Created by Patrick Somerville
Starring Mackenzie Davis, Himesh Patel, Danielle Deadwyler
All episodes available on HBO Max

by Jacob Harrington, Contributor

Station Eleven is a difficult show to watch. It would be a difficult show to watch even in normal, non-pandemic times. It was filmed during our current very real pandemic. I was hesitant to start it out of fear it may be a little bit too close to home for right now, in pandemic year 3. And it is. It made me cry my eyes out. It is full of all too familiar fears, loneliness and anxieties that we have been living through for two years. But It earns the things it makes you feel, and it was a pleasure to experience. I needed to feel these things. It helped me work through and understand all the feelings the past two very strange years have left me with.

When a character gets a call from his emergency room nurse sister telling him to get to their brother’s apartment and build a barricade before the city is completely devastated by a flu, you can feel the fear he feels. You have probably felt it too. You are probably pretty familiar with it. You have felt the creeping isolation and loneliness that sets in as this character, his brother, and a little girl who ended up with them go through weeks of being locked in a high rise apartment that as far as they know is the only safe place left on Earth. 

The ten episodes of Station Eleven weave a complex tapestry across three time periods: five years before a global pandemic killed most of humanity, days before the pandemic began, and twenty years after. Some people will find the jumping back and forth tedious and frustrating, but at the end you see how well it works and how much it will reward rewatches. It contextualizes these characters and the before/after times in such a clever way.

The ensemble of characters are all connected in a plethora of ways from the before–before the pandemic that ended most of human civilization. These connections stem from live theater, tangled relationships, pure chance, and a graphic novel called Station Eleven. The full depth of their connections becomes clear through the series. In the after, a Shakespeare troupe called The Traveling Symphony travels the Great Lakes, visiting little towns or survivors and doing their best to preserve these great works of theater from the before. In the after, there is so little left of civilization and all our works. It was all wiped away. Everything from the before matters so much more than it did before because it’s all gone. Or maybe it doesn’t matter at all.

Kirsten (Matilda Lawler/Mackenzie Davis) is a child actor who meets Jeevan (Himesh Patel) after a performance of King Lear. Jeevan knows a devastating virus is about to effectively end the world, and he can’t leave this little girl at the theater without an adult to get her home. This is how she ends up locked down with Jeevan and his brother Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan) in Frank’s apartment, where they all try not to lose their minds as they weather the end of the world. This show presents you with these awful, tragic things that we wish were not familiar–unimaginable levels of loss and loneliness–and somehow it’s comforting, because our broken world isn’t as bad as this one. It could be worse. In January 2022 this is something really resonated with me. The past two years have been a long nightmare. But it could be worse. We still have our before.

Kirsten clings to a copy of the graphic novel Station Eleven, of which only five copies exist. The book’s author and origin are revealed through gorgeous storytelling. The adult Kirsten, twenty years older and part of The Traveling Symphony, is played by Mackenzie Davis. Davis is one of my favorite actors who has been turning out excellent work for a few years now. Her role as Cameron on Halt And Catch Fire is something that has stuck with me for years. She plays the adult Kirsten with a sensitive facade covering up the vicious, dangerous young girl whose world ended around her.

The acting in this show is across the board fantastic with a huge ensemble playing characters at various ages and circumstances. Gael Garcia Bernal plays an actor with connections to most of the various other characters. David Wilmot plays his best friend Clark, a man who turns the airport he is stuck in when the world ends into one of the last holdouts of civilization. Daniel Zovatto plays The Prophet, a wandering creep who leads a cult of children who all believe there was no before - a very Guilty Remnant-like threat who are terrifying before they even get to do anything.  Himesh Patel plays Javeen and Nabhaan Rizwan plays his brother Frank. Patel gives such a tender, heartbreaking performance that exhibits so much depth and nuance. Lori Petty plays the Traveling Symphony’s conductor, and she’s a delight to see. 

An enormous standout performance comes from Danielle Deadwyler as Miranda, the author of the Station Eleven graphic novel. She has a line near the end of the series that truly devastated me. Her performance in this series is absolutely stunning, and we get to know her and what inspired the graphic novels that inspires others very well. If I have any criticisms of the show it’s that due to its very complex plot with multiple timelines, some characters in the far future maybe do not get as much exploration as they deserve. 

This is Patrick Somerville’s follow up to Maniac on Netflix, an excellent series that came and went but that I really enjoyed. It’s similar in tone and story to The Leftovers, Lost, and the video games Death Stranding and The Last Of Us, parts one and two. The Last Of Us television adaption is coming to HBO later this year and will likely be a similarly thematic downer existential trip but with a lot more zombies and violence. 

In the first episode, Chicago (which is mostly Toronto standing in) is shot to look like a far future sci-if city. The far future twenty years later is full crumbling buildings covered in lush green plants that reclaimed them in humanity’s absence. The sky is always blue, everyone’s clothes indicate a fashion sense of making the best of it. The troupe’s costumes during their performances are always incredible. Directors Hiro Murai, Jeremy Podeswa, Helen Shaver, and Lucy Tcherniak make this a visually dazzling series. There are many gorgeous shots that make rather plain locations look like another Earth. 

The complex narrative structure is brilliant, a non-linear puzzle that is stronger for the chronology it unfolds in. There is an existential, heavy, difficult to describe tone to the show that if you have seen The Leftovers will feel very familiar. But even with those comparisons, this is its own thing and I have seen never anything else thread a needle like this. You gotta watch it to feel it, but you will feel it. Dan Romer’s beautiful score elevates everything.

What does happen after the world ends? Well, it keeps turning. This is a story I find myself repeatedly interested in. The video games Death Stranding and The Last Of Us (part 1 and even more so part 2) explore this in depth. How is humanity at large doing 20 to 30 years after the apocalypse? Not very well. The stories of those games are more violent and less hopeful than Station Eleven, which is also occasionally very violent. In The Leftovers, the disappearance of 2% of the human population is so devastating because of how it affected everyone in both big and small ways. So many people were gone but it was still a fairly small amount of people considering the whole population. The devastating loss creeps in through the small ways people keep going about their lives with the inexplicable horror of their loved ones simply vanishing into nothing. The world kept turning but it was never the same, and the people who lost people were never the same. In Station Eleven the apocalypse is much more total. The flu seemingly killed 99% or people on Earth. Anything from before that survived is a precious gem of civilization and human connection, because almost nothing remains. 

The excellent Hideo Kojima video game Death Stranding is about reestablishing the connections of civilization. When everything gets wiped away, you appreciate everything the way it was. This show also shares some thematic DNA with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Wachowski sister directed film of the same name. Ripple effects and cycles across years. An unbroken circle. 

During the pandemic, have you thought about things you wished you had done in 2019? A trip or an experience that you put off until the new year?Have you thought about how many previously simple things are now complex and fragile? Have you gotten in touch with an old friend you had not talked to for many years because you suddenly missed them? Have you thought about how different these past two years of your life could have been? I live alone and work from home. I have spent most of my time during the pandemic alone. I have gone through every stage of cabin fever cooped up in my apartment. It is a strange, strange time. Things were much less strange before.

Sometimes it feels like the world did end and the gears that have kept relentlessly spinning are beginning to rust. It’s the loss of people, safety, and normalcy and so many other things big and small. There was a before where the world and myself were different. Things from that before - old friends, albums you loved in college, a book you used to love - they feel different now. But we still have them. That is what Station Eleven is about. The world ending, a traveling band of theater performers using art to keep the light of civilization from going out, and to heal their broken hearts. 

A repeated moment from the titular graphic novels reads “I have a job to do. I have found you nine times before, maybe ten. And I will find you again until the last time. I always do. I find you because I know you, and I know you because we are the same.” When the full context of this line and how it effects the various characters is revealed, the familiar sadness of this series is proven worth it for the beautiful ending it delivers. Another-  “Survival is insufficient. I don’t want to live the wrong life, and then die. I am at my best when I am escaping.” I can relate. Ripple effects that stick with characters for years propel this series to high heights. When Bill Callahan’s “One Fine Morning” soundtracks a crucial scene in the ninth episode and the singer croons “Its all coming back to me now - my apocalypse. My apocalypse.”, I felt like I had seen a magic trick. 

The resulting things you feel from the story this show tells are profound. I wish they were not so relatable. I wish the fictional Station Eleven graphic novel was real and that I could read it. I wish this horrible pandemic would end and that I could see my friends again, or go to the grocery store without feeling existential terror. I wish it didn’t feel so good and cathartic to watch this show and let it absolutely overtake me and make me sob at midnight on a Thursday when I should be in bed. But it did feel good. It felt good to be taken on a ride by this story and really feel the depth of the loss, fear and sadness of the world we have lived in for two years. It felt wonderful to see the connections from the before made again in the lonely, bleak far future. It truly makes me feel hopeful, and understood. Someone found a way to make sense of all the things I have been feeling. This series has a depth of humanity that is rare to find in art, and stunning to come across.

If you are hesitant to watch this show because of how heavy the material is, well, it is. It is going to make you get very sad and cry a lot. But it will help you make sense of the world we live in today, or at least it did for me. It is an optimistic show in the end. It is worth the journey to get to the ending. This is one of the best shows I have ever watched and I am completely floored by it.