![]() All four of the series’ directors - Hiro Murai, Jeremy Podeswa, Helen Shaver, and Lucy Tcherniak - lean into that overlapping, almost dreamy quality without sacrificing the stark realities of what’s involved in surviving without modern resources. Dialogue from conversations that took place years earlier bleed into what is happening in 2040.Įven though there is a hard dividing line between pre- and post-pandemic life, the series emphasizes that history still finds a way to repeat itself and creep into the present even when we think it’s all been packed away. They do too in Station Eleven, in which images of a barely occupied, overgrown Chicago two decades in the future are folded into moments when the flu has just begun and the city still looks normal. In the two years we’ve spent living with COVID, most of us have learned that our sense of time gets incredibly skewed during a pandemic. A number of shows this year have tried, with varied success, to adopt a similar time-jumping structure, but few have managed it with the sense of purpose and elegance that Station Eleven does. Station Eleven slides in all directions on its x-y-axis, moving forward in time 20 years, when we find the adult Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) on the road with a roving band of actors and musicians known as the Traveling Symphony, and back again to the earliest days of the outbreak as well as to events that occurred before it. Unfortunately, the concept of home fundamentally changes overnight as the contagion and news about it spreads, leading Jeevan and his brother, Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan), to become Kirsten’s guardians. Jeevan (Himesh Patel), an audience member, is one of the first to recognize what is happening to Arthur - and the only person in the ensuing chaos to take one of the young members of the cast, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), under his wing and help her get home from the theater. The series opens in more or less the same way the novel does, with actor Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) collapsing onstage in the middle of a production of King Lear. ![]() ![]() These ten episodes are much more interested in how human beings cope when they try to go on after losing nearly everyone they love and everything that once was familiar. Like The Leftovers, Station Eleven doesn’t spend any time attempting to explain its catalytic event - we never learn exactly how this flu spread so quickly or why it could not be contained. Given the involvement of Somerville and executive producer–writer Nick Cuse, another alum of The Leftovers, it’s not surprising that the tone of Station Eleven feels of a piece with that HBO drama, another moving portrait of what happens in the aftermath of a tragedy. Somerville and his fellow writers have done a very smart job of interpreting Mandel’s work, keeping key elements, excising others, and reshaping the narrative to make this series function as both a postapocalyptic account and commentary on the role art plays in sustaining and fortifying the human spirit during times of crisis. It’s just 2.5 million bodies.”) Yet Station Eleven is, at its core, an uplifting reaffirmation of the value of life and human connection that argues that Americans can and will come together to help one another in the most dire of circumstances. The sickness in this HBO Max series, whose first three episodes drop on Thursday, instantly starts taking out humans and basic infrastructure to such an extent that it seems non-hyperbolic when it is referred to as “the end of the world.” (Audio from a television broadcast notes that the survival rate with this flu is one in 1,000 and that Chicago, where the series is initially set, “is not Chicago anymore. Created by Patrick Somerville, whose past credits include Made for Love, Maniac, and, most tellingly, The Leftovers, Station Eleven is a beautifully wrought piece of storytelling that will certainly remind audiences of the coronavirus - it focuses on a flu that spreads rapidly, causing panic, quarantining, and an immense loss of life - but it also presents a much more extreme version of a pandemic than the one we’ve confronted. John Mandel’s superb, unexpectedly prescient 2014 novel, is a limited series you should see, not despite the stress we’ve endured in 20 but because of it. ![]() Station Eleven, an adaptation of Emily St. After nearly two years of living through a pandemic in real life, the last thing you want to do is watch a show about a pandemic.īut here’s the thing, and I say this with the utmost respect and love: You are wrong. I know what you’re going to say about Station Eleven, and I get it. In one of many points along Station Eleven’s fluid timeline, Jeevan (Himesh Patel) and Kirsten (Matilda Lawler) navigate the earliest days of a deadly flu outbreak.
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