To distract herself, Kirsten fixates on the graphic novel given to her by Arthur’s ex-wife, a prickly artist named Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler). Together, they hole up with Jeevan’s agoraphobic brother in a downtown high rise to ride out the first ugly months. In the chaos following Arthur’s collapse, Kirsten ends up in the care of Jeevan just as the flu is rapidly spreading across Chicago. An audience member named Jeevan Chaudhary (Himesh Patel) rushes to help him on stage-it’s not the last time he’ll offer help he isn’t fully qualified to give, or that Shakespeare will play an outsized role in the lives of the show’s characters.Īrthur’s costar in the King Lear production, in the role of young Goneril, is a child actor named Kirsten (Matilda Lawler). But the series and the novel share the same starting point, a scene that forecasts the story’s ambitions and themes: On the opening night of a staging of King Lear, a famous actor named Arthur Leander (Gael Garcia Bernal) suffers a heart attack. Ironically, that’s also what makes the book so well-suited to adaptation as an episodic series, with many installments focusing on a particular character or point in time rather than trying to wrestle it all into a single, coherent through line. It isn’t easy to summarize Station Eleven, which zigzags through time from the lead-up to the flu to its onset to what comes after it’s decimated the population. Terror is just one element in a tonal mix as eclectic as the soundtrack, which bounces from rap to rock to a synth-laden score with ease. If there’s one selling point I can offer to assuage those burnt out from compulsively checking case counts as omicron looms, it’s this: Station Eleven isn’t some foreboding slog that fries your synapses with nonstop dread. Like The Leftovers, Station Eleven understands that human nature perseveres even when human civilization does not, and that it’s human nature to crack jokes and make dumb, irrational decisions under the same circumstances that force you to get really good at throwing knives. But the most relevant item on his CV may be The Leftovers, another drama with a surprisingly playful approach to the end of the world. Station Eleven is either the last thing we need right now or exactly what we need, a Rorschach test of a show that will hopefully find its ideal audience-just like the illustrated Station Eleven.Īfter working on the star-studded Maniac and delightfully perverse Made for Love, Somerville has developed something of a specialty for off-kilter adaptations in the realm of science fiction. It’s also inexorably tied to said moment, a fact it doesn’t try to deny and even employs to its advantage. Created by Patrick Somerville and initially directed by Atlanta’s Hiro Murai, Station Eleven is in some ways bigger than our present moment, using a virus with a 99 percent fatality rate to explore themes like trauma, collective memory, storytelling, and survival. As tough a sell as Station Eleven’s synopsis may be, the show is well worth the discomfort it costs to watch characters in denial of what’s to come, then scrambling to adjust once they accept the inevitable. After watching all 10 episodes of the masterful adaptation, now streaming its first three episodes on HBO Max, I remain in it now. I was in the latter camp when I read Station Eleven in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Others will forge ahead-if not enticed by the premise, then at least intrigued by the possibility a fictional apocalypse can shed light on our current reality. Faced with a story about a pandemic that sweeps the globe and ends life as we know it, some will understandably balk at the prospect of reliving the last two years. Station Eleven, the show, will likely earn the same polarized reaction as Station Eleven, the book-within-the-show.

The other rejects civilization and its trappings altogether, becoming an isolated explorer of his own. One takes it as a lesson in the enduring power of art to anchor us through trying times. As adults, the kids have entirely different takeaways from their mutual influence, the saga of a lonely astronaut marooned on a space station. Only five copies were ever printed, but through a series of coincidences, two make their way into the hands of children who survive a catastrophic flu and then grow up in its aftermath. John Mandel and published in 2014-there exists a graphic novel, also called Station Eleven. In the miniseries Station Eleven-and before it, the novel Station Eleven, written by Emily St.

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