Station Eleven and the sweetness of life on Earth

The first season finale of Station 11, the HBO Max special, brilliantly realized based on best selling novel of 2014 by Emily St. John Mandel, both were incredibly pleased and faithful to the intricate universes the limited series has created. The protagonists separated in tragedy are reunited, smoldering grief is buried, and an army of child suicide bombers is disbanded.

The first episode is in the app at 3 a.m. ET on Thursday, which is a fitting end for Station 11, a series that depicts the extinction of human civilization as we know it but has somehow become the most anticipated work of art of the year – a complex autobiographical poem that sincerely asserts indelible human beauty in a broken world.

Now, the standard post-apocalyptic universe is familiar. As in Road or Zombie, survivors of a global disaster navigate a relentlessly brutal wasteland, besieged by gangsters or cannibals, trying and failing to rebuild communities. human community on a small scale. The rest of people are grizzly, skeptical, distrustful of everyone they encounter, and generally with good reason. The collapse of civilization turns life into a war against all, a ceaseless war with no room for altruism. Nearly all of these stories take a dim view of humanity’s likely response to the apocalypse. Kindness is punished.

Station 11 – which many spoilers will be watching here – is not the kind of apocalyptic show. There were robbers and violence, but it was clear that what was left of humanity was not immediately laid out in terms of the formation of gangs of rape and slavery. The survivors depicted 20 years after the fall are debatable, although they have clearly failed to recreate their lost civilization. A repeated line from the graphic novel’s title is: “I stood looking out over the damage, trying to recall the sweetness of life on Earth.” The questions the show’s characters struggle with are whether life will be sweeter before or after the world ends, how much pain they have to forget to move on, and who or what from before they had it. can continue in this new world.

A story with a complicated plot, Station 11 Despite the easy recap, especially since the shows frequently jump between timelines during and between episodes. The series follows its characters starting years before the apocalypse, through the night of the fall and the days that follow, to 20 years later.

Kirsten Raymonde (Matilda Lawler) is a child actor who witnesses the on-stage death of Arthur Leander (Gael Garcia Bernal), a movie star trying to restart her career in the theatrical production of Chicago. belong to King Lear, and is escorted home by Jeevan (Himesh Patel), a member of the audience who can’t leave the forgotten little girl trapped outside the movie theater on her own.

No one answered the door at her family’s home, which we soon learned was because her parents had passed away, like most people who will soon recover, from a novel, acute flu virus. The level of extinction makes COVID look like a bad hangover. On the train, Jeevan receives a call from his sister Siya, an ER doctor, who warns him of the impending flu and begs him to stop himself with their brother Frank in his high-rise apartment. After getting close to $10,000 worth of groceries, they do, and it’s clear that Siya (Tiya Sircar, who totally shopped for her shots) already knows her as good as death.

It’s all simple enough to start an apocalyptic show. But on the train, we find Kirsten reading a graphic novel called Station 11, and over the course of the many episodes to come, we’ll find out how it came to be in her possession.

Arthur was once married to Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler), who worked in shipping logistics and was slowly and diligently writing the novel on nights and weekends. In the months immediately following the apocalypse with Jeevan and Frank, the book became a quasi-religious cult item for Kirsten, who latched on to it fiercely and then acted as if she believed the negatives. Its plot is real.

When she found out Arthur was cheating on her with co-star Elizabeth Colton (Caitlin Fitzgerald), Miranda dumped him after giving a closing dinner speech, ending with, “Let’s burn everything down. the parasitic mother – ker is alive.” Years later, just days before the pandemic, Miranda arrives in Chicago to deliver Arthur her finished work, Station 11, and during their brief reunion, Kirsten wanders off. Miranda is then taken to Malaysia by her employer, where she receives a call from Arthur’s friend Clark Thompson (David Wilmot) with news of Arthur’s death. Heartbroken, she chose to stay at her hotel instead of hopping aboard the container ship her boss had arranged to take her off the deadly path of the flu. We didn’t see her again until the finale.

Despite the outbreak of the pandemic (one of the show’s obvious irrationalities was ungrounded air traffic), Clark boarded a plane to attend Arthur’s funeral, which was diverted to an airport Fictional flight in the fictional city of Severn City, Michigan. Miraculously, no one on the plane or the airport got the flu, but another plane arrived and the sick passengers were detained, presumably dead. Clark, his fellow passengers, and some airport staff gathered, eventually building a small, wallless society, including the “Museum of Civilization”, a collection of gadgets , like a notebook from the lost world, is housed in the control tower airport.

On the flight with Clark are Elizabeth, Arthur’s wife, and their son Tyler (Julian Obradors). Halfway through, we see Tyler also given one of five copies of Station 11. When a passenger exits the plane dead on the runway, Tyler escorts him inside, where the passenger is fatally shot. Elizabeth and Tyler were kept in isolation until the angry and bitter Tyler ran away. At the end of the episode, it becomes clear that he is the mysterious leader of the “post-pan” cult (those born after the pandemic) in the future timeline, whom we meet for the first time in the third episode. two. There, Tyler became known as the Prophet and built an army of children he called The Undersea, hedgehogs he led to believe his text. Station 11 is a prophecy.

The central characters of the futuristic timeline are a group of performers called the Traveling Symphony, who perform a periodic geographic loop around Lake Michigan that they call The Wheel, stopping at towns and Remains of settlements for Shakespeare performances and music. After separating from Jeevan for a year after the flu, Kirsten managed to survive on her own before running into Sarah (Lori Petty), who brought her into the group. Now, 20 years later, Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) is happily traveling and performing with this adorable musical group until they encounter The Prophet/Tyler, who vows to kill Kirsten and her friends . “Not before,” he said ominously and over and over.

Tyler wants to return to Severn City Airport and destroy the Museum of Civilization as part of a project to completely erase what remains of the past. In episode eight, with the symphony on the way to the airport at gunpoint (the Severn city group has a bit of an unanswerable outfit), Tyler traps Kirsten and convinces her to help with the sneak attack. he entered the airport under the guise of being an actor. It works when they make a scene from Station 11 for Clark, but after blowing up the museum, Tyler must confront his mother, whom he still resented for what happened 20 years ago. Clark knocked Tyler down and chained him up.

We see Jeevan again as a survivor at the end of the ninth episode, which finally tells the story of how he was separated from Kirsten: After half jokingly pretending to be a ham radio doctor , he is kidnapped by a group of women looking for him. to have more skillful hands to support birth. Unable to find Kirsten, who has left the house they live in, he joins the group, builds a life with his kidnapper, and actually becomes a de facto doctor, bringing the circle back to life. full on one of the show’s clever jokes, set in the first episode by Jeevan’s embarrassing decision to act like a doctor while watching Delete.

The finale managed to wrap up all of these topics in a tight 59 minutes. First, we go back to Miranda, dying in her Malaysian hotel room. We see that for the first time she begins to imagine Station 11 when her family died after Hurricane Hugo, a roundabout explanation of why she was only interested in finishing the book on her terms. Along with a colleague, she manages to call the pilot (also known as Hugo) on the plane the runway of the stranded Severn City and convince him to keep everyone on board to save those in the airport. fly. When the sun rises, both are dead.

Back in Michigan, it turns out that Jeevan was the airport’s “doctor” on request, and he was summoned, journeying a day earlier, to help treat Sarah, who had suffered a heart attack, and Clark, who had suffered a heart attack. badly burned trying to save the museum. Believing that Tyler could be contacted, Kirsten confirmed he would play Hamlet with Elizabeth playing his mother, Queen Gertrude. Sarah dies before the show, and Kirsten doesn’t tell the group until after the show is over, after which she stumbles across one of Tyler’s Undersea’s puppets, who’s ready to roll in destruction mode with a bag full of mines. Kirsten shows the child her copy Station 11 and convince her that it’s just a book; Tyler and his mother reconcile; and Kirsten and Jeevan are finally reunited when they discover each other during a symphony performance after Hamlet. Tyler and his mother travel to unknown places together, while Kirsten promises to put the airport on The Wheel and asks Jeevan to take his family next year.

I’ve outlined the entire season, but a simple plot synopsis isn’t enough to capture this finale’s touching. It’s full of happy endings, but they’re well earned. Actors on Station 11 deserving of a huge pile of Emmys, none more so than Lawler – whose incredible, layered performance as the young Kirsten anchored the entire series in grief, loss, and hope – and Patel – whose journey from unfathomable failure to post-apocalyptic family man and town doctor is portrayed with nuance, humor and restraint.

Especially on days that can feel like your darkest days ours pandemic, it’s surprising to be reminded that no matter what’s on the other side of the nightmare we’re experiencing, life on Earth will still be sweet. We can remember the damage but still escape with humanity and our capacity for love, art, joy and community still intact.

Just speaking for myself, I really need to hear it.