It’s the show’s indulgence, and with any other subject it might have read as tacky or like naive camp. These mixed timelines give actors space to perform the fear, austerity, and grit required of survival across numerous points in their life. It weaves together scenes where a character is dead immediately with scenes where that character is still alive, across one episode - often using similar framing techniques to create the impression that the pandemic is always at every point of its inception, that every character lives in a liminal space where they are both alive and dead, both corporeal and not. The show layers the Act 1, Scene 2 monologue from Hamlet - Hamlet is still dressed in mourning for his father, three months later - over the scene of a child receiving a text message from a morgue. This rhythm is an effective departure from the storytelling of the book, putting various timelines in more consistent conversation with each other. Their connections grow apparent over the course of the show, as episodes shift time and subject, between the more immediate collapse of society and life 20 years after. As in Mandel’s novel, these people’s lives are intertwined. There’s the traveling Shakespeare troupe - Kirsten has become an actress with them, years later - that performs plays around the Great Lakes in a path they call “The Wheel.” There are the people of Severn City Airport, in Michigan, a diverted flight that turned into a long-term community of survivors. There’s Kristen, the young girl orphaned by the pandemic, and Jeevan, the man who takes her in. The show makes piercing work of this source material, tracking the lives of various people. (The horror of this is only clearer after months of learning incubation periods of COVID variant strains, in the process of researching which tests can be trusted at what times after exposure.) A handful of communities rise out of these horrors, making their way forward in the rubble of a now defunct society. Mandel’s apocalypse results from a flu that has no incubation period and causes near-immediate death. Clarke Award-winning 2014 novel of the same name into a 10-episode limited series. HBO Max’s Station Eleven adapts Emily St. It’s the closest to anything I’ve seen that lives at the knife edge of despair and hope of the last two years - an elegy to grief and living beyond survival. Watching Station Eleven under these circumstances is equal parts punishment and a breath of fresh air. Now it’s the third year of the pandemic: Omicron variant caseloads are rising, the American COVID-19 test infrastructure is busted, and hospitals are overburdened. I haven’t watched any kind of fictional pandemic media since March 2020 - back when friends and family were worried about the impact of a few months of quarantine. It’s the closest to anything I’ve seen that lives at the knife edge of despair and hope of the last two years - an elegy to grief and living beyond survival It wasn’t busy, and people looked at me oddly as I made my mountain of purchases - grabbing items with the fatalistic hubris that I’d be compelled to eat them, which means I have beans in a quantity that I am still working through. I’ve always fallen on the anxiety side of things, and one morning in the first week of March 2020, I decided to follow the impulses that screamed “better safe than sorry.” I took a sick day from work. I still remember my last pre-mask grocery store run, an impulse trip to Ralphs to stock up on essentials. Jeevan tells the clerk, in no uncertain terms, to head home. As he dissociates through checking out the groceries, the lone cashier asks him if the flu is worth worrying about. Jeevan goes to the grocery store - with young actress Kirsten, for whom he has become an accidental babysitter - and loads up numerous full carts of food. His sister Siya, who works at a hospital, has warned him to take shelter, to find his brother Frank and barricade themselves indoors. Midway through the Station Eleven pilot, Jeevan Chaudhary has a panic attack, as he realizes the world is about to permanently change.
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