In a particularly frosty move, Jeevan’s girlfriend heads home without him. Arthur dies as Lear - an act too early - while some random dude with no life-saving skills stands over him shouting out for someone with life-saving skills to please help. Except Jeevan isn’t a doctor he doesn’t even know first aid. Sitting nearby is Jeevan (played by Himesh Patel from the musical rom-com Yesterday), who perceives in Lear the visible indicators of a heart attack and rushes from the stalls to the stage. When the episode begins, mad Lear is still rambling through Act IV while someone texts from the good seats with keyboard clicks turned on. The season premiere is dedicated to hurrying us through the worst of the storm. Station Eleven is a show about Earth’s dark end, yes, but also its future, which, in defiance of the dystopian genre’s norms, is complicated beyond survival. Feral pigs roam the theater where once the movie star Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) played King Lear, but on a sandy dune, twenty years after the plague, his old co-star is still alive and running late for some rehearsal. Like in the novel, art outlives civilization. In the future glimpses, the city is rewilded - lush, but empty. In scenes from before the virus strikes, the Chicago streets (apologies, my book people, but we’re not in Toronto) are crowded, and the light is icy blue. On Station Eleven the series (but also the book, tbh), time jumps in hard-to-describe ways between the period before a flu-like pandemic hits Earth, the pandemic and its immediate aftermath, and the years after the pandemic. There’s a corresponding sadness to the spaceman’s remove: He can take in the whole spinning globe, but he can’t touch it. “There is too much world,” Miłosz’s speaker finishes, overwhelmed by what he cannot see. A spaceman in orbit watches night crawl across his old home, a Route 66 mug in his space-gloved hand. As the series premiere of the HBO miniseries based on Mandel’s book ends, that inhuman perspective is personified. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven opens with an epigraph from the poet Czesław Miłosz: “The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness / And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour.” It’s a forensic account of time marching on, not how it feels to be on Earth as hours pass, but what the phenomena looks like from some inhuman perch.
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