I chickened out of watching the recent adaptation of "Y: the Last Man" after the reviews came in, and a major complaint was that its post-apocalyptic world was too depressing. Frankly, it's a bad time to be any kind of depressing media. I've been having a rough time just getting through the gloomier Oscar films this year. HBO miniseries "Station Eleven," however, bucks the trend. While the characters do live through a worldwide pandemic that kills off 99% of the population, the point of the series is that they do, in fact, live.
"Station Eleven," based on the Emily St. John Mandel novel, follows a collection of loosely connected characters at two different points in time. First, we begin at a theater performance of "King Lear," where an audience member named Jeevan Chaudhary (Himesh Patel), decides to escort a child actress named Kirsten (Matilda Lawler) home, after the outbreak kills the lead actor, Arthur (Gael Garcia Bernal), and leaves the troupe in disarray. After a few misadventures, Jeevan eventually brings Kirsten to his brother Frank's (Nabhaan Rizwan), to wait out the crisis. Twenty years later, the adult Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis), travels a slowly rebuilding Great Lakes area with a different Shakespearean theater troupe, the Traveling Symphony. Her found family includes other artists and performers like her mentor Sarah (Lori Petty), and youngster Alexandra (Philippine Velge).
This is one of those shows, like "Lost," and "The Leftovers," that tells its story from multiple perspectives, and parcels out important information a little at a time. After the first two episodes centering on Kirsten, she barely appears in the third, which is about the relationship of Arthur and his first wife Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), and not at all in the fifth, which is about a group of survivors sheltering in an airport, including Arthur's best friend Clark (David Wilmot) and his second wife Elizabeth (Caitlin Fitzgerald). We don't learn what happened to Frank and Jeevan until the seventh and ninth episodes respectively, with little flashes of them from Kirsten's memory in other episodes to provide foreshadowing. However, everyone's story is told to my satisfaction, and I like the show's messages about connection and survival, and how the dead and their art can influence us long after they're gone.
Created by Patrick Somerville, best known for writing on "The Leftovers" and "Maniac," the show is definitely a genre piece, but a far more thoughtful and grounded one than the majority of post-apocalyptic fiction. There is a villain, a cult leader named Tyler (Daniel Zovatto), but he's probably the weakest part of the show. Where "Station Eleven" really shines is in its worldbuilding and character building. We really get to know all of these people intimately, and it makes their victories, their sacrifices, and the tenuous, precious relationships they form with each other all the more moving to witness. Once you work out how certain people and places are linked, it's so satisfying to see the whole, remarkably detailed tapestry of their growth and development, and the hardy little communities that they're able to create. Rewatch some early episodes after the finale, and you'll find more connective tissue everywhere.
The direction has some lovely, fantastical touches. A recurring element is a comic book called "Station Eleven" that both Tyler and Kirsten are obsessed with, and is eventually revealed to have been written by Miranda. Its main character is a lost astronaut, who keeps appearing throughout the show, unseen by anyone else, like an angelic witness. There are several other instances of dreams and visions colliding with reality. Sometimes it's not clear whether something is happening literally or figuratively or in memories, such as adult Kirsten's reminiscences. I'm not a big fan of the hippie junkyard aesthetic of the Traveling Symphony players, but it sure adds some wow factor to their Shakespeare adaptations. The visuals are just the right mix of the odd and the familiar, and no surprise that Hiro Murai had a hand in the look of the show.
Honestly, when it comes down to it I just like this set of characters, and the actors performing them really give it their all. This is the best thing I've seen Himesh Patel do yet, Miranda Lawler is an irresistible newcomer, and Mackenzie Davis remains one of my very favorite actresses working today. And it's so nice to see Lori Petty again, and Danielle Deadwyler is a stunner, and Gael Garcia Bernal gets just as much screentime as he needs to make an impression. It's a rare thing these days, in this kind of show, that we get characters and performances this good. And "Station Eleven" is one of the rare ones that absolutely shouldn't be missed.
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