Premise first. A recognisably contemporary world is plunged into a pandemic which erased most of the Earth's population and a great deal of its culture. We follow a handful of characters in the first stages, some of whom don't make it, and then leap back and forward in time over a twenty year period into the future where events occuring around the Great Lakes region of the U.S. where settlements of various stages of progress are visited by a troupe of travelling players. Through sudden time shifts we learn personal histories and connections, telling us how this came to be and the existential threat that faces it from a cult leader.
Got all that? The show contains most of this and makes some significant changes from the source novel, as might be expected. A lot of those are practical: it's nothing for a novelist to start her story in Toronto, leap over to Chicago and Malaysia etc but the logistics of putting all that on the screen take a distant ticket when a more compressed setting still tells the story. Other changes vary in impact and success.
What they got right:
First and foremost, they shaved the character Arthur Leander down to essentials. Arthur is a love child of the author and the author and his boorish narcissism drags every single page he's on and then toward the end of the novel we get his presence rising like the least interesting zombie in history that we have to read to death until the end. While the casting of Gael Garcia Bernal promised to put some sparkle into this bore the faithfulness of the dialogue to the novel could not save his grating nature. Having a lot less of him is a massive improvement.
The opposite was done with the character Jeevan whose earnest humanity is missed through much of the novel but here is happily on screen with a much expanded role. His brother Frank and their time in Frank's apartment are also expanded and add some real heart and weight to the events as the plague turns the end of the world into the beginning of the new one.
The casting of the child and adult Kirstens is stellar. It's very easy to see how the young, serious and concentrated survivor that Matilda Lawler could turn into the expert knife throwing and more worldly thirty-something she becomes as McKenzie Davis. If you've seen the woefully undersung Halt and Catch Fire series or the more recent feature film Tully you'll know her intensity and depth. She is perfect as Kirsten.
The realised Shakespeare productions with found materials costuming and credible staging machinery are a wonder. The Severin City Airport in its panicked form in year zero and then as a centre of persistent civilisation is taken a few well-judged steps towards cinema. The wholly imagined maternity centre earns its place, making Jeevan's journey more profound and even giving a glimpse of boy Tyler in his wilderness years.
What they got wrong:
The novel's Prophet is a nightmare of childhood indulgence turned monstrous in adulthood. He is a terrifying figure who might be a David Koresh or a Jim Jones. Add dogma to charismatic narcissism and you get an unstoppable force of destruction. The tv version of the Prophet is all back story and through lines, allowing too much room for redemption to a character who must remain a dread. I should say that the big scene between him and Kirsten in the novel is a non-event and, curiously, with the changes, she has a similar encounter which is also a non-event. In any case, changing the engine room of the lion's share of the plot means that everything around it must also be changed and in this case we are led to a long ending rather than a crisp, business like one. Replacing his skewed Christianity with his memory of a comic (sse below) and changing his harem-like cult to a children's army gives rise to another problem. He is depicted as organising an atrocity (no spoilers) which we are meant to forgive and forget as we get to know him. That's worse than having him bad through and through.
What they couldn't change:
The title refers to a graphic novel that the annoying character Miranda writes and draws while she is married to the novel's chief soporific Arthur. Station Eleven is a sci-fi story involving a flight from a defiled Earth. While there are sample pages given in the novel and a great deal of exposure in the tv show, this comic that has guided lives and events is really only a series of inconsequential quotes. While that is a clever retooling of what religious texts are and how they are referred to in real life the ones from Station Eleven all have a weightiness and solemnity that suggests that they are part of the most boring and self-righteous comic in history. But because of its linking role it has to be there and the puzzle of its fascination for some of the characters must remain. The main change to the Prophet's character means that rather than be a weirdly wired devotee of The Bible he has based his new religion on a comic. Poignant, maybe, but it sill reeks of the writers' room.
If you are a fan of the novel be prepared to be taken away from it if you watch this, and to a significant degree. If you don't know or intend to read the novel, you'll get a well produced if a little soft post apocalyptic drama that works by its internal logic. As a fable of survival and hard deicision with the promise of a hopeful future Station Eleven gets a resolute "ok" from me. Buuuut, I read the book in 2020 which felt like the early chapters were happening around me and the community was getting freakish and disturbing so any opportunity to remind us that we should prefer humaneness and sharing to self-interest and falsely easy solutions is right for these times. In that sense, Station Eleven really does do its job.
Station Eleven is currently available though STAN
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