner and clean shaven compared to the wonderful actor who brought him to life in the TV show) and his Museum Of Civilisation. And it’s from this article that he recognises that Kirsten is someone who would remember Arthur Leander (because, unlike the TV show, they’ve never actually met pre-pandemic).

And, yeah, I don’t think I want to say much more about the original version of Station Eleven other than... The Prophet is, amazingly, a lot less sympathetic a character than in the TV show and that another certain key character, who is visited an antagonistic, violent death in the TV version, is afforded a much more peaceful, ‘TV network unfriendly’, deliberate overdose of sleeping pills here. If you liked the TV show, then I’m pretty certain you’ll want to give this one a go... if you haven’t, well you may want to read this version first and figure out for yourself which bits have been improved and which bits have been left out, to the detriment of the show (whole characters are wiped out in the TV show while others are given more prominence, for example). Both are great and all I can say about the novel, really, is that it’s truly wonderful stuff and I’ll definitely be pursuing some of this writer’s other novels, for sure.

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.