In some ways, Station Eleven subverts the storytelling norms of speculative fiction. Instead of first meticulously building out its world, for example, the series urgently dives into characters and story. “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead†pumps the brakes just enough to fill in some of the gaps on basic plot points, like who started the Travelling Symphony, what life was like immediately following the “first hundred,†and what Miranda’s graphic novel is even about.
The world is made up of two races now: pre-pans and post-pans. The pre-pans are the people who survived the pandemic and implicitly consider the civilization that they used to know — the “before†— the real world. What they live in now is what’s left over; what they do with their lives is survive. The stereotype is that pre-pans are dishonest, too stuck in their own trauma to see the world as it is and too nostalgic to evolve past what it was. And if that’s all true, well, fair enough. They saw some shit.
The post-pans are the children born after the flu, the oldest of whom are around 20 — the perfect age for some good old-fashioned misbehaving. “After†is all they’ve ever known. They crave the progress that pre-pans have seen with their own eyes but now deem impossible. Post-pans don’t assume every stranger is a threat; they don’t function out of fear. They want to write new plays. Alex is the only post-pan in the Travelling Symphony, and the Travelling Symphony is a cobwebby institution. It takes the same route around Lake Michigan — they call it “The Wheel†— and it plays the same Shakespearean plays to the same outposts, over and over again, year after year, nothing changing but the symphony Sarah writes to accompany the action.
With one extremely notable exception. Sarah is the troupe’s conductor, but the actors once had a director, too — Sarah’s husband, Gil (David Cross, whom I will always assume has jorts on under his costume, no matter the show). Back then, the Travelling Symphony would occasionally split, musicians moving in one direction and the actors visiting Pingtree, an impeccably named golf-course community populated by professors. Like a long-haul trucker with a wife at each end of his route, Gil cultivated a secret romance at Pingtree with a lady prof called Katrina. When Sarah found out, Gil retired to the golf course, and the Travelling Symphony, for one time only, edited the Wheel.
In “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead,†Kirsten connives to reunite everyone at Pingtree once again. A week’s gone by since the players left St. Deb’s, but the conversation still revolves around the drifter, a.k.a. David, a.k.a. “the Prophet.†According to a hand-drawn “Wanted†poster Alex finds along the road, that’s what he’s called. He goes from town to town, picking off the post-pans, wooing them away from their families by telling them they’re special. “The first generation to be free from trauma,†Alex tells Kirsten. The notion is familiar to Kirsten, an echo of a sentiment from Miranda’s book.
This week, via young Kirsten’s voice-over, we get a little bit of a Station Eleven plot synopsis: The spaceman Dr. Eleven gets stuck on a crewless, broken space station, captained by a guy who looks like a haggard, defeated Arthur. Some accident onboard killed the adults, and now there’s just the captain and the kids — the first generation to be free from trauma. The kids want to use time travel to go back to Earth in the future, but the captain says no, and Eleven is agnostic. Only the kids have hope. David is a prophet, his followers are a cult, and their bible is the sacred text that arguably ended Miranda’s marriage — the same one that Kirsten hid in Pingtree before they changed the Wheel. Why Kirsten is so convinced she owns the only copy is beyond me. Maybe she needed to believe that when she was young and cold and lonely and the book was the only talisman she had to connect her to her own Before. For the Prophet, it’s the novel’s message that holds him: “There is no Before.â€
Regardless, Kirsten tracking down her copy of Station Eleven is a good thing because the people in Pingtree are languishing. The Prophet’s already hobbled through town on his crutches, kidnapping Katrina’s grandkids on his way out. (Katrina, of course, is super-alive and not at all dead, as Kirsten told Sarah to convince her to leave the Wheel in the first place.) The Pingtree U faculty are rattled and paranoid, but rather than look for the missing children, they’ve surrounded the clubhouse with mines hoping they’ll come back on their own (but somehow also know to avoid the new mines?). And maybe they will! Compared to what we saw at St. Deborah by the Water, life at Pingtree is civilized. People sleep and eat indoors, they educate their children and dine on MREs. I don’t hate Gil for straying. If my choices were a smelly caravan of theater kids and nerds with pitch and putt, I’d stay in Pingtree, too.
Despite the recent tragedy, Gil and Sarah still manage to push each other’s buttons in the mode of exes with unfinished business. Apparently, when they were together, they said they would never do Hamlet, which Gil calls the most overrated play of all time, including August: Osage County. (I love you, Tracey Letts, but did it really have to end so depressing?) To impress Gil, Sarah claims to have turned over a new leaf: The troupe is actually doing a cool ’90s Hamlet, written by Wendy (Deborah Cox), set in Portland, and starring young Alex. SO TAKE THAT, GIL! Kirsten is upset at being recast even just this once (theater kids), but Sayid (Andy McQueen) talks her down. They also sleep together because drama club is horny.
When Kirsten eventually slinks away to check on her copy of Station Eleven, she finds it exactly where she left it, buried under golf balls in Gil’s desk. (Of course she does!) She takes it outside and flips its pages, tracing the pages with her fingertips. It’s an emotional reunion that sends her back to Alex wanting more information about the Prophet. Alex confesses she agreed to leave with him. She wants out from under Kirsten’s shadow; she wants to be the lead. And in Wendy’s new play, she finally is. After the show, on a frenzied performance high, Alex steals a horse and sets out beyond the minefields in search of the Prophet, whom she now knows Kirsten stabbed. Alex is engaged in the time-honored tradition of youthful rebellion but with the stakes turned all the way up. The Travelling Symphony never should have returned to Pingtree, which reeks of paralysis. Gil is unhappy there, futilely attempting to write an oral history of Before before the voices who knew it all die out. Kirsten, Alex, Gil, lonely Sarah — none of them should have ever gone off-Wheel.
The Pingtree set were right about one thing — their young children return to campus, only with dug-up land mines strapped to their chests. They’re spooky. They don’t answer to their old names, and they don’t say much before they unwittingly take Gil into an explosive, deadly hug. Kirsten is watching and screaming but no one can hear her, just like there was no one to hear her cries 20 years ago.
Because woven throughout “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead†are glimpses of Kirsten and Jeevan from the first year after the pandemic, holed up in a cabin in winter. There’s tension between them, and it centers on Station Eleven, as everything eventually does. Jeevan insensitively suggests that the book’s pseudo-philosophical drivel isn’t meaningful (maybe he has a point?); later, Kirsten accuses him of stealing the book from her rucksack. “I was just supposed to walk you home,†Jeevan complains; now, he’s accidentally her father, making every decision with her survival in mind. In Year 20, Kirsten is Jeevan, claiming responsibility for Alex, trying to control everything to keep her safe.
Outside the cabin, a wolf bays. Kirsten is 8 again, screaming for Jeevan, who is nowhere to be found, and clutching the one thing other than her guardian that she has left from Before — her copy of Station Eleven.