Recent Watching: Station Eleven

Last night, I watched the first episode of the new HBO or HBO Max series Station Eleven. The series is based on the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel. I have not read the book, but I did check it out of my local public library today and I am curious to read it. 

What is the story about, you ask. Emily Temple summarizes it as follows:

In case you haven’t already read the novel (and you should), here’s the gist: in the approximate present, a flu pandemic descends without warning and spreads across the globe, quickly wiping out 99.99 percent of the human species. Kirsten is eight when the flu strikes; she is performing in a production of King Lear with the famous actor Arthur Leander, who dies of a heart attack on stage, and through chance winds up quarantined with a stranger, a man named Jeevan, and his brother.

Twenty years later, Kirsten is part of the Travelling Symphony (whose motto is “Survival is Insufficient”), a group of actors and musicians who trace a well-trodden loop through the near-empty world, stopping at ragtag settlements, performing for survivors. The novel isn’t plotless, exactly, but like most of Mandel’s work, it is introspective and ruminative in a way that resists summary, more about sensation than action. It is non-linear, dipping back into the early days of the pandemic, and also the years before, focusing first on one character and then another, creating a sort of collage effect, building meaning as it goes, but leaving much unsaid and unexplained.

I am not sure what I think about the story after seeing just the first episode. The question of whether you really want to think about a pandemic that is far worse than Covid is one to think about. But I think I will watch more. Temple says it is worth watching:

Ultimately, this the rare case in which I’d say that the adaptation actually improves on the novel in some ways—it complicates the details of the characters, puts more bends into the road, overlays images in ways that deepen their meanings. Sometimes the expansions feel unnecessary, but the writers—several of whom are Leftovers alums, which shows—have maintained the thrust and sense of the novel while widening its scope. Though Kirsten is the linchpin, the diversions into the stories of other characters, each with their own complex struggles and interconnections, all feel like parts of the same puzzle. And this is a puzzle that rewards completion. When you step back after ten episodes, you don’t see a pandemic, or a disaster, or a post-apocalypse. You just see a bunch of people, still connected to one another, for good or ill, moving forward.

In addition to Temple's recommendation, James Poniewozik in the Times also had a positive review:

But that’s just it: This is art for art’s sake. That is, it’s a work that celebrates humanity by celebrating humanity’s drive to create. Art, in “Station Eleven,” is the human soul conserved in M.R.E. form for future consumption. It’s the way we speak to one another across generations and beyond death. “Station Eleven” finds this power not just in Shakespeare but in comics, in a hip-hop anthem, in a long-ago child’s voice recorded on an electronic keyboard — even in an episode of “Star Trek: Voyager,” which gives the series a repeating mantra, “Survival is insufficient.”

Not everyone agrees on what art is for, of course, and if you want it to help you forget your troubles, “Station Eleven” is not for you. I don’t blame you; it’s been a rough couple of years.

But if you want catharsis and a surprising laugh, I’m not sure I know a better show to go into the next year with. At a time of both sudden and slow-motion catastrophes, “Station Eleven” is a reminder that we never know what life will bring. But the show must go on.