HBO Max’s ‘Station Eleven’ is post-apocalyptic sci-fi without the Strong Survival Gun Guy – SFGate

In my role as copy chief at SFGATE, I have also become our official pandemic timekeeper, marking the days, since the first cases were reported (Dec. 31, 2019), since the pandemic was declared (March 11, 2020), since the first shelter-in-place orders were announced in the Bay Area (March 16, 2020). Every few months, I have to remind a writer that its not the past year or the past 18 months since the pandemic started, that time continues to move forward, that its been two years since COVID-19 first entered our lives.

So as I watched the first episode of HBO Maxs Station Eleven unfold, which featured title cards marking time (10 days before, 80 days after), I felt my chest tighten with recognition. I knew this feeling, this endless marking out of days, the way they seem to trudge by and also vanish, lurching you into an unforeseen future.

Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic drama based on the novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel (written in 2014, filming began in January 2020) about a flu that sweeps through the world almost overnight, killing millions and leaving the few survivors to reckon with what it means to go on when civilization falls.

The story involves a famous actor trying to launch a late-career renaissance, a religious zealot and a Shakespearean acting troupe known as the Traveling Symphony, but at the heart is a comic book called Station Eleven. Station Eleven, the comic, follows a mysterious character named Doctor Eleven who floats through space before finding himself on a stalled space station inhabited by warring factions.

Two children, Kirsten and Tyler, both find themselves with copies of the rare comic book around the time of the plague, reading it obsessively. When we see them as adults, 20 years after civilization has collapsed, they are both defined by the story. Tyler becomes a sort of Pied Piper, luring children away from settlements of pre-pan survivors with the prophecy, a retelling of Doctor Elevens story in which there is no before. Kirsten, the star actress of the Traveling Symphony, tattoos herself with a symbol from Station Eleven for each person shes killed to ensure her own survival.

Plenty of post-apocalyptic fiction is about what happens when society unravels, often starring a Strong Survival Gun Guy in a world without laws or tax brackets. What sets Station Eleven apart is its focus on how traumatic events can sever our connections to others, and the ways in which we continue to reach for each other even when a deadly plague is spreading and we have no way of knowing whos sick and whos safe. Thats shown in the character who shelters a child actor when her family goes missing, even though it will mean more risk for him, or in the Traveling Symphony, which brings music and theater to the small settlements that have sprung up in the wake of disaster.

The series adaptation departs enough from the story of the novel to make it entirely fresh, meaning theres no telling when someone will get stabbed or mauled or when a bomb will go off (as of the second-to-last episode, my count is three bombs, plus a couple instances of arson). And it has clearly been influenced by real life. Small moments provide the texture of a global illness. In one scene, a swanky hotel hands out complimentary room-sealing kits with masks and duct tape to cover the vents. Im reminded of the strip of tape running down the center of my tiny dining room table, where my partner and I would unpack and wipe down our groceries, moving them from dirty to clean as if that would protect us.

In its own way, Station Eleven became a comfort to me as I read it near the start of the pandemic. Here was a world hit by a devastating and mysterious respiratory illness, and yet ultimately, the tone of the book is one of hope. Its a world where even without electricity or modern medicine, people still create art and find meaning in the works of Shakespeare. Its a work that says we can get through this, if we find each other.

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HBO Max's 'Station Eleven' is post-apocalyptic sci-fi without the Strong Survival Gun Guy - SFGate