The show's first three episodes (what I was able to watch of the 10 total) are less a narrative tale than a connect-the-dots workbook.Īnd yet, there's an appealing undertone to Station Eleven, a sense that most of the remnants of the human race want more than mere survival. Geils Band video, with the soundtrack from one sometimes running over another. Scenes often change at the pace-and, often, coherence-of a 1981 J. The tight plotting and procession of the first episode quickly dissolves into a determinedly non-chronologic screenplay that skips randomly among at least three time-lines (the immediate days of the outbreak, a change of scenery two years later, and the more settled landscape of 20 years in the future). The phone has been found on a corpse at the city morgue, the text says, and adds, with mortal finality: "DON'T COME HERE." The final gut-punch is a texted reply to a call from character who has been repeatedly calling her father's cell phone.
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Midway there, he gets a call from his sister, an ER doctor, who asks ominously: "Have you heard about this flu?" From there, a series of spare but terrifying images cascade across the screen: desolate streets, empty stores, and jumbled lines of deserted cars outside hospitals. In the tumult that follows, the child actress Kirsten (Matilda Lawler, Evil) who plays one of Lear's daughters can't reach her parents to pick her up, and a kindly stranger in the audience named Jeevan (Himesh Patel, the Beatles wannabe of Yesterday) who lives near her offers to escort her home. The show starts innocuously enough-an actor collapses and dies onstage in Chicago of an apparent heart attack during a performance of King Lear. Though the show is principally concerned with the long-term aftermath of the flu and is by no means a big-budget disaster flick, it uses a few deft strokes to skillfully evoke the sensation of a civilization falling apart at seams. And brutal as the death toll has been (5.3 million worldwide as I write this), it's a case of the sniffles compared to the apocalyptic outbreak in Station Eleven, which depopulates much of the world.īut whatever the dissimilarities, it's impossible to avoid at least a small case of the what-if willies while watching Station Eleven, particularly its first episode.
John Mandel on which it's based was published in 2014, and the loosely adapted show went into production in January 2020, months before the COVID-19 lockdown.
Station Eleven, HBO Max's new miniseries about life after a pandemic apocalypse, is no cheapie ripped-from-the-headlines exploitation flick. Next thing you know, hospitals are overflowing and people are dying by the thousands. Then somebody gets off an overseas flight at an American airport. There are vague reports of a flu outbreak in Asia and Europe. Available Thursday, December 16, on HBO Max.
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