Station Eleven’s three-part premiere offers little escapism
Based on Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 novel, Station Eleven echoes our COVID-era reality, but is more reminiscent of a zombie apocalypse movie
TV Reviews Station Eleven
Adaptations always have it a bit rough—they’ve got an ur-text to live up to, and have to develop their own merits to stand on their own. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune brewed a singularly strange, sensual atmosphere in order to expand beyond the book. The best Jane Austen adaptations often excise useless characters and liven up the text, as in Ang Lee’s Sense And Sensibility. The more a book (or any source material) is loved, the higher the standards and stakes are for the adaptation. The HBO Max series Station Eleven has an especially difficult task, because not only is it adapting a book, it’s tapping into a real life global story that is still, unfortunately, unfolding.
The first episode, like the novel before it, follows the familiar beats of an apocalypse story (both the show and novel follow the suspenseful beats of a zombie apocalypse, to be more clear), but it’s strange to compare the response to the disaster to our real world experience. (Never before have I felt so grateful for the two weeks that COVID-19 takes to show up.) There are definitely moments that hit too close to home, or feel reminiscent even as they are unfamiliar—the fully stocked but empty grocery store is weird, but the food hoarding is very recognizable.
The show also attempts to establish its own disturbing imagery through scenes of Jeevan (Himesh Patel), Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan), and Kirsten (Matilda Lawler) watching aghast as a plane crashes in front of them, or a sick man stuck inside his car who Jeevan doesn’t want to let out, or—later, in the second episode—Kirsten getting texts about how her parents’ bodies are in the morgue. Station Eleven might actually be a bit triggering depending on what your last two years looked like, but that’s just unavoidable.
The book’s structure, which the TV show attempts to follow, is carefully plotted to go back and forth in time, traverse the world of many characters whose lives are gently intertwined, the way they always are. Unfortunately, Station Eleven stumbles in episodes two and three, which focus on Kirsten and Miranda. Kirsten in particular is a confusing character; in the novel, her traumatic story is just one among many in her community. But the show presents her as a special case, someone who’s particularly wary where others are friendly. This seems ridiculous—are you telling me the people born after the pandemic wouldn’t have more sense to survive the world after this?
It also seems like Kirsten has struggled much more than everyone else, perhaps because she was eight when the pandemic started. I understand that that can be traumatic on its own, but it’s a bit odd. Can she really be the only person with abandonment issues after the pandemic, who can’t tell that guy is creepy? He is so obviously creepy! Also, doesn’t she know the double tap principle?
In the book, Jeevan and Kirsten part ways. In the show, they stay together, which I enjoyed greatly—Matilda Lawler and Himesh Patel have a sweet ease to their interactions, and Lawler in particular, with her strong brows and thoughtful face, is arresting to watch. Which is why it’s so disappointing to have her age up to Mackenzie Davis, who has a much more open face than Lawler. And it’s irritating to see in the second episode, “A Hawk From A Handsaw,” that Jeevan and Frank are treated as Kirsten’s traumatic backstory when we got to spend so much time seeing things from Jeevan’s point of view in the first episode.
Zombie apocalypse story like The Walking Dead and Max Brooks’ World War Z novel have used the jumping between character perspectives with great aplomb. But there’s a difference between changing points of view, which I think the third episode does well, and having a character take over another’s story. (The good news is that Jeevan is meant to show up in 10 episodes.)
Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) doesn’t get any interiority in the novels, and the third episode of the premiere, “Hurricane,” treats him similarly—as just a character in his first wife Miranda’s story. Here’s where I noticed a major problem with this adaptation: It filters a lot of the stories of the book, which felt fresh and exciting even as they referenced familiar tropes, through shoddy prestige TV tropes. In the book, Arthur cheats on Miranda with Elizabeth (played in the TV series by Caitlin Fitzgerald) as an almost inevitable consequence of his career taking off, which alienating him from his wife.
But the series implies that Miranda’s workaholic habits are what push Arthur away and into Elizabeth’s arms, which I find tiresome and misogynistic. It robs the moment of its inherent tragedy: Miranda and Arthur grow apart not because anyone didn’t show up in the relationship or made a mistake, but because they grew apart. I also think using the Station Eleven comic book as a wedge between them—Arthur calls the character on the cover “the man who ruined my life”—lessens the poetry of the comic book a bit. Miranda’s fury over someone being in her studio is understandable to many artists; her burning the studio down in response, less so.
Bernal is wonderful but incredibly miscast, and has little chemistry with Danielle Deadwyler. It could also be that their scenes are filmed with a heavy melancholy, which especially hangs over the third episode like a dark cloud. Deadwyler is very fun to watch, but the writing and directing underserve her. She’s not allowed to engage in sparkling banter with Bernal—instead, she’s irritated until he wears her down. Nor does show any emotional response to Jonah Timothy Simons’ dismissive jokes about the apocalypse. Instead, the character is presented as morose and serious no matter the situation. Even her crying at a work meeting is strangely couched in the awkward direction of no one really responding to her outburst.
The characters feel so disconnected from each other, but the whole point of the book was the joy of connection and the realization of how it goes on, even after the world ends. Is the show gearing up to that realization, or will it take a more nihilistic tone? So far, I’m not sure.
Stray Observations
- I understand the artistic choice—we need to see the actors’ faces—but I wish people in the show’s before-times would wear masks. At one point, Tiya Sircar takes off her mask before leaving the children’s rooms.
- Tom’s Independence Day audition speech was a funny moment. How does he remember that?
- Also, is that him at the table with Arthur and Elizabeth in the third episode?!
- I also couldn’t tell who Kirsten woke up next to in the second episode. The composer? The show has so many more bald people than I’m used to in one show. Did you guys figure that out?
- I loved the summer camp feeling the traveling theater has. When I first read the book, I struck me as a serious take on the 30 Rock joke where Jack asks Liz, “In a post-apocalyptic world, how would society even use you?” Seems like “traveling bards” will be very needed.
35 Comments
The Passage, along with Station Eleven were two of my favorite books of the past 10 years. (Seems I have a thing for post apocalyptic fiction)I really hope this adaptation turns out better than The Passage did.
Me too. Just borrowed audio of The Passage. TX
I thought the TV adaptation of The Passage was somewhat better than the average during-the-apocalypse show. Would have been curious to see what they would have done once they went forward 100 years.
I felt like The Passage was just starting to get to the good parts when they canceled it. I really liked the main actress and I think it had potential. This show not being on a network gives me a little hope it won’t be canceled too quickly.
This is my favorite novel of the last 20 years. I’ve been awaiting this series for quite some time. Please, please, please Do Not “Saints of Newark” this thing. Please, I beg of you, make this good, HBO.
Just watched the first episode and it was in desperate need of a rewrite, and not just the masks.This would have been fine pre-pandemic, but nowadays? We know how people behave during a mysterious virus, and we know how physicians behave too. The masks on for the kids in the hospital and off everywhere else were just one of a whole bunch of things that worked for the 2014 novel but just don’t for a 2021 adaptation. Same with the empty supermarket as he’s buying $10k worth of supplies and the TV blaring about how travel won’t be affected.It’s relatively faithful to the book, but it’s something that feels like anachronism nowadays.
I’d never thought I’d live to see a time when I could say, “This depiction of a worldwide pandemic isn’t at all realistic.”
you get all the stars today.
That’s all in the first couple of days. And travel does get affected pretty quickly, hence the community in the airport.It took, what, two or three weeks from COVID-19’s arrival in mid-March for the CDC to recommend people start wearing masks in public? And there are still plenty of people and places that still don’t mask.People have been complaining about the plausibility of how quickly the virus infects and kills people, which is fair—I mean, even Ebola takes a few weeks to develop and another two weeks to kill people. But if we’re suspending disbelief around that, a non-instant response makes sense. The novel was written/set around 2014, so this is taking place in a pre- or non-COVID world.
No idea what you’re complaining about. Are you saying too many people had masks, or too few? Are you saying the supermarket shouldn’t have been empty? Are you saying the TV shouldn’t have gotten some stuff wrong?
Being stuck with drama-nerds-gone-hippy sounds like a more dystopian than any episode of The Walking Dead.
Bernal is wonderful but incredibly miscast, and has little chemistry with Danielle DeadwylerI went through the next couple of episodes since I figure I’m binging the Witcher this weekend (as a palate cleanser after a month of WoT and apparently now this) and I think this needs to be expanded a bit.It’s not really a matter of ‘workaholic habits’ being ‘misogynistic’, but that both Bernal but Deadwyler are terribly miscast in the roles and between that and some terrible writing Episode 3 just falls flat on its face.Both are capable actors, but they are just outright wrong for the parts. Arthur needs to be a shallow but gorgeous Hollywood type; Miranda needs to be someone naïve enough to be attracted to the life he can provide her but then grows out of it. I wouldn’t call this ‘fresh and exciting’ whatsoever, and it’s an inherent problem with adapting the book; what makes it stand out is not as much original plot or characters as it is one of the few apocalyptic stories that is genuinely literary rather than poorly written SF/F. So it’s perfectly fine to revise the stories and characters in it, provided they allow this as a literary tale rather than just straight thousandth post-apocalyptic story of the last couple decades.Instead, we get almost the opposite: Arthur as a deep thinker without Hollywood leading man looks and Miranda as incredibly capable and confident from the moment he starts hitting on her. So this cripples the writing since it’s yet another major suspension of disbelief as to why the two would ever knock boots to begin with, then you get a terrible attempt (which I’d argue is the basis for what you didn’t like) at trying to force the relationship as well as explain its failure, and then on top of that the two actors just don’t click at all.Another misstep is the decision to place the pitch after the world is falling apart; it makes absolutely no sense save to provide a vehicle to explain why Miranda missed the boat, and that her colleague was equally scared. It’s a lovely literary moment, but it’s a terrible screenwriting choice.Episode 2 was semi-generic – although Davis can act, and I think it was the composer as well (which should have been set up, another miscue) – but about the only good thing in Episode 3 was Clark, who may be the only present day character that can carry their weight.We’ll see if it improves over the next few weeks, but I’d bet against it.
Curious to know how The Witcher (a sword-and-sorcery fantasy) works as a palate cleanser after Wheel of Time (a sword-and-sorcery fantasy)?
I’ll presume you’re asking in good faith. Largely because even if you disagree with her vision, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich does have a relatively rare talent in Hollywood: being able to edit and adapt an existing SF/F property into something that produces a consistent world and a decently gripping story, even if it’s not the one you thought you were going to get by reading the books. Hence, the palate cleanser since I cared less about genre than seeing someone tell a story well, and while there were some pacing issues with Witcher’s second season, I enjoyed it overall.I think Wheel of Time (and from what we’ve seen of Station Eleven so far) continue a long trend of showrunners who may very well have talent in other areas but just fall flat on their face when taking a knife to existing work, especially SF/F where its story structure can often be radically different than literary fiction in the underpinnings of what makes the original story work. I’ve argued this here before, but given how much of a disaster their last three seasons proved when they decided they were perfectly capable of creating on their own without expanding the writers’ room (and they were terrible at it), we now tend to forget just how good Benioff and Weiss’ editing was in the first 5 seasons of GoT. It really is an uncommon skillset.
Oh, now I get it. I agree after XX hours of Very Serious Fantasy, the Witcher is a freshmint blast of balls-to-the-wall silliness that the genre so seldom allows itself to be. Probably my favourite thing about the Witcher is that I don’t have to care how well the story is told. Does Geralt fight a monster? Do I get to look at Freya Allan’s incredible face? It’s all good!
I think the reactions here are mostly right on, this is misconceived. They are spending WAYYYYY too much time in “the before.” I know they don’t want to ruin shit, but the third episode is too early to have an entirely pre-apocalyptic episode, we need to have an idea of what is going on with the Traveling Symphony, who have only been featured for 1/2 of one episode so far and are sort of starting to feel beside the point…whereas all of the explanations of the show talk about how, No! it’s really uplifting!, because of the players storyline. Instead we have the players barely together, hiring nonshakespeareans and breaking up, murdering people 50 feet from a camp and…hoping nobody notices? They need characters and a storyline in the after SOON. Otherwise it has been pretty standard apocalypse miserabilism so far (which I kind of expect from Podeswa, who often thinks slow and sad means profound).Lots of things so far ring false or don’t make sense. I just don’t understand what kind of actor or person Leander is or why he would do Lear instead of Macbeth (Alec Baldwin, Kelsey Grammar, etc., they all do Macbeth). I don’t understand why the kid asks Jeevan where he learned “all that EMT stuff” when he sat there uselessly not doing anything. I don’t understand why they didn’t call the kid’s parents IMMEDIATELY and REPEATEDLY.So far it seems like a pretty shrug your shoulders misfire.
B- is way too generous in my opinion. This show is a slog. Slow scenes with slow, stilted dialog, a virus that acts with speed (in both transmission and staggeringly high mortality) that’s not — at all — how biology works, a social response that (as we’ve been seeing!) is not how people act. And it’s sooooo slow. What a grind. Absolutely no tension. I still have no idea why a guy who has no medical knowledge or skills ran on stage when he diagnosed an actor as having a heart attach. That scene was so baffling, and it set the table for everything that followed. I sampled, but I’m out. Didn’t make it through the first three episodes and I’m not going back in for more.
Have you read the book? In the book he’s training to be an EMT. What’s especially weird is in the show someone asks him “how he knew how to do that”…do what? We don’t see him do anything…Anyway, I recommend the book.
From 1485 through 1551, a mysterious illness called the sweat ran through Northern Europe—mostly in England—killing people within hours of exposure. To this day, no one has figured out what it was, and it never re-emerged after 1551. It killed entire families between waking and dinnertime. And it spread like wildfire. It was seen in every stratum of society, and killed about 50% of those who contracted it. Henry Tudor’s son Arthur got it, as did his young bride Catherine of Aragon. He died quickly, she survived. Villages were all but emptied. My point is, viruses can be extremely quick and deadly, much more so than what we’ve seen in the last century or so. I really loved the show. I read the book when it came out and, once I’d settled in to its relaxed pace, I found it a pleasure to watch.
“Tom’s Independence Day audition speech was a funny moment. How does he remember that?”I know way to many man-boys that can do that speech from memory. This show is a bit slow and also a bit triggering after watching my wife go to work in an ER for the last 21 months of the pandemic.
Posting separately just to encourage everybody to read up on Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, which I wish they had found some way to adapt before this:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Burns,_a_Post-Electric_Play
Came here to say this, too: my wife and I talk about this play *a lot* . It is so impactful and related to this show. Someone please adapt this in a short and sweet (and dark) way, it’s far more hopeful and real than other similar stories 👍
This is so funny. I thought “This does similar things to… ‘Mr. Burns’ but better.” Everyone raved about Mr. Burns and I didn’t care for it, though maybe it was the production I saw?
Well I haven’t read the book, and yet thought this was utterly hypnotic and fascinating with amazing performances. So sorry that the this role is miscast sentiment doesn’t really wash with me.
it’s so disappointing to have her age up to Mackenzie DavisI haven’t seen the show yet, nor have I read the book—although I’ve heard nothing but fantastic things. However, as a Halt and Catch Fire fan, I take umbrage at the idea that Mackenzie Davis’s presence could ever be disappointing. which alienating him from his wifeTypo? Looks like you were deciding between “alienating” and “which alienates.”
OK. So I’ve seen it now, unlike my previous replies, and so far I think it’s pretty good! It seems like it’s going to be hard for anyone to experience this show completely separately from their experience of the last two years, and that’s completely fair—but a lot of the reactions seem fairly harsh, especially around how this story (set in 2005 and 2025) does or does not successfully anticipate the specifics of the last two years, which feels extremely unfair to the story itself.I understand that everyone’s personal experience of the pandemic is going to affect their experience of the story—that’s inevitable. That said, it feels extremely nitpicky and unfair for people to complain that this story—originally published in 2014—fail to anticipate exactly the events of the last two years. (Especially when we’re talking about how the in-universe response to the Georgia Flu during the first few days fails to replicate the response to COVID-19 pandemic in the first 4-6 weeks IRL.)Maybe it’s simply the wrong time for this show to come out: that’s fair. But criticizing a fictional narrative published in 2014 for not anticipating the events of the last few years feels really unfair. Maybe the showrunners should have made more adjustments for the specific reality we’re living in, but I for one find the theme of timeless stories speaking to one’s current reality in unexpected ways very moving and comforting. If you’re focused on the misalignment of specific fictional vs. nonfictional details, you might be missing the point.
OK, I did some Googling, and I understand that the show’s title cards adjust the book’s setting (2005) to be 2020. Either way, it still feels extremely clear that the show’s 2020 is not our 2020. And that’s totally fair! Any sort of science fiction involves some amount of suspension of disbelief. In-universe discrepancies are way more important than differences between the story’s world and our world.
8Indeed. I think of it this way. When Apocalypse Now came out scant years after the actual conflict in Vietnam, shit was uncomfortably profound. This series is one of our first artistic processings of our collective anxiety around the pandemic. Personally, I think it’s necessary viewing among so many retread narratives that constitute most content.
We found the writing in Episode 1 to be particularly off. The behavior of the two leads belies their actions as people who in fact believe the world is ending. He’s buying $9000 worth of supplies but ACTS like it’s just an odd day. What in the hell happened to his girlfriend/wife? He’s all kind of upset about his can’t wear a mask sister who berates him. The girl is stuck with two random strange men in an are of “stranger danger”, cannot get ahold of her parents, and then watches a plane crash with the demeanor and commentary of Bruce Willis in any Bruce Willis movie. Fuckineh I hate snark. A jet buzzes by the tower and crashes in the parking lot, and they’re like, “Yep.”
She later knifes a guy to “death” 50 feet away, and just leaves him there. WTH?? It’s an interesting story, but a directorial / screenplay mess.
If I want contrary opinions to seemingly everyone else on the internet… I can always rely on this site.
I’ve seen nothing but universal praise for this show and loved the first three episodes. Strange to think that Hiro probably directed the last pandemic hospital scene just before the actual pandemic. The next episodes were filmed during which in a weird way I’m looking forward to.Anyway, I’m in.
As a Torontonian, the fact that they changed Arthur’s death to be in Chicago hurts me.
I had questions about the pilot. It is the only episode I have seen because I do not subscribe to HBO Max. But there was a podcast called Philosophers in Space that loved it. I enjoyed Mackenzie Davis in Halt and Catch Fire but she was only in the pilot for about a minute at the end.My questions were: There was a copy of the Graphic Novel in a bag early on and then Kirsten is reading it at the point where the pilot stopped with the man who looked like an astronaut. Does this mean the pilot did not happen? Was it a dream?I ended up liking the child actress more than wanting Davis to be there. It was weird to me also that if a high catching flu bug was in the air, why wouldn’t people cover their mouths? Even before Covid times? Also, $9500 worth of food only fed three people for 80 days? I assumed they barricaded themselves in. Were they looking for food or did the plague stop as fast as it started? I cannot watch later episodes. Maybe I can find a copy of the book at the library and wait to see if it is released on DVD in the future.
“Can she really be the only person with abandonment issues after the pandemic, who can’t tell that guy is creepy? He is so obviously creepy! Also, doesn’t she know the double tap principle?”Are you talking about The Prophet here? Kirsten is the person who is MOST wary of him and then stabs him and leaves him for dead. This entire review seems like you only sparingly watched this show.
This is a bad review that suffers from “isn’t like the book”-itis. As for me, as someone who hasn’t read the book, I found the first four episodes to be incredible examples of acting/writing/directing, the structure is refreshing, and the characters are all unique and memorable. This show will live on long after people have forgotten about this shell of a website.