healing through art

A series about a pandemic released in the midst of a pandemic? Despite the necessary explanations (it is based on a 2017 novel and began shooting at the end of 2019, that is, there was no exploitative vocation), ‘Station Eleven’ It was going to be difficult for him to gain immediate sympathy. Pandemic fatigue is a reality. But the series by Patrick Somerville (former screenwriter of ‘The leftovers’, creator of ‘Maniac’) has ended up making an important hole in the lives of many who took the risk of sinking into misery and started watching it. It has left a mark, above all, for its curative usefulness: your reminder of the value of art and all the life-saving connections that bind us to one another.

Luckily, the base situation was not so, so recognizable either: the ‘Estación Once’ virus is even more lethal than covid-19 and strikes down 99.9% of the global population in record time. The action of the series is divided between two basic time blocks: the outbreak of the pandemic and the year after, on the one hand, and the new order two decades later, on the other. We dynamically jump between locations, From Chicago to Singapore, past that broken space station from which he watches us a taciturn and lonely astronaut.

That character comes from ‘Estación Once’, an imaginary comic with a decisive role in the lives of those who matter most in the plot. The protagonist Kirsten (revealing Matilda Lawler in its pre-adolescent version; Mackenzie Davis in the post-pandemic), star of the traveling Symphony theater company, which has set out to challenge the apocalypse with Shakespeare, has it as a favorite souvenir of an idealized Before. For the Prophet (Daniel Zovatto), leader of a cult that turns children into soldiers, that Before does not exist and the book is a distorted inspiration for horror. Nor can we forget the author of the work herself, Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler), whose difficult relationship with actor Arthur Leander (Gael Garcia Bernal), Kirsten’s mentor, provides a plot basis for that great reflection on love asymmetry called ‘Huracán’, one of the best episodes.

Far from telling a linear story, Somerville and his team zoom in and out on a long timeline, a vast landscape, and a rich set of characters. (we have only talked about some), which invites us to think of the omniscient cosmonaut as the narrator of all this. The breadth and freedom of the vision have given joyful vertigo: each episode was its own adventure, as if following in the footsteps of ‘Lost’ and ‘The leftovers’, in which Somerville cut his teeth as a television writer. Also like in that one, tackling difficult topics does not mean dispensing with joy and fun, or tending to an extravagance that, let’s face it, here could take the form of irritating horse racing.

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But even these slips were offset by a formal excellence that reached sublime heights when hiromurai Y Lucy Tcherniak They stood behind the camera. From the first we will always remember the aforementioned ‘Huracán’ and the masterful opening episode. From the second, ‘Severn City Airport’, a kind of ‘The Terminal’ with a darker ending, and the devastating ‘Goodbye my poor home’, in which Kirsten was reunited with her little self in difficult times. Kirs’ relationship with his unexpected protector Jeevan (Hamish Patel), developed by Somerville from what was a fleeting moment in the original book, has given rise to the most resonant strokes of emotion. In fact, a certain moment in the last episode again invites comparisons to ‘Lost’, or to be precise, the telephone climax of ‘The Constant’. The same compunction, the same healing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaAG-SwEa7k