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After watching the first episode of the new HBO Max miniseries Station Eleven (2021-2022), viewers might be taken by surprise as the show takes a moment to thank the production’s COVID Compliance team. The remainder of a real-world disease is particularly poignant due to the show’s subject matter: a deadly influenza pandemic that kills near-100 percent of the people it infects. One might hesitate to watch the show, given its intense first episode. In a terrifyingly familiar scene, people overrun a hospital with their sick loved ones, asking for help from doctors who know that their own fates — and the fates of their patients — are already sealed.
Why watch a show about a fictional pandemic when the world is still very much working through its own? The answer is hope. Much like the 2014 book of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven is not so much about the minutia of pandemic disaster as it is about how humans cope with it. Both within the main narrative of the story and in its conversation with the real world, the show tackles what it is like to deal with and move on from grief.
Station Eleven helps people learn how to say goodbye to the past, ever-changed by a disastrous pandemic, and how to hope again.
What Is “Station Eleven”?
Well, that is a bit complicated: it is a spaceship, the name of an in-universe graphic novel that features that spaceship, and the title of the show itself. The miniseries’ structure is as complex as its namesake: Station Eleven uses a multi-focused storyline, meaning that the narrative jumps back and forth in time as well as through various points of view. The series finds its present-day home in the year 2040, twenty years after an influenza pandemic killed most of the earth’s population.
The series follows an ensemble of characters through their lives before and after the pandemic. Young Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), a child actress, is left alone at a Chicago theater after the lead actor in a performance of King Lear, Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal), dies of a heart attack. Audience member Jeevan (Himesh Patel) tries to walk Kirsten home when he gets a call from his sister warning him of the deadly flu. As Kirsten’s parents are nowhere to be found, she moves in with Jeevan and his brother Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan) to wait out the proverbial storm.
The show’s brilliance is in its portrayal of so many people’s lives and experiences around this one static event, and the serial television format allows for each story to be handled with the time it deserves. Throughout the miniseries, the audience learns about Miranda Carroll’s (Danielle Deadwyler) relationship with Arthur and her creation of a graphic novel titled Station Eleven, the lives of Arthur’s former friend Clark (David Wilmot), and Arthur’s wife and son as they create the “Museum of Civilization” in an airport as the pandemic rages, and the continuing story of Kirsten and Jeevan living together before Jeevan’s mysterious disappearance. Entwined throughout is the story of present-day 2040, where an older Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) is part of a traveling Shakespeare troupe, and a grown-up Tyler (Daniel Zovatto), Arthur’s son, calls himself “The Prophet” and has some unfinished business with Clark. By splitting up these stories into episodes, Station Eleven creates insular stories that portray a well-developed world. Amanda Whiting from Vulture puts it best: “‘Station Eleven’ episodes either tend toward the character or the plot,” (( Whiting, Amanda. “Station Eleven Recap: Welcome to the Undersea.” Vulture, 30 Dec. 2021. )) which makes the viewing experience just that — an experience, rather than a detached narrative.
Themes Of Pandemic Life
Station Eleven resonates with audiences because of the show’s ability to portray the unique touches of melancholy in pandemic life. Both in the world of the show and in our own outside world, the constant pressure of dealing with loss has taken a toll on everyone. This is where Station Eleven shines, as it connects to the world’s recent experience and allows people to look at their feelings through another frame of reference. Sometimes, it’s easier to make sense of feelings when they are abstracted or distanced, and this show gives audiences a sorely-needed fictional world with which they can compare their previously unthinkable struggles. Here are some of the (understandably related) themes that Station Eleven tackles particularly well.
Grief & “Saying Goodbye”
Grief and memories are messy, and Station Eleven succeeds in utilizing flashbacks and quick edits to promote the feeling of snippets of the past. As Katy Waldman of The New Yorker puts it, “the series,” through its embraces the messiness, range, and complexity of life as real people live it” (( Waldman, Katy. “In ‘Station Eleven,’ All Art Is Adaptation.” The New Yorker, 13 January 2022. )). The extent of Kirsten’s unresolved grief is most clearly shown in the second episode, “A Hawk from a Handsaw.”
As Kirsten reads a monologue as Hamlet, the scene continuously flickers back to show her in Jeevan’s apartment in the early days of the pandemic. Kirsten cries on stage as the viewers at home see her younger self finally receive text messages back from her parents, only to realize that they are simply cold messages announcing that “the owner[s] of [these phones]” are dead. Jeevan and Frank are there to try and comfort her, but the shock of this moment clearly sticks with Kirsten, as shown by her recollection of it. The entire sequence exemplifies the overwhelming viewing experience, with Lee Hazlewood’s song “Your Sweet Love” underscoring the scene with a bittersweet sadness.
Kirsten and Jeevan’s relationship is quickly complicated as the pandemic stretches on and food runs low. After Frank is killed by an intruder, the two move out into the snowy wilderness to survive on their own. One day, Jeevan disappears, and while viewers later learn that he was mauled by a wolf and started a new life as a doctor after searching for Kirsten, his disappearance is yet another time that Kirsten is unable to say goodbye to the people that have cared for her. Now in the present day, she is stubborn and skeptical of those who seek to threaten her found family, and she will do anything to protect them. Kirsten cannot let go of any of the members of the Traveling Symphony, expressing worry any time a member wants to take some time off.
It takes a touch of fantasy to help Kirsten resolve what happened to her. In the series’ most creative episode, “Goodbye My Damaged Home,” Kirsten finally gets the chance to say goodbye to Frank. Present-day Kirsten, dealing with the effects of poison after an altercation in the forest, hallucinates herself traveling back to Frank’s apartment from earlier days in the pandemic. The episode shows the older Kirsten as an observer who can talk to her younger self while watching past events play out, allowing her to process her time there with a clearer head and with the benefit of maturity. At the episode’s close, Kirsten says goodbye to Frank, now portrayed as a skeleton lying in an overgrown bedroom.
Kirsten’s final words to Frank are left to the very end of the end credits, where the audience can hear her say:
“Wanted to say thank you… for letting me stay here.”
Leaving this until the end gives the impression that these words are hard for Kirsten to say as if she has thought about this moment many, many times and is trying to make the most of it. Kirsten does not want to be seen as vulnerable and to survive this new world, she had to protect herself — but finally being able to get closure on her childhood provides her some catharsis, some ability to feel the feelings that she pushed down long ago.
Moving On Without Forgetting
There is a difference between moving on from one’s past and forgetting it entirely: one needs to confront their past to truly move forward. In the final episode, “Unbroken Circle,” Kirsten finally reunites with Jeevan after twenty years of separation, where the two can reconcile their relationship and leave each other on good terms. Notably, their reunion does not contain any edits to past moments, as the show has done before in emotional scenes like Kirsten’s earlier monologue. Instead, the two slowly approach one another at the Museum of Civilization, where Kirsten is performing and where Jeevan has been called to act as a doctor, before hugging and crying together. The two are finally able to live in the moment, to move past the relationship between their prior selves.
Jeevan and Kirsten split up once again at the episode’s close, but not before Kirsten gets to tell him goodbye. The two do not completely forget about their past or each other, far from it; they plan to see each other the next year. Instead, the two of them — and especially Kirsten, whose story the show follows more closely — directly confront their grief and their regrets. They can move on because there are no more “unknowns” or “what if’s” in their relationship, at least none that aren’t assuaged by the fact that they have both survived and found their own ways to be happy in such a cruel world. This method might not be possible for everyone struggling with how they left the ones they love, or how those people left them, but the possibility that reconciliation can persist after twenty years of heartbreak sparks hope.
Where Kirsten is left haunted by her past and tries to hold onto it, Tyler copes with the pandemic and the constant distrust of others (for fear of infection) by denying the past altogether. Tyler, who spent the early days of the pandemic hunkered down in the Severn City Airport, attempts to help a seemingly-immune plane passenger, only for the passenger to be shot by Clark before Tyler is placed in quarantine. While he waits out the time, he similarly latches on to the book Station Eleven, which was given to him as a gift by his father. Instead of escaping like Kirsten, however, Tyler focuses on a particular line and repeats it:
“There is no before.”
Tyler fakes his own death after hearing that Clark wants him and his mother to get out of the way of Clark’s quest for protection — and power — of the airport.
In 2040, Tyler — now “The Prophet” — is simultaneously stuck in the world of the book and trying to deny the past altogether, as he recruits children to help him destroy the Museum of Civilization and finally get his revenge against Clark. It takes a performance of Hamlet that both Clark and Tyler act in to make Tyler finally reconcile his past: his fraught relationship with his father, his history with Clark, and his own view that perhaps humanity shouldn’t try to remember what came before. Tyler’s story, though far more extensive than can fit here, shows that while living in the past isn’t healthy, denying it altogether isn’t either.
The Healing Power Of Art
Both within and outside the universe of Station Eleven, art plays a large role in providing comfort for those who desperately need it. The Traveling Symphony’s motto, “Survival is Insufficient,” points out the importance of art at all times, especially when survival might be the only thing that people can think about. For Kirsten, who spends her childhood obsessively reading the book and even adapting it into a play, Station Eleven has been something that may not be necessary for survival, but that still feels necessary nonetheless. In flashbacks, the audience sees that Miranda worked on writing and illustrating the book almost obsessively as well, deriving comfort from working on something that she never intends to share with the public. Art helps people have something to hold on to when everything else is in flux.
People have gravitated to art during the past two years: to entertain, to fill the time, to get some comfort, to feel. Strangely, escaping into a different pandemic helps bring some peace of mind, or at least helps people see that their personal problems — grief, mourning loved ones and lost time, feeling “stuck” after a traumatic event — are not uncommon. Station Eleven is a unique example of media where the production of a fictional pandemic was interrupted by a real pandemic, which means that the actors and creators had to work through their own emotions all while trying to show these themes on-screen (( Greene, Steve. “‘Station Eleven’: The HBO Max Show Made A Fictional Pandemic Before and During a Real One.” IndieWire, 22 September 2021. )). The show is thus a mix of art that is made in the context of a pandemic and art that helps audiences process their own overwhelming stress that has lasted over two years, and this connection helps Station Eleven get these complicated feelings right.
Processing feelings on one’s own is difficult. If someone wants to move forward, they need to delve into their memories to think about what made them uncomfortable in the past, and this is hard to do even though an artistic lens. But, by exploring one’s own grief just as the characters on screen explore theirs, audiences are able to enter into their own memories feeling a little less alone. Station Eleven is a masterclass in how people can use art to help themselves through tough times, and the show is a well-timed balm for current audiences struggling to move forward without “moving on” completely.
