You all know I'm a stickler when it comes to adaptations. I just reread a whole bunch of books so I could nitpick their adaptations better. But Station 11 said fuck that. This is an adaptation. We're going to adapt.
Station 11 the book is about the power of art. Survival is insufficient! Art brings back joy in the apocalypse. The Prophet is there, yes, mostly as a generic post-apocalyptic predatory cult to move the plot along, and he's defeated after a moment of artistic connection. But the TV show says, hold up. Yes art can save us. It can allow us to speak to each other when we can't find the words. But it's not enough on its own. You can't keep telling the same story for 400 years and always have it land. You have to leave the wheel. You have to adapt. You have to ask yourself, what if it ends differently this time? If you don't - if you resist all change, if you can't handle going off course - you're going to wither and die. Frank unable to leave his house. The father dead on the sofa. Kirsten letting poison spread through her veins. Hamlet, who for four hundred years has been dead from the beginning. The finale music doesn't play at the end of the final episode of Station 11. It plays during the play, because that's the turning point, when this show's Hamlet holds a knife to Claudius's throat and doesn't stick it in. The play finally gets another ending.
It's not subtle about any of this. The metaphors, the narrative parallels, the masterfully done scene cuts, and the select quotes about Station 11 are all very blatant, but it clicks together well enough that it works and I don't care. When we get to the final episode and Miranda drops a tragic backstory that happens to connect to the problem at hand, I accept it because I'm not bought into this story as realism, I'm bought into it as a piece of well-constructed, very deliberate art.
Your art is your message. It's your last phone call. And maybe sometimes that last call saves an airport full of people. Maybe it condemns a plane full of passengers to die. Usually you don't know. Everyone's going to take it a different way. It might save someone. It might damn them. It might not do anything. Miranda starts Station 11 as her life collapses, burns it all down, and starts again, and then the world ends and two very different people find it and adapt it in two very different, disastrous ways. But you have to make it anyway. You have to talk to people even when they're not there. I don't want to live the wrong life and then die.
I love what the show did with Jeevan, turning a relatively minor character into an awkward millennial fumbling his way through the end of the world but genuinely wanting to do good. I loved the extra content we got from Miranda and the ways she touched people's lives even beyond her graphic novel. Clark's dark turn was unexpected but worked for the story. I'm still not sold on why everyone loved Arthur Leander, but I am constitutionally immune to movie stars. I liked that the show took the brief connection between Kirsten and the Prophet and turned it into two very lost people who remember damage and can't escape the stories they're telling themselves until someone else crashes into them and tells it a different way. Forget the generic Christofascist child bride cult. We've heard that before. Let's hear something else.
My one complaint is the child army thing got defused a bit mysteriously, but mostly it was tidy in the way a graphic novel is tidy. Every image is deliberate, every line counts. This is one of the rare instances where I think I actually like the adaptation better than the book, although it's very clear that they're doing different things. I probably should have saved this for last because now all the other TV shows are going to suffer for not being Station 11, but them's the breaks sometimes.
Highly recommend! Only if you can handle pandemic trauma though.
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