Nature triumphs. Green burgeons over streets, along concrete foundations and pillars; a handful of feral hogs snuffle, root, rut in the overgrowth. The land is absent of any traces of mankind save for what they left behind in their departure. Everyone’s gone, not on trips, or on business, but gone gone, permanently, bequeathing their mortgages and HOAs to the pigs, who don’t care about anything other than the chief responsibility people failed to meet: Survival. Happy holidays! Patrick Somerville, Hiro Murai, Jeremy Podeswa, and Emily St. John Mandel got you the best gift of all: The truth. Cuts deep, doesn’t it? “Station Eleven,” HBO Max’s latest doom-forward miniseries, the long-lost spiritual cousin of “The Leftovers,” radiates truth in distress.
The new HBO Max drama series covers the end of the world as we know it, spurred by the rapid spread of a mutated flu strain deadly enough to inspire awe and pants-shitting fear. Somerville’s adaptation of Mandel’s 2014 sci-fi novel, an exhaustive pre-present-and-post-apocalyptic tale sprawling over weeks, years, and decades, doesn’t qualify as “comfort viewing,” not by any standard. It is discomfort viewing. It’s essential viewing, too, for two reasons: One, it’s great, and two, you at home reading this probably feel uncomfortable already, so you have nothing to lose and much to gain.
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Loosely speaking, “Station Eleven” is a thriller because a show about people outrunning and out-hunkering a plague cutting through the global population like slicing up a cake can’t avoid thrills. Characters holed up in a condo wonder what the rumbling outside the building could be, until one of them points out that there’s a plane, the plane’s descending, and hey, look, the plane crashed right on Chicago’s streets and immediately burst into a big ol’ fireball. The brothers Chaudhary, Jeevan (Himesh Patel) and Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan), and Jeevan’s unexpected young ward, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), helplessly observe tragedy in slow-motion from the relative safety of Frank’s home. They react with a mix of wonder and stomach-churning horror, helpless, stunned at irrefutable evidence that the sky is falling. It’s unbelievable. Nothing makes sense. We can all relate.
But as did Mandel, Somerville puts more into “Station Eleven” than dread to quicken the pulse and shred nerves: Blunt honesty, tough questions and tougher answers about how humanity endures through crisis, an exercise in working through survivor’s guilt, and, yes, hope, the cliché we cling to when fortunes take a turn and we grow too easily convinced that the end is nigh. “Station Eleven” makes the end very nigh and staunchly refuses to soften what it may look like from a ground-level perspective: that of Kirsten, Frank, Jeevan’s sister, Sia (Tiya Sircar), and corporate executive slash prophetic comic book artist Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler). There’s a contrast in these arcs between knowing and not knowing, and how much anyone can actually know anything under conditions this extreme.
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Again, the plot particulars ring too familiar, as if HBO Max had always intended on premiering “Station Eleven” now in a misguided effort at having it crowned as a show “of its time.” But art doesn’t always get to choose its moment, and “Station Eleven’s” moment began in January of 2020, just before the Bad Times, and ended in July 2021, the Slightly Better But Still Crummy Times. Someone watching at home will question the wisdom of airing a series like this one right now, ignoring the impact COVID had on “Station Eleven’s” conception and release. That someone is wrong. Bringing Mandel’s vision to life on screen means making the same arguments about art’s value and necessity, and those arguments put forth the best justification for putting the series out there for viewing. This may be a tough sell, but we need stories like “Station Eleven.”
A chunk of the narrative’s multi-character, multi-period skein takes place 20 years in the future, where Kirsten, now an adult played by Mackenzie Davis, is a member of a wandering acting troupe, the Traveling Symphony, that tours the Great Lakes region of the U.S. performing Shakespeare, a la “Hamlet” and “Coriolanus,” in new settlements whose inhabitants are starved for culture; one such stop unfolds in Episode 2, “A Hawk from a Handsaw.” “You know, they blame you if you stay,” the symphony’s Conductor (Lori Petty) tells Kirsten in her girlhood. “But they love you like you saved ‘em when you come back.” It’s a great read of a great line, one of 2021’s most urgent sentiments, and the soul of “Station Eleven,” packed into 20 syllables.
Earlier moments in the series opener, “Wheel of Fire,” show us the frontline workers we worship as heroes in real life drowning under a deluge of infections. These are the folks deemed critical to the perpetuation of the species. That designation is correct. We need doctors, nurses, and midwives to live. We need food, too, and shelter, and the love of our families and friends. But we need art as well. That a show occupying the post-apocalypse niche should care so much about the function the arts play in civilization is unexpected, but not unwelcome; the reason we toil and struggle, the reason we have systems built to keep the human race going, is so that we can enjoy life. Art provides that enjoyment, and with it a means for comprehending catastrophes, losses, and the amoral universe we’re so infernally convinced we control when precious little is.
Somerville expresses these immense ideas through breathtaking craftsmanship. Could you guess the man loves a match cut? He makes great repeated use of this technique in “Wheel of Fire,” slowly and deliberately touring through Chicago’s snowy pre-pandemic streets with DP Christian Sprenger’s camera; they stop at a spot, say a light flickering over a garage, and snap to that spot in the present, now buried beneath unsettling hush and ominous verdancy. Cities are never this green or this quiet. There’s no sound heard in these sequences other than the somber notes of annihilation’s aftermath. Patience is a potent tool in Somerville’s belt. The way he relates “Station Eleven’s” two chief periods through sharp editing and studious photography grounds the series. The flashbacks and forwards fall under the umbrella of what’s yet to pass, each scene a building block in the blueprint for a viral cataclysm.
You may decide none of this is for you; things look bleak for humans out here, so wading through “Station Eleven” may read closer to a punishing chore than as an opportunity to learn about yourself. But this show, more so than most overt pandemic shows and films, has too much to say about our current dire circumstances to ignore. For one, as bad as it looks for us now, it could always be worse. For another, there is a way through moments that are this enervating. Read a good book. Watch a good series. Listen to a good record. Lose yourself in a good film. Art teaches us about who we are and who we used to be for the sake of reconciling the two. That’s “Station Eleven’s” power. [A]
“Station Eleven” is now available on HBO Max.