Station Eleven is about goodbyes in all their varied forms: protracted, painful, overdue, bittersweet, unexpected. This is why “Who’s There?†stands out from the preceding episodes. Until now, our characters have mainly bounced off each other, ricocheting into their own storylines and leaving one another behind. In this hour, we start to sense a series in search of its ending — a process that begins by getting everyone into position under the same roof.
Elizabeth is sitting by the husk of Gitchegumee Air Flight 452 and communing with the young son she believes she lost to self-immolation. She talks to him like Clark talked to Arthur over the radio, like Kirsten talked to Frank from her poison fugue, like Jeevan talked to Siya, like Tyler wanted the kids to talk to their dead sisters and brothers back when Tyler was still a kid himself. Maybe the ritual keeps Elizabeth in perennial mourning, or maybe it keeps her son alive enough that she can bear living. There’s comfort to be found even in the fiction of company, same as Miranda felt with Dr. Eleven. Talking to the dead — or the missing, or the invented — is emerging as a powerful motif.
Back in the woods, Kirsten and Tyler continue to feel out the peculiar rapport between them, still oblivious to their connection through Arthur. When Tyler asks her what she dreamed about under the spell of the Red Bandana’s poison dart for three days, Kirsten’s guarded but truthful. “First hundred,†she tells him, a period of time that haunts all pre-pans. Soon Miles, still providing airport security after all these years, catches them lurking inside the perimeter fences. He drags Kirsten and Tyler (now d.b.a. Lonergan) through the airport terminal to face Clark, revealing something of a paradise along the way. His plan to install solar panels worked. They grow their own fruit trees in Severn City; they have bathrooms and surveillance cameras. They even have support groups, where Clark, now an old man, can spill his feelings. Today’s epiphany is that he’s always felt hated, a suspicion that’s corroborated when he tries to explain a karaoke machine — a treasured artifact from his Museum of Civilization — to a group of middle schoolers who don’t give a shit.
Maybe Clark’s perception is accurate. It would explain why, 20 years after the onset of the flu, he still rules the airport by sowing fear of the unknown. Even in the winter of his life, he wants the doors to his little fiefdom to stay shut. Elizabeth, on the other hand, pleads with him to welcome the world back in. The Travelling Symphony’s limited invitation, it seems, is an experiment in compromise. Clark calls on Kirsten and Lonergan, who he doesn’t recognize, to prove they’re actors — an echo of what Tyler’s Undersea asked of Kirsten in episode six. Even in the absence of governments and borders, people have defined each other into groups and devised rudimentary ID checks. “What have you done, my lord, with the dead body?†Clark asks and waits for Tyler to respond. “Compounded it with dust, whereto ’tis kin.†See? He’s an actor!
Except Clark’s not satisfied. He asks for a scene, and Kirsten savvily picks up a mug off the desk. Inside the airport, they still have mugs; from the windowed control tower, they could be on a space station. The two perform a scene from soon after Lonergan recovers Eleven’s body. It’s improvised, sure, but between people who know the text so well and who have so recently lived its story, it feels choreographed. Clark watches as Kirsten invents Eleven from nothing but a coffee mug, too transfixed to notice Tyler furtively hiding something in the floorboards. From just outside the room, Elizabeth listens in too. Does it sound familiar to her? Did she ever flip through the comic that kept her son so enthralled? What about Clark — did he ever sneak in the pool house to peek at what Miranda was working on?
Or perhaps Kirsten’s face is what sends Clark into his memories. He went to see Arthur as King Lear when the production was in rehearsals; he even met young Kirsten backstage, issued her the same Shakespeare challenge (“Our eldest-born, speak first,†he begs, and she answers: “Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter.â€) Clark was sober then, but Arthur suggests they go to a bar because he’s forgetful or insensitive or both. Back at the hotel over dinner, Clark even has to remind Arthur of his boyfriend’s name. Arthur’s one of the worst kinds of friends, really — the kind that doesn’t let you change, that holds you endlessly accountable to your younger self. Arthur reminds him that when they first met, Clark was a punk violinist; now, he’s a suit with bad values.
They fight with the special awareness of each other’s fragile spots that decades of friendship afford. Arthur tells Clark he prefers to surround himself with softer people than you find in the business world, as if Clark’s failure as an actor was a matter of choice. Clark says Arthur prefers sycophants anyway. The conversation gets so deep under Clark’s skin so quickly. He pours himself a drink. Then another. It makes him bolder and meaner. Clark’s not jealous, he insists. He just misses friendship. He misses when Arthur was someone he could be friends with.
Clark’s not thought of Arthur with such clarity and intensity in years, and it puts him off the idea of the Travelling Symphony performing at all. If Kirsten and Tyler’s one scene could dredge up so much so quickly, imagine what Hamlet could do to Severn City. The insolence! The subversion! Poor, misunderstood Claudius!
Out on the tarmac, though, the Travelling Symphony is settling in and having fun. Someone’s brought out the karaoke machine, and Alex is doing “Stay†by Lisa Loeb (I’m thrilled to learn it survives the apocalypse). They’re playing music and laughing, and, thanks to the tall gates all around them, they feel safe. But when Clark releases Kirsten back to her friends, the mood sours. She immediately reframes the situation according to the cynicism Tyler told Alex to expect from pre-pans. The fences don’t keep bad things locked out; they’re keeping the Symphony locked in. Sarah isn’t being helped. She’s being held for ransom: one performance of Hamlet for one conductor.
The troupe’s debating what comes next when someone mentions Elizabeth by name, and Kirsten finally connects the dots that led her from Chicago to Pingtree to now: who Elizabeth is to the Prophet; who Tyler is to Arthur; who Tyler is to her. “Holy fucking shit,†she says, which I think is under-the-radar perfect dialogue, really. Kirsten has seen the world end, but nothing jolts like coincidence. Imagine if Frank’s grandfather’s compass broke when it was pointing west. Maybe Kirsten and Jeevan never cross Lake Michigan. Maybe Kirsten never meets Arthur’s son like she was supposed to do all those years ago.
And if they didn’t meet, then they’d never do the scene that sent Clark down the uglier corridors of his memory. “Do people like me anymore?†he asks Miles as they settle into bed. The conversation between aging lovers is interrupted with moments from after Clark’s last bender with Arthur. The detente between them didn’t last. When Clark wakes up the next day, Arthur tries to shoo him out of the hotel without Tyler and Elizabeth seeing. “I feel fucking sorry for Tyler having you as a father,†Clark tells Arthur, but Tyler is unknowingly within earshot. That’s how they met the first time, a few weeks before they saw each other on the plane to Severn City. That’s the Clark that Tyler knows. Not the old man muttering lines of Miranda’s novel to himself as he goes to sleep — yes, it seems he’s read it too — but the bruised, angry man who hated his father.
Tyler’s come back to Severn City on a revenge mission that’s wrapped up in liberation dressing. He wants to stop Clark from remaking the world as it was “before,†with its artifacts and hierarchies and selfishness. It’s impossible, of course, yet Kirsten decides to follow him on the hopeless errand. In the dead of night, he leads her out to the carcass of the Gitchegumee, and they trade secrets in the same place his mother talks to him every day. They’ve built a memorial there now — a statue in the shape of a paper plane, inscribed with a quote from Clark. Tyler tells Kirsten how Clark punished him for trying to help the plane’s only survivor.
It’s a moment for confessions, it seems. Kirsten reveals that she knew Arthur, that she knows Tyler’s real name. Maybe because they’ve both been lonely in the same way or maybe because two adolescent minds raised on Station Eleven will understand each other instinctively, she senses there is more to Tyler’s return to Severn City than revenge. There’s recovery here for him, too. He could get his mother back.
Tyler’s less sure. “I remember damage, then escape, then adrift in a stranger’s galaxy for a long, long time.†He repeats Miranda’s words to Kirsten like Clark mutters others to himself. The magic in Miranda’s writing is that it has nothing to do with the world’s end. We’ve all had fallow periods, directionless ones. As he leaves her, Tyler releases Kirsten from the Undersea that she never really belonged to in the first place. Kirsten belongs to before.
Tyler sets the memorial on fire, and Elizabeth meets him by the blaze, followed by Clark. There’s a reckoning but no reconciliation. For Tyler, Clark is the living embodiment of pre-pan culture: cruel, cynical, stuck. He uses his old handheld gaming console and the explosive he tucked under the floorboards earlier to blow up Clark’s stupid museum, though I really hope the karaoke machine is still on the tarmac. Miranda’s Station Eleven ends without an ending, without closure. Kirsten doesn’t know who wins or loses, if the Undersea return to Earth or spin around it for the rest of their lives. Maybe this is what happens. Civilization does not rebuild because there are enough people who don’t want it back.
Before Tyler leads Kirsten out to the ​​Gitchegumee, he brings her to see Sarah, who diagnoses herself terminally heartbroken. It’s the episode’s only goodbye. At Sarah’s request, Kirsten promises not to tell the others that Sarah’s dying until after the show. “The play’s the thing,†Sarah tells her, ominous parting words for the girl who’s followed her dutifully around and around a lake for almost 20 years. In Hamlet, the play reveals Claudius’s guilt. In St. Deb’s, playing Hamlet revealed Kirsten’s vulnerability to Tyler, and, in Pingtree, it revealed Alex’s thirst for freedom. What secrets are left to be unearthed in Severn City?