Station Eleven plays with comedy and tragedy this week
Clark's and Jeevan's stories stand in stark contrast with one another in the eighth and ninth episodes of the season
TV Reviews Station Eleven
For weeks, I’ve been wondering how Station Eleven was going to work as a show. Reading the book has been both a blessing and a curse. I read Station Eleven before the pandemic but after Trump became president, and I found it comforting during that seemingly apocalyptic event. It has the kind of optimism I’ve found to be anathema in most TV dramas, which favor nihilism, cynicism, and an anti-hero complex that I haven’t enjoyed since 2016. Even Patrick Somerville being showrunner didn’t give me much hope—I also read The Leftovers before I saw the show, and I couldn’t stand the latter. Not because it wasn’t good (I didn’t watch far enough to have an actual opinion), but because I couldn’t stomach the despair or gray morality of the characters when I had to spend more time with them outside of Tom Perrotta’s text.
But with this week’s episodes, “Who’s There?” and “Dr. Chaudhary,” the show has both met and exceeded my expectations. Adaptations are tricky things—the best ones become more than the sum of their parts, but usually fall into the trap of merely summarizing the story. When I wrote about Gael García Bernal not fitting the character Arthur Leander in episode three, it was because I was expecting the show to go the way of the book. But, like casting Captain America Chris Evans in Snowpiercer and Knives Out, the show works to subvert our expectations while staying true to the book.
I read the book on Kindle, so I had the advantage of seeing what people had highlighted in their copies. In the book, Clark has the same job—doing assessments of CEOs. But the book includes a flashback to when he went on one particular interview that stopped him in his tracks. Dahlia, who he’s meant to speak to about a CEO, tells him that said CEO is a joyless bastard. “Adulthood is full of ghosts,” she says.
“I’m talking about those people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed. Do you know what I mean? They’ve done what’s expected of them. They want to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped. Dan’s like that.”
“You don’t think he likes his job, then.”
“Correct,” she said, “but I don’t think he even realizes it. You probably encounter people like him all the time. High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.”
What was it in this statement that made Clark want to weep?
Was it the show that had me on Clark’s side, or this particular sequence? In the book, published in 2014, Clark is a distinct figure because he’s gay, outside the heterosexual mores of Miranda and Arthur’s relationship. But in the show, he’s something darker. As one of the only white adult characters from pre-pandemic times, he’s showed as having money, status, romantic success, and so on, but he’s still bitter about Arthur’s success. Arthur, in turn, is a friend who actually likes Clark, and is shocked at his misplaced anger. And it turns out his relationship with Miranda was a lot more troubled and full of misunderstanding than Clark, Tyler, Elizabeth, and even Miranda understood.
The subtle way this episode clears a lot of my confusion about the rest of the show is masterful. While in the book, the above conversation grants Clark a release from himself before the pandemic, in the show, Clark still does not seem to have learned this lesson. Clark is the figure to be wary of here. He acts like Arthur is the source of all his anger, his problems, his bitterness, and he acts like Tyler is yet another Arthur he so personally dislikes. The museum is less a source of safety and kindness and more a way for Clark to rule with an iron fist and hang on to his sleepwalking life with an even stronger grip.
Another thing the book doesn’t have is Elizabeth. Knowing that she wasn’t sleeping with Arthur before Miranda burned down the guesthouse explains more of her character, and even more of how she and Arthur struggled to find understanding. She, like Clark, was unaware in the old world, but in the post-pandemic times, she is much more understanding. I can understand why she holds Tyler at the end of the first episode and says, in an almost childlike way, “He came back.”
Beyond Clark, “Who’s There?” doesn’t completely work—I absolutely do not understand how Kirsten went from being so wary of Tyler that she stabbed him for freaking her out, to listening to him. The main problem is the way that Tyler terrorizes the Traveling Symphony is enough for Kirsten to not like him. Or did I mistake that sequence where he uses a child as a suicide bomber? Maybe it’s because she doesn’t trust the museum and some of the Tyler’s frustrations with Clark are legitimate? Not all of them are. Maybe it’s because he’s the only other person who’s read Station Eleven. Even Kirsten has a weakness.
Ah, and then we get to my favorite, favorite episode of this series, and the one I’ve patiently been waiting for: “Dr. Chaudhary.” In the book, Jeevan is important in the beginning and a footnote in the ending; but the structure of the show lets Jeevan be his own, totally new character. He’s a coward, plain and simple, not unlike Dev Patel’s character in The Green Knight. While both Patels—Himesh and Dev—have luxurious hair and British Indian origins, it’s the fidgety, awkward, and ultimately, really funny way they shrink back from responsibility that really gets me.
Jeevan’s episode is by far the funniest and perhaps even the most relatable sequence of the show. He’s bogged down by the responsibility of Kirsten, protesting that he needs other adults and she needs other kids and he can’t stay in the cabin all winter. He hates the book she’s found solace in, throwing it away in one scene. He hates how much she better related to Frank and how much they both so obviously miss him. Most of all, he hates that he has to be strong for Kirsten yet he actually can’t be strong for Kirsten.
In “Who’s There?,” when Clark meets Kirsten in the before times of the play, Arthur tells him that Kirsten apparently has a bad home life. There’s an implication that Kirsten had survival instincts long before the pandemic, although why and how we may never know. But certainly it’s in strong contrast with Jeevan’s wishy-washy awkwardness. He even lies over the radio about being alone and being a doctor, which is what ends up separating him and Kirsten, but also what helps him grow the fuck up.
Even the little tribe that Jeevan finds is hilarious. Of course Kirsten knows his old pre-pandemic nickname, “Leavin’ Jeevan.” Of course he falls in with a bunch of would-be moms in a Y: The Last Man–type sequence (Brian K. Vaughn did say that the comic was about Yorick learning he had to grow up from the strong women around him). If there’s anything that can get a man to grow up, I guess it would be seeing several live births over the course of a day or two. I knew, I knew, that the pregnant lady he fights off was going to end up being his partner. Somehow, every part of Jeevan’s experience with the pandemic is comedy over tragedy, through a combination of dumb luck and almost over-the-top sincerity.
Pairing Jeevan’s episode with Clark’s is great: While Clark is barely holding it together, ready to go on a bender from even the smallest perceived slight from Arthur, his emotions packed inside him like sardines in a tin can, Jeevan is constantly spilling his emotions everywhere. The main problem is he can’t lie, and if he tries to lie—like when he initially shrugs off Kirsten’s protest that he got rid of the book—he’s too obvious about it.
But it’s the moment he does lie, when he understands suppressing his emotions in order to hold someone else’s, that he finally blooms. It’s when he’s helping a doctor help a girl give birth, and things are not looking good. He’s there for her till the end, finally showing up instead of shrinking back. The baby doesn’t survive, and it’s Tyler who shows up as the “Dave” the now deceased mother was looking for. He doesn’t get to keep the baby, but he does give you a chill down your spine as you get to see exactly how intertwined the characters are.
From there, every moment of his happiness feels earned. He earns the home he makes in the cabin with his partner, his three adorable children, his actual work as a doctor. He’s off to make a housecall. Hm, I wonder if there was a character who’s in a hospital bed who needs some assistance….
Stray Observations:
- Thanks, HBO Max, for that flashback to my 8th grade health class.
- Was Frank the apparition the result of all the weed and meds and alcohol Jeevan had?
- On that note, another way Jeevan is highly relatable is how badly he wants to escape his circumstances. If it’s not his drugs, he wants to watch a movie. He refuses to read Kirsten’s book.
- Frank’s fatherly sequences in his episode stand out more now that we know how bad Jeevan is at it on his own.
- I love how this show lets memorable scenes leak into the character’s present. The part when Jeevan plays the keyboard’s song of a dead father’s dead child nearly broke me. And of course it calls back to this sequence in Frank’s episode, where he remixed a celebrity interview into A Tribe Called Quest’s “Excursions.”
- So, if there’s an apocalypse, I should make my way to a baby store. Seems like the safest place on this whole show.
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The baby does survive. We see Deborah write up a birth cert for her under the name Alexandra. It’s Alex.Tyler presumably knew this when he was talking to her in Ep 2 because he tells her a (highly modified) story about her mother, Rose. Kirsten and August assume there was never any Rose – in this episode we find out there was, but “David”/Tyler wasn’t married to her, wasn’t the kid’s father, and the baby she died having wasn’t Cody. It was Alex.
Phew, you’re right. I’m going to have to rewatch this show all over again.
Jesus. I missed the Alex comment completely. I thought “is that Tyler? No. He said his name was Dave.”Also a little confused on the timing, because wouldn’t the birthing scene be the same winter when the flu first broke out? I thought Kirsten/Jeevan were only in the cabin a few months. Which would put Tyler still at the airport?Or did I miss that this is Kirsten/Jeevan’s second winter in the cabin?
It’s the second winter- 1 year from the flu outbreak
I think the timeline is-
Early December (Winter Solstice?)- Flu Outbreak
90 days later (so early March)- Kirsten and Jeevan leave the apartment. Presumably they find the cabin within a month“Almost Year One” and “18 Days before the winter solstice” seem to be used interchangeably- so it opens in early December 1 year after the flu.
One inconsistency from my point of view is that the level of snow drifts they encounter when leaving the apartment feels right for early March, but it would be unusual to have that level of snow built up by early December the next year. It takes time for winter to settle in like they portrayed it at the beginning of the episode. It would have made more sense for Jeevan to encounter the birthing center in Febuary instead.
It’s a full year later. Second winter.
My assumption was that all of the babies in the birthing center were post-pans, conceived in the few months after the flu emerged. Without going back to check, I think (I *think*) that the timeline sort of works out like this:The “Dr. Chaudhary” episode says it takes place sometime like “almost year one,” so almost a year after the flu hit. When he arrives in the birthing center, they say it’s something like two weeks before the solstice, which is when they expect the babies to arrive. That would put that episode in early December, almost a year after the pandemic started. That means the flu could have hit sometime in late December the year before and the timeline would still work out for Jeevan and Kirsten to leave Chicago during the wintertime. I think they stay in Frank’s apartment for 60 days, so that puts them walking out of Chicago in February(ish). What’s missing in the timeline, then, is the summer/fall of year zero, after the flu. Presumably, they spent that walking, but the show hasn’t given us any of that. It does say, however, that Jeevan is itching to leave, so it’s possible they arrived there soon after leaving Chicago and stayed for several months, until the winter. The thing that puzzled me was Jeevan’s push to leave, given that it was the middle of a Michigan fucking winter. Yeah, sure, make plans to leave dude, but don’t actually go until like April when you’re not going to freeze to death.I’m not going to let myself get too bogged down with this, though, because in the end it was a beautiful episode, the best of the series so far in my opinion.
Man, this show has turned out to be really really different than the book. I mean, obviously it’s got the same bones, but so much of the rest is seriously divergent. I like quite a bit it as a show on its own merits, but I kinda feel like I’d appreciate it more if I could have gone in knowing nothing about the book.
It’s sort of weird, because the book seemed pretty adaptable as is. It’s not like it required all that much streamlining, and it’s quite cinematic.
Yeah, it feels more like it’s been padded if anything. There’s been at least one full episode that I thought was entirely unnecessary to the story, but was necessary to hit the required number of episodes. If I didn’t know the book, I don’t think the thought would ever have crossed my mind.
I’m wondering if that’s to make it easier to adapt into additional seasons, should it be a hit. I feel like that’s HBO’s MO these days…
Even THAT would not be a problem with a faithful adaptation. There would be plenty to explore after the book ends, especially considering that Jeevan has zero interaction with any of the other characters in the book after the first day of the flu, and ends up living 1,000 miles away. You could find a way of bringing him back together with a grown Kirsten and meeting an elderly Clark. You could also pay visit to that town to the South that appears to have restored electricity.
It seems to be a bad trend that TV-grade writers and showrunners think they are the match for successful novelists. As soon as the source material runs out, most of these productions go off the rails (Handmaid’s Tale, GOT, and too many others to list here…) if they weren’t already driven there by network “adaptors” at the outset.
Episode 9 made me chuckle before it started because my dentist’s name is Dr. Chaudhary.
Thanks to HBO and Avclub for covering this, it’s been a welcome addition to my pandemic survival kit.
Jeevan hiding under a heat blanket, bleeding out in the snow, yelling at the graphic novel for being “so pretentious!” is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. This show has completely blown me away. That birth scene was so poignant that my eyes actually stung from tears.
Cant believe that wasn’t mentioned in the review, biggest belly laugh I’ve had in ages. And yeah this show is special
I do like how the series has slowly made it very clear that Station Eleven (the book) is not some masterpiece. It is just a remnant made important by it’s survival, which I suppose maps thematically onto the series as a whole. I don’t think the book capitalized on that aspect of the comic book all that much, but it’s obvious in the show with things like young Kirsten’s play, the times the comic is quoted, and the scene that Kirsten and Tyler re-enact that Jeevan is right. So pretentious. Having that character deliver that line in that moment was such a high point for me.
I also read The Leftovers before I saw the show, and I couldn’t stand the latter. I’m an OCD completionist when it comes to serialized storytelling, and The Leftovers is maybe the only show where I recommend people start on the second season. It just got so much better—so much more exciting and complicated and joyful—once it moved beyond the original book material.
Ooh, thanks for the recommendation.
Good god do not listen, it’s a terrible recommendation, the first season is my personal favourite and totally worthy of being watched properly.
I made it about 4 episodes when it first came out, then I had to bail. The Guilty Remnant thing was just beyond tiresome and annoying to me. It was a shame, because I liked a lot of the people associated with the show.
I have a 16-year-old Australian Cattle Dog mix who looks a lot like the one that gets hit by a car in the opening scene of the pilot, so I abandoned it almost immediately. It wasn’t until the pandemic (when I had caught up on like, literally everything else) that I gave it another chance.Ultimately, I was glad I did. But the later seasons are so different it’s not crucial to see the first.
I just finished rewatching the Leftovers season 2, so powerful, love that show 4eva!
Did not read the book. The story started with her, Frank and Jeevan and it is what drew me in; I loved coming back to the apartment—the other episodes were interesting but these, for me, were the most involving and emotional. I had to look up the hooded intruder, I honestly thought it was Shia LaBeouf! I am going to miss this series, it has been a bright spot for me and love the unpredictable originality of the various plot lines and character arcs.
Or did I mistake that sequence where he uses a child as a suicide bomber?Didn’t he say (in Episode 6 I think) that when he was recovering from his stabbing, one of the Undersea started making up stories and it led to the kids stealing the mines and blowing themselves up (I forget the rationale, but some BS like “it’ll set you free” or something)? So I don’t think he was actually behind that.
Yeah I wish they’d have made that more clear because her even thinking that he may have used the kids like that like of ruins things…
Yeah, the show made it clear there he wasn’t behind that. But I’m confused by the point of that bombing scene. It was very dramatic, but it’s whole purpose in retrospect seems to only be as a fake-out to make us think Tyler was this evil antagonist.
He did still take the kids though. Or lure them away or whatever.
he said he did it to help “reset” the story as they were believing different tales that had been told in his absence. Almost a sacrificial lamb situation.
I randomly started watching this because Mackenzie Davis is awesome (Halt and Catch Fire, forever!). I Didn’t know anything about it but goddamn if it isn’t the best show I have seen in a long time.Also, if Jeevan and Kirsten don’t get to meet up again, I’m going to riot haha.
I too started for Mackenzie Davis (I 2nd that Halt and Catch forever!)Thank you to Hbo , the creators and all involved or talking about this show/story!
Was very reluctant to bother with this show, as I find post-pandemic story-telling to be a pretty saturated well I’m tapped out on, but tuned in because I do like Mackenzie Davis so figured I’d at least give it a shot. My biggest surprise, beyond the earnest enjoyment of the show, is despite Mackenzie Davis being my hook into the show, I find the young portrayal of Kristen to be much more compelling and interesting.
it was written well before the pandemic- its hands-down my favorite fiction of the last 15 yrs. And THE GLASS HOTEL her next book has characters/places in it from S11 as well which is an incredibly good read too.
Phew, this show. I almost broke a few times that last episode. Glad I never read the book as I’m afraid it would sap some of the enjoyment of watching this amazing show.
My favorite thing about the show is Matilda Lawler as Kirsten. She’s such great actor. Fave scene is Franks rap and Kirstens dance to it.
Did the book punt on the issues of food, water, and shelter as much as the show has? I assume the writer just decided to not spend any time on portraying what would be an all-consuming task as finding food and water every day. Twenty years on the canned foods ,clothes, batteries, tires, teeth, bones, diseases are all running out, rotting away, or spreading unopposed after twenty years of societal and infrastructure decay. No more new shoes. New clothes. Even the unused stuff is twenty years on in age in unconditioned storage. Mother nature is consuming everything.
I was also curious if they ever touched on the fact that you were pretty stuck wherever you landed when this started. Maybe within a land border you could score a vehicle for awhile and try to travel home over time, but if you were across an ocean you were NEVER coming home and likely never having contact with anyone you knew ever again. I would have preferred some examination of those realities and a little less drama-club traveling theater storyline – but that’s not the book. I like the Kirsten Jeevan Frank (KJF) time the most by far as it did address those worries at the start, and going a year or so forward.
Moving to the present we now have “Lost” like weirdness and intrigue which doesn’t compare to the realistic drama of the KJF time. It’s also gotten tropy with people running through air ducts (that shrink on the outside like Snoopy’s doghouse.) Wheelchair-bound Jeevan getting an unconscious pregnant woman back in to a locked building in a blizzard. Silly things that just make a record-scratch moment. The terribly explained suicidal children. Explosives and remote detonators appearing from a contrivance I can’t possibly believe. Tyler explaining you can navigate anywhere through jetways (never seen any like that where I’ve traveled or worked) that he actually never had a chance to explore that much in detail if that even worked. He was portrayed as stuck in the terminal for several days, then brings in the survivor and is immediately quarantined in a locked plane – then escapes when he sets the plane on fire all in a day or so. The characters also ridiculously avoid any natural expository conversation to the point it’s like, “You wait here. I’ll go for help.” “I have something I must tell you! But I’ll tell you later.” The idea that Tyler and his mother have been co-existing like this within a relatively short hike’s distance all this time and never knew it? C’mon. Just write better.
I thought they did a good job showing the difference between 1 year out and 20 years out. In the first year or two, the gas is still good, so they have generators and cars, canned food hasn’t expired, there are still batteries with power. They are still scavenging, and finding most of what they need, especially things like medicine.
20 years later, the only processed food we see are those survival rations at the country club (which I believe are designed to last for 20 years?). The cars are now being pulled by horses because gas is gone/expired. It looked like every other community had some pretty big gardens happening by now. When Tyler gets stabbed, he doesn’t get antibiotics, he gets some sort of home grown penicillin.
The airport is unique, with their solar panels, they have one of the only electricity sources that doesn’t have components that need to be replaced. And you can see how much sq footage has been devoted to growing food by year 20
I just found silly the horses pulling full sized cars/trucks 20 years after, tools and mechanics would still exist to make life better for those poor horses
I find the blithe disregard for the day -to-day survival needs as distracting the writers making a deep dive in to it. They should have portrayed SOME middle ground in the twenty-years on future. Like, I don’t know, food production and markets markets have somehow re-evolved in communities, or something, so you can stock up as you traverse the desolation. Personally, based on recent events, I think America would degrade in to a brutal nation of totalitarian right-wing hatred, suspicion and punishment. There are too many of us who cannot be reasoned with on any level of politics, science, empathy…and that forces the “reasonable” of us to react in kind to survive those others. It’s like being elected to save democracy and then having to become an authoritarian to keep the other authoritarians from using democracy to get elected and instill themselves as authoritarians. We can’t save ourselves from ourselves. IOW, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”.
in that I think Y: the Last Man was pretty accurate, except for people driving cars/bikes around as if gas wouldn’t be the first resource to be disappear in oil addicted america.
wow I have felt that. However the Traveling Symphony actually reminded me of two existing communities. 1. Rennies, who travel from Ren Faire to Ren fire year round and live in tent cities of under 200 ppl behind the the fences and 2. Queer leftwing-anarchists, particularly 3 communities in West Philly, Austin and a radical faerie owned community in short mountain. There is alot of emphasis on communitarian sharing of resources but individual self-expression/determination, alot of concern with post apocalypse skills, old timey survival skills, a small % are interested in tactical, alot of arts/humanities like painting reading and theater and they look just like those people in the show, i mean, down to even their aesthetics. I’d be surprised if someone involved wasn’t a part of that scene. I guess my point is we need to create alternative communities before such an apocalypse. There will aways be some conflict and power struggles with humans, and more democratic communities would have to be tactically skilled and able to interrogate strangers for proof of honesty/good-faith, (like how in the show they made alleged Shakespearean actors answer a line cue from Hamlet).
We lived as hunter-gatherers for 150, 000 yrs. Every pure hunter-gatherer society that existed then or now is egalitarian without concepts of landownership or even paternity. They’re leaders have no power, and all food must be shared, otherwise people are free and move between bands. Teasing, mocking and if neccessary, shunning is used to hold ppl accountable. All the anthropological evidence we have, from stones and bones, to accounts if those American tribes that were hunter gatherers (many were not), to the cultural anthropology of the 20th century have found that pure hunter gatherers live this way, and they are the happiest people in whatever era they exist. (As soon as they start any gardening, herding or even some types of fishing, everything changes). It changed for most of us 10 000 yrs ago. And ppl did fight the agricultural revolution then when they realized it came with labor, slavery, inequality, inheritance, and control of women and thus sex (neccessary for inheritance). People tried to run away. Obviously even if we had the low amount of ppl we did then, the earth is different and can’t sustain us as traditional hunter-gatherers. And we already know too much, (Tyler asking if he should delete capitalism). My point is only that this is the natural human state, and it too is a part of our heritage. In small communities of under 200 ppl, it has a better chance of coming out in us and being effective, despite 10,000 yrs of inter-generational trauma. So do not despair my friend.
I fear that when we introduced dependent “economies” to our long departed hunter gatherers we crossed a line that will never be uncrossed. That, and a country full of guns, ammo, and and an irrational idea that we go on to a blissful afterlife, so no repercussions for screwing up our one chance here and now.
This was very heartening, thank you.
The quarantine ended and he and his mother were running things along with Clark and Miles before he left. He wasn’t in quarantine when he set the plane on fire. As a matter of fact, I got the impression at least a month had passed. He just used that plane to fake his death.
The surviving plane occupant couldn’t have lived in the plane without food and water but more than a few days at best, so unless I missed a lot of time passing by AFTER Tyler and his mom were released from being locked in the pane in the hangar, I don’t know where he’d have traversed all these “jetways”. Since when do jetways link together like that? They’re secured from plane to terminal in every airport I’ve ever worked or traveled in. That’s kind of the idea. Nobody should be diverting over to other flights through an unsecured tunnel. And how did he rig all these explosives and remote detonators? He literally blew up a tower. I mean, c’mon.
None of what you said here has anything to do with what I said. I wasn’t defending all that, just that he did not set the plane on fire while they were quarantined and that some time had already passed by that point.
You’ve probably read in the other reviews that the series departs significantly (I would say almost completely) from the book. Some of those adaptive choices have been excellent—pairing Kirsten with Jeevan was the best. In the book they meet when Arthur dies but that’s it, really. Other choices, I’ve not liked as much, but have been OK with once I accepted that the series was telling a different story than the book. I think it’s told that story pretty well, all things considered. But on to your questions about the book:The book honestly does not spend any time on the 20 intervening years between the flu and Kirsten at 28-years old. But by the time the story picks up, the roads are safer, people have settled down into ragtag communities, and are largely functioning in little islands of crude civilization. The references to those 20 years are oblique—things like scavenging are mentioned, and the narration talks about the eventual end of motorized things because gas expires after about two years. That sort of stuff. When Kirsten and another symphony member miraculously find an un-scavenged house, they look for things like shoes and boots and shampoo and soap. The narrative mentions some “hard” or “dangerous” years before “the world settled down again.” That sort of thing. But largely that’s not the point and not the story it’s trying to tell. The story of the novel is much more about memory and the ways that art creates our humanity. Art survives when science and technology fail, and the novel makes much of the line that “survival is insufficient.” Art helps us make sense of the world and cling to hope. The people who lose memory (Tyler/Prophet with his “there is no before”) lose that shared humanity. There is no sympathizing with Tyler in the novel. He’s the antagonist all the way. The series has tried to turn him sympathetic, and if I had a criticism it would be that that turn has been clunky and not particularly well integrated. The series in a lot of ways is telling a much darker story in the Kirsten/Symphony at the airport storyline. The ending of the novel I find quite hopeful, and the airport commune plays a large roll in that. Shifting the airport from a utopia and valuable site of human memory into what is quite clearly a dystopia has the potential to get really dark. It will lead to a much bigger climax/confrontation than the book has, for sure, and I suppose it will work better for TV.
Thanks for the reply. As a non-book reader in this case, the whole portrayal of the Prophet’s storyline and motivations has been a fail IMO. I would have preferred they followed your explanation. This is why TV writers and showrunners should not mess with the material from successful novelists.
This is a PERFECT encapsulation of the import of the novel. Well said.
…Kirsten went from being so wary of Tyler that she stabbed him for
freaking her out, to listening to him. The main problem is the way that
Tyler terrorizes the Traveling Symphony is enough for Kirsten to not
like him. Or did I mistake that sequence where he uses a child as a
suicide bomber?…Yup. I like the show, but this is a logic leap I’m having a problem with. I’m hoping there is something to help explain this in the last episode.
That has been the weakest part of the series, in my opinion. The development of Tyler as Prophet has been really clunky. In the book, the foundations of the prophet’s cult don’t really matter. The conflict is much simpler: The symphony rescued his child bride. He wants her back. So he abducts symphony members, and they flee to the airport to be safe from him. The conflict plays out on the road to the airport. The Prophet character in the book functions mostly as a symbol of what happens when a person loses connection/community and the things that make us human (like art). All manner of evil is possible. I don’t necessarily think the show was wrong to give Tyler a different storyline, but I do fault how clumsily it handled shifting Tyler from a malign figure into a sympathetic (and possibly heroic) one. That whole part was pretty under-developed, and it’s part of why the episode where Kirsten finds Tyler is the worst of the series. And then that episode is followed by the Kirsten/Frank/Jeevan bottle episode, so that whole narrative momentum from the Kirsten/Tyler episode is interrupted. When we rejoin Kirsten and Tyler, it seems abrupt. She wakes up and is suddenly on his side. It’s weird.
They are pretty clear he didn’t do it and it wasn’t part of his plan. She finds out it was one of the older kids took the mines and some small kids and made them suicide bombers.In the show so far as E8 he doesn’t even coerce the kids. He gives them the choice, and many want to leave with him.The problem I have with this is I don’t think it would ever happen. A few teens might leave with him, but small children don’t choose to leave their Guardians to run off with enigmatic young men unless they are abused, and even most abused kids under 11 or 12 would stay.
Was the OB/GYN doctor’s real name supposed to be significant?
Yes, I think so. The town the symphony first visits is “St. Deborah-by-the-Water,” and that’s where a symphony member gets off the wheel in order to have her baby. Alex mentions thanking all of the doulas at the birthing center. The statue of Deborah in the town is of a woman holding a baby.So I think we’re meant to see another connection between characters we thought were disconnected. That even in a world so blown apart, people’s paths still cross. Also, it tells us that Jeevan is likely very close to Kirsten and the Severn City airport. I think his house is across the lake from St. Deborah (the slide in the middle of the lake might have been the same one that Kirsten swims near in episode 1 or 2. But I would have to watch those parts again to check.
On second look, Jeevan’s house is not on the same lake. St. Deborah is on Lake Michigan (the symphony mentions being able to see Chicago across the lake on a clear day), and Jeevan’s home 20 years later is on a much smaller lake. But in episode 2 when the symphony is at the lake, one of the other members asks Kirsten if she checked the cabin, and she says she did, but that’s it’s still the same—nobody there. In retrospect, that conversation is clearly about Jeevan, and Kirsten checking to see if he came back. So it’s pretty certain to me that St. Deborah is the doctor, the birthing center is nearby, and Jeevan likely is, too, perhaps just more inland.
Dr. Terry says her real name is “Deborah”. Pretty sure she is the namesake for the town of St. Deborah by the Water. In episode 2, as the Traveling Symphony is entering St. Deborah’s, we see a statue of a woman holding a baby.
I believe there’s another connection, made subtly near the end of this episode, to the Twenty Years After timeline.When Jeevan is preparing to leave, Dr. Terry reveals that her real name is Deborah.She is almost certainly the namesake of “St. Deborah By The Water” – the community in ep. 2 where Kirsten’s pregnant friend Charlie leaves the wheel and stays to raise her baby, and Alex thanks “all the midwives and doulas from the birth center”.
I caught that, too. I think it tracks, especially when you see Jeevan at a cabin on a lake with a slide. That slide appears in the lake when the traveling symphony gets to St. Deborah-by-the-Water (possibly seen from the other side, so Jeevan and his family are on the other side of that lake from St. Deborah, maybe?).
I really hope Jeevan and Kirsten meet again, but it seems unlikely that they haven’t yet : the Symphony is clearly famous, and Kirsten too. And if the St Deborah city is named after that Pyramid Scheme Nurse, then why have they never met again ? But anyway, this show is devastating and so good. It really shows the difference in adaptation and why Y The Last Man was so disappointing