Station Eleven’s Exquisite Finale Finds Solace in Storytelling
Photo Courtesy of HBO
Station Eleven barters in stories, investigating how art functions as an extension of ourselves and fills in the gaps when communication stutters. At the heart of the story, the “terrified carnival of trauma” known as the Traveling Symphony performs Shakespeare, and a breadth of art thrives within the show’s world. But HBO Max’s miniseries also dwells in the small fictions resting in our language, and in the show’s finale “Unbroken Circle,” the most heartbreaking story is also the shortest—a simple fabrication intended to assure normalcy to people who need it for a few more seconds: “Well folks, looks like it’s going to be a little longer.”
Miranda Carroll (a showstopping Danielle Deadwyler) lays dying in Malaysia from the lethal Georgia Flu, a viral epidemic in the process of annihilating 99% of the world’s population. But even as she sees her own ending written out, Miranda seeks to protect an old friend and her former love’s child, currently safe in the isolated Severn City airport. Adrift on the tarmac, Gitchegumee Air Flight 452 has been infected; already, it’s part of a ghost story. Miranda, in her plea to convince the plane’s pilot to not disembark, turns to the method of communication she knows best. She tells him a story—how her entire family died in Hurricane Hugo when a live wire floated in their house, electrocuting everyone but the girl sketching atop the kitchen counter. Captain Hugo, named for the same hurricane that wrecked Miranda’s life, turns on the intercom.
Emily St. John Mandel’s source novel about a troupe of actors focuses on the cultural response to a post-apocalyptic event, casting art as an innate human characteristic to make sense of a deeply transformed world. The message shines right there on the side of the Traveling Symphony’s wagons, the line itself borrowed from Star Trek: Voyager: “Survival is insufficient.” Heady material, sure, but what sets the show apart is its refusal to make grandiose proclamations about resilience or how trauma paves the way for character development. Instead, things are just as they are. Showrunner Patrick Somerville takes this idea and digs into it with dialogue that shifts between the lyrical and the plain, getting to the core of how people use storytelling to shape their reality. The show recognizes Clark’s callous interpretation of the people aboard Gitchegumee 452 as a fiction in itself, a way to make himself feel better. Art is an extension of that instinct.
Throughout its 10 episodes, Station Eleven preoccupies itself with gaps in language and communication. Arthur speaks callously about Miranda to his family in Spanish; only later does Tyler ambiguously reveal she could understand him all along. When Frank and Jeevan struggle to take care of Kirsten, they resort to speaking in Hindi to shield her from their situation’s despair, although she can still clearly read their body language. After Kirsten and Jeevan are separated, he can only describe her as “just someone I ended up with.” The words don’t come close to grasping the richness of their relationship, but they’re the only words he has to delineate a new type of relationship. People invent fiction around their lives, talking to the dead and the lost and conceptualized. The fictional Dr. Eleven knocks on a dying Miranda’s door, letting her glimpse the space station that’s frequented her thoughts for years: “I have found you nine times before, maybe 10, and I’ll find you again.”