On a Chicago stage, renowned actor Arthur (Bernal) dies for reasons unrelated to the pandemic that is about to destroy civilisation. An unwitting witness to the tragedy becomes a girlfriend, Kirsten (Lawler), and the incident forever connects the theatre stage with the death in her heart. So, a couple of decades later, Kirsten is touring the graves through the remains of a bygone world as part of an improvised travelling troupe and giving performances to the few survivors. On these trips, the ideological conflict between the adults who seek to preserve the memory of the past and the mysterious Prophet, who convinces the young people that the stories of the apocalypse and the lost civilisation are a hoax, becomes more and more apparent.
Which series Station Eleven are very similar ?
The mood, atmosphere and mentality of the characters in Station Eleven are very similar not to The Walking Dead or Epidemic but to Lindelof's The Departed. This is perhaps the most important thing to know about "The Station" (as, indeed, about any "The Departed"-like creation). The narrative here focuses on the personal experience of the misfortunes of each of the characters, on the emotional state of people, and the video sequence shows close-ups of often weeping faces and a fashionable "soft" image with cold colours.
The true story of this series
The series is based on a book of the same name, written before the appearance of COVID-19. It is called Georgian Flu (the writer is sure the name is nice, although, let's be honest, it sounds rather appetising) and is based on the H1N1 virus outbreak. The screen adaptation has hastily and perhaps predictably updated the introductions: the source of the outbreak has been moved from the CIS to sinister Asia, and a couple of important storylines have taken place from Canada to the US. The zero patients, however, in both the series and the source material still arrive in the New World from Moscow. No one directly hatching the virus in the adaptation, and it's much deadlier in the plot, but many parallels can be inadvertently guessed at.
Chaotic Chronology
The most memorable feature of the book remains its chaotic chronology: the narrative jumps between characters and time periods like a frightened mustang. Film adaptations tend to cautiously distance themselves from this format. All credit to the showrunners' courage, however controversial. They have taken this peculiarity of the original and turned the adaptation into a veritable hodgepodge of characters, events and seasons. It's worth considering: it's not entirely fair to call the local setting a post-apocalypse - the writers pay more attention to the events before and during the pandemic, as well as what can be called a post-post-apocalypse. This is a time when the initial chaos caused by the collapse of human civilisation has passed, the years of violence are over, and people have begun to rebuild their world.
How this series emulate series "The Last of Us" ?
The postapok itself is deliberately framed by drifts and snowstorms, highlighting the extreme conditions created in the first days after most of the population was killed. The survivors are wrapped in scarves, wearing masks and helmets, hiding their faces. People are dehumanised and invariably clutch weapons in their hands. Hungry wolves rush in and the frost drives everyone into hiding. Here the characters are forced to literally survive. It is at this point that the writers most willingly emulate The Last of Us, creating the missing tandem of a man and a little girl to replace the father in the source material.
The post-post-apocalypse
The plots that show other stretches of time take place in more humane weather conditions: it's warm outside, everyone is walking around, laughing, and trying to kill each other a little less often.
Post-post-apocalypse - a couple of decades after the pandemic - shows Kirsten's heroine as an adult: she's been working at a traveling theater for some time, it's spring or summer, the company is happily staging Shakespeare. It's reminiscent of the phantasmagorical tales of medieval actors traveling through towns and villages during the plague. Only here, instead of wagons, they're harnessed to car wrecks - the gasoline has gone bad in a few miserable years. The theater refuses on principle to stage anything but Shakespeare, because it sees its mission as preserving the playwright's legacy.
The narrative then jumps back many years. We are now in the middle of a familiar world, where planes and trains roar and important corporate deals are made in offices on the top floors of skyscrapers. There's another jump: winter is raging, people are burning kerosene lamps, little Kirsten is reading a comic book and forgets to shoot her pregnant opponent. Another leap forward: we're back in range with King Lear in a post-pandemic future. And such jumps happen four or five times per episode, mitigated only by the action credits.
The structural echoes of the book and screenplay with Shakespeare's plays are immediately apparent: direct quotes from the plays, a dreamlike poisoning as in Romeo and Juliet, and, indeed, the underlying plot of the relationship between a long-dead father and his adult son, which mirrors Hamlet. Playing the role of the father's ghost is a comic strip drawn by one of the hero's ex-wives and called Station Eleven. It's a story within a story, somewhat reminiscent of the black schooner concept in The Guardians.
Aside from Shakespeare, the novel is full of much stranger and not always appropriate references. The authors make frequent references to Star Trek, and writer Emily St John Mandel begins by polemicizing Sartre. "If hell is other people," she writes, "then what is a world without them?"
There's also a hard-to-explain reference to a science fiction classic: the character Arthur in the story has a close friend, almost a brother, and his name, of course, is Clark. The series adds a line of dialogue to the pair - let's just say they're interchangeable, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern - and somehow manages to tie in what's happening with Shakespearean references and move away a bit from the chaotic foreshadowing, like the novella's plot itself. The showrunners of the mini-series poured more parallels to Hamlet into the finale as well, getting to the classic scene with the dagger under Claudius' chest.
Shakespeare between consistency and contradiction
The fluctuation between different years and characters - while Shakespeare's foundation remains chronologically consistent - is not as contradictory as it seems. It is about trying not only to show the story of an individual character in the midst of a generational conflict (as the playwright had done), but also to emphasize the continuity of that conflict. In the series, this continuity is explicitly shown in a scene in which dialogue from the heroine's childhood and adulthood is edited together. Here, as a child, she goes out into a world full of danger and her guardian orders her to stay. Decades later, she herself is trying to prevent a teenager from making rash decisions (rightly so, it must be said, because she's circling a minefield with enviable persistence). The heroine here speaks as if to herself, becoming the person whose experiences she didn't understand as a child.
Or here's another: we see an independent theater actor before the pandemic - the hero is a free spirit, noble, empathetic, and not particularly pro-government. Here we see him twenty years after the end of the world: a decrepit old man who is afraid to stage Hamlet in his community, because in the play Shakespeare criticizes the king and thus opposes the government. This man, who once branded hypocrisy from the stage and in life, now hosts his own Besogon-TV equivalent for the group of survivors who have placed their trust in him. Shakespeare's heroes turn into his own villains, sometimes in just ten minutes of screen time.
Which characters are better by Shakespeare or Lindelof ?
Now let's take a step back, as Station Eleven teaches us, and compare the TV adaptation to The Departed again. Lindelof also fixated fanatically on the characters, sometimes forgetting about the world around them, but unlike Shakespeare, who killed everyone in general even worse than Martin, he didn't put the tragedy inside the climax, but made it just the beginning. The same mistake is repeated by the creators of Station Eleven - the writers, not the author of the book. There are indeed some arcs in the book that are written worse than in the screenplay, but what Mandel managed to do was keep the narrative from being overly melodramatic. The writer got it: there were characters that didn't need to be brought together again because it would have been trite, like a Stark family reunion.
These very moments proved too subtle once for Lindelof, and now for the writers of the television adaptation of Station Eleven. Their characters' experiences are an oversimplified reflection, and the lyrical zenith is a pathetic mix of unmotivated euphoria and uninteresting regret. Even if sincere, the too much understanding and jokes of emotion cannot be spread over a dozen episodes in such a way that the emptiness ceases to shine through. Like Lindelof, the writers of The Station stocked up on tears before the story's apotheosis, but forgot to stock up on tragedy. Shakespeare forced you to study your character, his torments and reveries, in order to ruin everything in front of the audience; here, you study the character so that you can embrace someone in the finale.
And that was the reason for another failure: the idle emphasis on characters robbed us of detailed exploration of the world. This emphasis certainly reminds us of how Shakespeare's plays focused on the personal turns of the characters, but the problem (or luck) is that Shakespeare never wrote in a post-apocalyptic setting, so he wasn't forced to describe the laws and characteristics of the environment in which his doomed characters live. And here, the most interesting plots only neatly touched on changes in society - and immediately departed. They touched on the ideas of the Prophet and the rise of his cult ("he was not there before"), the deepening of the dictatorship under the fear of the unknown, the confrontation between the supporters of the old world and the new.
Image of the conservative generate controversy within the ranks of the audience.
The very image of the conservative as a more rational protagonist is atypical of the post-apocalypse West and bound to generate controversy within the ranks of the audience. However, all of these social roles have been replaced by personal dramas, reducing such diverse characters to the understandable, humane, but so thin and dull model of the tragic with its noisy soporific experiences.
It happens to be a brilliantly curated, talentfully directed, well-acted, and very good mini-series. We've seen exactly the kind of picture, the kind of post-apocalyptic cinematography that could almost never be shown, like The Walkers. But the writers of this film turned out to be not very good writers, who also adapted a mediocre book, sincerely believing it to be brilliant.
