Posted in: HBO, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: Emily St. John Mandel, hamesh patel, HBO, hbo max, mackenzie davis, Station Eleven

Station Eleven Proves Poignant Post-Apocalyptic Peter Pan Story

Station Eleven, HBO Max's prestige post-apocalyptic miniseries, is one of the best shows on TV right now. It might be overlooked by people who don't want to sit through another story about a pandemic that wipes out most of humanity and the world that pops up afterward. It's much richer than the usual post-apocalypses. It takes a different direction from The Walking Dead, leaving out zombies and taking on a more literary, magical realist direction. Where The Walking Dead tackles the question of how society should rise and be governed after the end of the world, Station Eleven is about how Art and Storytelling help people make sense of their lives and redeem civilization. It's also an oblique retelling of Peter Pan.

Station Eleven begins with actor Arthur Leander (Gael Garcia Bernal) collapsing on stage during a production of King Lear on the night the world ends. Javeen Chaudhary (Himesh Patel), an audience member, tries to help and ends up having to look after Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), the child actor Arthur had taken under his wing in the production. When his sister, a doctor in an overwhelmed ER, phones and warns him that a wildly virulent flu is about to cause society to collapse, Javeen takes Kirsten to hold up at his brother Frank's (Nabhaan Rizwan) apartment to wait things out, but they realise once they get there that civilization is coming to an end.

Twenty years later, a grown Kirsten (MacKenzie Davis) has become an actor touring with a theatrical troupe called The Travelling Symphony that visits the surviving townships of America to entertain the locals and give them hope beyond merely surviving. The Symphony are considered celebrities, but Kirsten is constantly on the lookout for threats from marauders and murderous bandits, still traumatized from her experiences of loss and her years surviving on her own after her guardians were gone. She comes across a new cult stalking the Symphony and is shocked to find them quoting from an obscure graphic novel she read as a child during the apocalypse. The leader of the cult, the Prophet, has been using the graphic novel as a prophet sacred text to recruit and drive his child recruits to acts of murder and destruction.

For both Kirsten and The Prophet, "Station Eleven" the graphic novel becomes a bible, a totem, a prism through which they process their memories and their trauma. The Prophet uses it as a biblical text to recruit children and kids to his survivalist cult, promising that the Undersea (the state of mind they're living in) is the path to a promised land. For Kirsten, the graphic novel was a gift from her acting mentor Arthur, a comforting fairytale she returned to during her darkest childhood hours, and a text that echoes her life throughout the rest of her life in the post-apocalyptic world. Dramatic irony abounds: Kirsten doesn't know The Prophet is Arthur's son, and he doesn't know she was given the other copy of the graphic novel by Arthur, who has inextricably linked them to him and the comic. They become spiritual siblings at war with and in parallel with each other. The Prophet has become a Peter Pan figure recruiting children to his version of Never-neverland. Kirsten has become both Wendy and Peter, a fierce warrior and protector of children, her childhood self, and the Symphony she travels with. Her combat skill with knives is another allusion to Peter Pan.

Station Eleven is an example of a TV adaptation deepening and enriching the source material. It takes a nonlinear structure to call attention to how memory lingers in the mind and recurs, how a line from a comic or a quote from long ago traverses lingers through time, how trauma repeats and recurs. The Peter Pan thematic motif is not in the original book by Emily St. John Mandel. The Prophet in the book is a more generic cult leader who preyed on the girls he recruited. The TV series draws links between the characters and the timelines that are only hinted at in the book to create a richer story. It keeps the core story of the book, virtually all the key plot points, and finds ways to go deeper than the book did. The past is a haunted house we carry with us, and our younger self is the ghost that haunts that house. Station Eleven is about how Art is essential for keeping the soul of society alive, but the TV version also shows how Art and Live bleed into and reflect each other.

Station Eleven is streaming on HBO Max.

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