#starzplay

The Great.

Episode stills of Jason Isaacs, playing Peter the Great, from episode 8 - Five Days.

Photos by Gareth Gatrell.

Episode directed by Ally Pankiw.

Hulu / MRC Television / Starzplay

Samantha Morton & Liv Hill as adult/young Catherine de’ Medici

So now Station Eleven is out there in its entirety and I'm all caught up, I can tell you my verdict is that it was so stunning it could even wobble on landing and still be the best thing I've seen on television for years.

If I was irked by some decisions in the second half of the season - ones I suspect came during post Covid retooling - that's only because the bar was so high it felt like grease smudging on a masterwork. It's imperfect, okay - but it gets so much more right than wrong, and what it gets right it gets so right it's breathtaking. There is nothing else like this on television and it's hard to imagine there will be again.

Set at different times before and after a near-extinction pandemic - seen almost in passing more than in progress - Station Eleven is told through a web of different people; a guy trying to get a stranded little girl home in Chicago in the 2020s, a woman who writes a comic book as her marriage fails in 2010s, and a group of travelling performers touring Shakespeare around the "After" in the 2040s.

Across these ages and places, the rhymes and relationships between timelines slowly begin to emerge, and it becomes clear these different journeys might have a shared direction after all.

If that sounds like a confusing drag, it isn't. If it sounds too serious it isn't that either. If it sounds pretentious, well, I could tell you but I'd spoil my favourite gag in it.

Station Eleven is many things, and most surprisingly some of those things are lively, funny, and full of unembarrassed warmth, whether it's a scene set in the world where appendicitis will kill you, or the one still hosting the single worst pitch meeting I've ever seen.

What it is most immediately though, is an astonishingly beautiful thing to look at.

The world of After is a huge, sprawling landscape of vivid natural life, leaping into the space people used to fill, while the colourful survivors dwarfed within it seem to burst beyond themselves with energy and personality. The world of Before seems almost lifeless by comparison, but its thoughtful composition makes for a quiet tension as we wait for this life and almost everyone in it to meet their foregone end. A breakup, a job interview, an awkward dinner party; mundane events take on a poignant heft while the doomsday clock ticks away unheard, in rooms filled only with glass and closed doors and electric light.

The eclectic soundtrack and score is as hand-crafted as the visuals, and would be superb even out of context. It runs a diverse spectrum, from bluegrass strings and warm crowded-campfire folk singalongs, all the way to the eerie synths and cold, lonesome piano notes which punctuate the empty Post-Anthropocene around them. Hip hop, funk, blues, and 1990s pop, all show up too to make memorable cameos, as if to form a portfolio of human music to date. Music's starring role goes hand in hand - and sometimes blurs into - some remarkably clever sound design tricks, which I won't spoil, but go a long way to lending this universe an offbeat and off-kilter atmosphere, quite unlike any of its genre mates.

Production Design - and Wardrobe in particular - goes in even bolder, fresher directions for such a well trodden premise, conjuring a giddy mishmash of found, altered, and remade material from the leftovers of human society. An improvised knife pouch sits comfortably over a corset made from package strapping; ornaments become jewellery, blankets become imperious capes. Endlessly inventive and thematically on point, I'll be very surprised if the costume design alone doesn't win braces of awards, if nothing else.

The cast deserve their share too. They're perfectly selected and uniformly terrific; even apparently comic novelty weirdos live and breathe. But Davis as lead, Patel and Lawler as unlikely fellow travellers, and Deadwyler as secret weapon are all giving what feel like career bests. Special mention is also warranted by Lori Petty, who is wonderful in a supporting role that does exactly that, a character so lived-in even for her limited scenes that everyone else feels more real in her orbit.

The show demands plenty of each of them. The writing, once you learn to trust it, is compassionate and kind to both character and viewer, and though it may challenge your patience and attention early on, it's sure to be generous with rewards sooner or later. This kind of textured, patient storytelling relies on a large, totally committed cast to work, and they deliver, hurling themselves at both its highs and lows with equal zeal.

Make no mistake - bad things can happen in this world and to these people, and you'll feel them, but the show's interest doesn't lie in grimdarkness or despair. They have all lived through an indescribable loss, but Station Eleven is less concerned with trying to describe it anyway than it is in seeing them make sense of that "living" part, as best they can.

Violence is certainly present, but almost always off screen, and it goes uncelebrated. Its effect is what's important. Station Eleven is not here to wallow in the characters' trauma and pain - it is here to witness them unpicking it, decoding it, and reworking it to something new. Not everyone died, we're reminded, and characters who didn't die when everyone else did mean to get busy living, through art, travel, and each other. The show is unafraid to take big serious feelings seriously, but that's earned by being just as willing to allow for humor, and surprising left turns into the absurd on a hairpin whim.

The Direction, similarly, can be epic and ambitious when it wants to be, taking very cinematic advantage of the huge landscapes and lush outdoors; but it can just as easily and suddenly become quirky and strange and intimate. More than once I found myself startled into laughter just by a knowingly timed cut or needle drop, something completely unexpected and yet unimaginable any other way once it's done. One show-shattering plot revelation near the end is marked simply by closing in on Davis, feasting so exuberantly on a couple of swearwords you'll rewind to enjoy it again.

Book readers will of course want to know how faithful it is, and the answer is "It's complicated". They will find characters and plotlines taking dramatically different routes, and to entirely different conclusions; some themes are pressed harder or much more lightly than in the novel. Some plots are changed or replaced, some characters swap roles entirely. But the tone and sensitivities are in tune enough that these divergences feels like a complement, not a failure or rejection of the source. More often than being omitted, the book's ideas can emerge from an unexpected place to make the same points in the end.

This might best be approached then as an alternate timeline to that of the book's world, a companion piece; this Kirsten could understand that one, though they are fraternal rather than identical sisters. Where Book Kirsten is grateful not to remember the first year, this one remembers all too presently, and it's easy to imagine any difference between them stems solely from that fork in the road.

(Incidentally, if you're wondering - I would suggest reading the book first if you haven't already, solely because its plot depends on a surprise reveal near the end that's made matter of fact very early in the show)

The misgivings I mentioned about later episodes may be minor, but I'd be remiss not to note them - a particular subplot I found draggy was given more spotlight than it deserved, only to resolve in a way that's both puzzlingly unsatisfying and at odds tonally with what I think was intended. A secondary character involved with it is irritating without mitigation, and I promise you'll know exactly which one I mean.

But again, that only bothers me because everything else is so well considered and assembled that it jars. A draggy plotline frustrates because it's next to such compelling ones; one annoying character is nothing compared to the six or seven warm, funny, wounded ones I felt grateful just to spend time with at all. The show's unconventional, interlocking structure means there is always plenty of everything worth seeing through to the heartfelt end, if you just keep the faith.

Ultimately, Station Eleven is not a story about the end of the world; rather, it is a defiantly life-loving fable, a story about people figuring out how to live in whatever world they get left with. And more importantly how to thrive in it; how to make peace with who they had to become to get there, how to honour the people who didn't come with them, and who they can choose to be now. Something survives, this show insists, and so long as it does survival is insufficient. There must be more. We must make it more.

I cannot recommend this enough, but I'll do my best to try all the same. You'll laugh. You'll cry. It makes plenty of space and time to do both, and offers a graceful, only occasionally clumsy sense of understanding either way.