"Station Eleven": Shakespeare & Co. Pandemic Performances

Plus, what the HBO series got wrong (who would've guessed?).

[First Published: June 3, 2022]

Like all notable pieces of literature, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven was the recent subject of an adaptation to the screen by HBO. The series, which debuted on the streaming service at the end of 2021, comes from the 2014 novel of the same. Mandel’s literary science-fiction masterpiece was a downright sensation upon release. The book’s following garnered a lot of expectations around the adaptation. Unsurprisingly, the writers of the ten-episode miniseries stray from the novel. How far? We will come to that in due course. But let us first discuss the original's ideas, characters, and meaning before discussing the series.

Station Eleven is told through a series of non-linear narratives. The first takes place in Toronto and is mainly centered around a local production of Shakespeare’s King Lear. A big-time Hollywood star, Arthur Leander, pursues the lead role in the production as a passion project. Tragedy strikes on stage, leaving Jeevan an entertainment reporter/EMT-in-training whose life intersects with Leander’s at several key moments. After the incident, a close friend and doctor contacted Jeevan from the local hospital. He warns Jeevan to get out of the city as a mysterious and deadly virus known as the Georgia Flu spreads rapidly throughout the city and will soon become a full-blown pandemic.

The story then takes the reader twenty years into the future, where a troupe of nomadic thespians navigates the surviving remnants of the world before the pandemic. The Traveling Symphony group is made up of actors and musicians alike. Kirsten, who acts as the primary vessel of plot development in the present, is an actress in the company. She was just eight years old at the time of the outbreak and clung to a set of comics given to her by Arthur Leander titled Station Eleven (they said the name of the book!). The group operates on a two-year cycle touring inhabited areas of the Great Lakes region of the U.S.

Meanwhile, paths cross in the past as several characters are en route to a mutual friend’s funeral. This helps establish connections between the past and present, which ultimately converge inside the Severn City Airport. Those stranded there when the pandemic began twenty years before have set up a community, which contains the Museum of Civilization. Clark, who was also a friend of Arthur in the before times, now curates the museum, where he gathers artifacts such as iPhones and laptop computers. While most airport survivors adapt to their new life, others embrace religious zealotry and ultimately leave in the formation of a religious cult.

In the present, Kirsten and August find a group of the Prophet's men holding Sayid, a member of their troupe, hostage. They kill the men and free Sayid, who explains that their friend Dieter was killed, while another hostage escaped, warned the group, and sent them on another road, explaining how they went missing. The trio continues to the Museum of Civilization, where they are reunited with rest of the troupe. Clark, who has lived in the museum for twenty years, realizes Kirsten's attachment to Arthur and that the Prophet was Tyler Leander. Clark takes Kirsten up to the airport's control tower, where through a telescope, he shows her there is a town to the south with electric lights, suggesting that civilization is beginning to take root again.

In HBO Max’s Station Eleven, many of the same bones remain, but with a different outcome. We sense some of the novel’s looping structure in the television show. These shots show an unrecognizable world: today’s driveway becomes an overgrown wilderness years after the pandemic. Today’s theater, where Arthur performs King Lear to a packed audience, is later overrun by feral hogs. The visual style hints at narrative omniscience.

Both the series and novel introduce Tyler Leander, the young son of Arthur Leander, and Elizabeth Colton, Arthur’s second wife. We meet Tyler at the Severn City Airport in both stories, where stranded travelers, sealed off from contagion, transform the building into a self-contained community, eventually including the Museum of Civilization.

In the book, Tyler becomes convinced that the pandemic happened for a reason, and God chose those who survived. He and his mother leave the airport and assemble a following, only to eventually set up shop in St. Deborah by the Water, a town the Traveling Symphony will later pass through to perform a play. As an adult, Tyler is known as the Prophet; he runs the city as a spooky cult leader, takes child brides, and even asks to marry teenage Alex from the Traveling Symphony.

The show both changes the character and spins it into a mystery. In Episode Two, we meet a mysterious creep named David, whom Kirsten stabs and leaves for dead. But David survives, and in Episode Four, we learn that David is the Prophet. He still tries to lure Alex away, but his philosophy looks a little different; this Prophet believes that people born after the pandemic are unique and chosen because they’re born free of trauma. He amasses a following of children lured away from their families and trains them to act as his child army. It isn’t until Episode Five that we learn the Prophet’s true identity. After a series of cataclysmic events at the airport destroyed young Tyler Leander’s faith in adults, he faked his death and ran away, only to become the Prophet.

Ultimately, the Prophet meets different fates between the source material and adaptation. In the book, the Prophet dies rather unceremoniously, killed by one of his cult members while Kirsten is en route to the airport. But the show, like with Kirsten and Jeevan, forces these two characters into closer contact, making for a kinetic reaction. Kirsten and Tyler form an unlikely alliance despite the big ideological rift.

Readers also note that the show’s ending looks different from the novel’s. In the book, the Traveling Symphony ends up at the Museum of Civilization in search of two missing members of their troupe; in the show, they arrive by invitation to deliver a performance of Hamlet. The novel ends soon after Kirsten arrives and reunites with the troupe, but the show keeps going. The artistic liberties chosen with the ending of the series do not undermine the story at-large, but do no make for as satisfying of an end that readers know.

“Survival is insufficient.”