Station Eleven: An Ode to Jeevan
I can pull up vague snippets from the ol’ memory files of the first episode of Lost, because somebody once told me it was *amazing* and one day arrived, years and years ago, when I must have been bored enough and bereft enough of other options to think: a series based on the psychological woes afflicting an assortment of airplane crash survivors, sure.
Fans of Lost are often like this: Aggressive. Assured. Unrelenting. I don’t remember which friend (no one in my immediate family would ever watch a show as peculiar and withholding as Lost) recommended it, but I do remember that I strongly questioned their judgment. Plot-wise, the series begins in bleak tragedy; tonally, it runs like a punishing jungle slog. Maybe humor made an appearance in latter episodes, but I don’t recall any suggestion of it in the pilot. Here are some people who miraculously survived a catastrophe; now they are stranded on a mysterious island. None of them has ever encountered laughter. Things are gonna get weird.
I have neither the patience nor the temperament for such shows, and I especially lacked an appreciation for solemnity or X-Files-esque additions of the surreal back in my early 20s. You would have found Lost tiresome and pretentious too, had you been kicking it in sunny Austin, carefree young adulthood capital of the world, in its late-aughts, pre-boom period no less.
So when I heard some folks gushing on the podcast circuit about Station Eleven, loving it precisely because it reminded them of Lost, I thought to myself: now there’s a show I probably wouldn’t like!
The premise alone! Twenty years after a world-crushing pandemic kills off 99 percent of humans, a group of traveling actors and musicians perform Shakespeare for a string of villagers eking it out around Lake Michigan on a tour trail called The Wheel (cue intimations of GOT and devices of medieval torture). Incredibly, this tops Lost on the bleak charts.
And yet… Station Eleven offered an alternative pandemic, a glimpse of an imaginary course of events much darker than our own. It held forth the potential for catharsis and, simultaneously and more importantly, gratitude. Also, the previews looked cool.
Well, I went for it. [SPOILERS AHEAD]
The first episode was probably the most difficult to watch, despite its (unparalleled?) excellence as a work of the series. Two years steeped in pandemic news now, we’re all thoroughly educated on how disease spread works, and the unwitting epidemiologist in me could not stop arguing with the timeline of events. A flu breaks out that kills within 24 hours, but yet somehow traverses the entire world at the same exact time, and yet two characters hanging out in a crowded theater on the day of outbreak remain uninfected? This is nonsense. It bothered me that Jeevan and Kirsten are miraculously spared, despite hospitals in Chicago already packed with the dead and dying by the time they make their plodding journey to Frank’s apartment.
Mercifully, this is the only full-on reality-defying trope of the series. As mentioned above, I don’t like mixing real life with the fanciful (magical realism is a big no-no on my bookshelf). It feels very “let’s play pretend,” to which I answer: “We’re adults.” The real world is funky enough.
Himesh Patel as Jeevan is so, so excellent, and all the accolades Matilda Lawler is collecting for her portrayal of the young Kirsten are fully earned. The episode is pretty much just them, witnessing and reacting to Arthur’s (Gael Garcia Bernal) death on stage, fumbling their way to Kirsten’s house, then on to an empty mega grocery store, finally crashing at Frank’s (Jeevan’s brother, a pitch-perfect Nabhaan Rizwan) lofty digs in a chic Chicago highrise.
In a delightful stroke of directorial brilliance, Jeevan initially presents as Lead Dude from a romantic comedy, lost on the wrong set. He’s with a girlfriend at the theater, but we sense no chemistry. Then he’s bolting down the aisle and onto the stage to help Arthur, despite not being a doctor. It’s dark comedy, but comedy nonetheless, and Jeevan is that attractive-but-not-overwhelmingly-so bumbling nice guy with a strong streak of sarcasm, just waiting to be discovered by Ms. Right.
As the unlikely hero, he saves Kirsten, at first kind of by accident, later by intentional choice. By the time he lies in the grocery store parking lot, telling Kirsten her parents texted to say it was okay for her to go with him for now, Jeevan has discovered how to be resolute, maturing before our very eyes.
A flashback in a much later episode shows him bicker in exasperation with his brother Frank upon arrival at his apartment, and we’re again with the Jeevan of the opening scene, a guy who gets annoyed and exasperated, but in a fussy, amusing, charming way.
Humans change, but usually in fitful and often regressive baby steps. Ain’t it the truth, though.
Savvy choice, starting us off with Jeevan and young Kirsten —two endearing characters with no baggage between them, thrown together by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (yes, I will try to keep the Shakespeare references to a minimum).
But not just yet, because like some of Shakespeare’s least effective scenes, Station Eleven falls a bit flat when it goes full monologue, slicing its characters off from interpersonal action. And even then, much of the future/post-pandemic character interactions seem driven firstly by plot necessity. I understand young Tyler (a solid Julian Obradors) was an unhappy tween with a self-obsessed mom and absentee dad, but I remain unconvinced he’d hold onto those bitter identifiers through a global apocalypse and two decades of solo wanderings. There’s that moment we all come to at some point where we acknowledge and accept our parents’ fallibility, bracing as it may be to our ego’s need for an inflated sense of having been personally, particularly failed by our upbringing. Surely adult Tyler (a convincingly creepy Daniel Zovatto), with his obvious intellect and capacity to connect with Kirsten on an *almost* soul level suggests that, as a man in his early 30s, he should have by now a more nuanced relationship to his past.
Plus, as the Pied Piper has long taught, no one can trust a guy who gathers bands of parent-free children unto himself. Tyler, aka The Prophet, is ominous and menacing when we meet him, and his last-minute transformation/redemption arc aren’t really deserved, welcome as they feel in the moment.
It’s like the show wanted to explore how a sociopath goes about his business in a post-apocalyptic midwest, but understandably lost the nerve for such sinister galumphings given our current events context. Still, the Tyler trajectory felt like a bait-and-switch, the final lost-boy-found finale an unearned copout.
With the calendar nearing March 2022, the glum mark of Year Three for this pandemic, I would be remiss to hold the optimistic redemption line too much against Station Eleven. As adult Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) tells Elizabeth (Caitlin Fitzgerald) in the final episode, “No one gets anybody back”, except both Elizabeth and Kirsten will soon thereafter reunite with a lost loved one, proving that hope reigns eternal, pandemics be damned. That’s not a message I want to mess with.
But I find myself wishing the story stuck with Jeevan and Kirsten and Frank, served up a much bigger helping of Arthur and Miranda, and skipped all the rest.
Like many a naive and wistful soul, I majored in English, so you can imagine how greatly it pains me to say this, but I could have done without the Shakespeare. The bard is an entity unto himself, unmatched through these many centuries in his level of poetic and playwrighter-ly genius. As someone who, like many a young and idealistic English major, went on to teach secondary English, I never understood the vocal band of educators annually insisting we don’t need Shakespeare anymore. And replace him with what? I’d wonder. No one besides the writers of the Bible has had a bigger author impact on our slice of the world, and you don’t ditch an unparalleled collection of texts just because they’re *kind of* difficult for hormonally driven teenagers.
But Station Eleven never showcases a full scene, let alone a full play. We get a few minutes, here and there, of different Hamlet crises. We get Arthur squeaking out a fraction of a line from King Lear before dying on stage. The show never reveals the total story of its titular graphic novel, but someone unfamiliar with both the bard’s and Miranda’s literary output will come away with a much clearer grasp of the latter.
Shakespeare deserves and demands more careful attention, is what I’m saying. He doesn’t work in this role as magic hat out of which handy allusions and correlations can occasionally be pulled.
Am I missing the point of the show? Probably. A recurring theme is how and why art stays with us and sustains us, why it matters just as much in the long run as food and water. I get it, and I concur. And there are moments, particularly with adult Kirsten, where you appreciate the raw power of Theater. Here Shakespeare’s singular literary gifts merge with his achingly sympathetic view of human beings, his insistence on their worth and dignity — even villains—that puts poetry and depth in each mouth, like a priest bestowing the cup and the wafer. It hits on a spiritual plane, and Station Eleven deserves extra credit for creating TV moments like that—I’m thinking particularly of the final performance at the Museum of Civilization (formerly known as the Severn City Airport).
It’s not so much the will he/won’t he kill his mom and pseudo-step-dad question around Tyler’s performance that moves in that scene. It’s watching Kirsten watch the play. She is enraptured, she is all in. You can see the young Kirsten alive still in those eyes and tilting posture, leaning for the stage, the play —now and always—the thing.
But it is Jeevan who becomes the most beloved character on the show—a guy so not enraptured by Shakespeare that he alone notices when the man onstage ceases to act and starts to die during the opening pre-pandemic King Lear performance. Jeevan, who does not want to put on Kirsten’s Station Eleven play, but does so anyway, out of deference to her and Frank. Jeevan, who is so annoyed by Kirsten’s devotion to Station Eleven that he chucks her earmarked copy into the woods one fateful winter day, only to venture out (at night? WHY, JEEVAN, WHY?) in a torment of guilt to recover it. Jeevan, who finally deigns to page through said copy while sheltering under a space blanket after being wolf-jumped and losing God knows how much blood, screaming the single greatest line of the entire series in response to what he finds: “SO… Pretentious!”
Jeevan will be rescued by a woman on a snowmobile, taken to a maternity ward that’s been set up in a kind of low-rent Bed, Bath, & Beyond, and once again play doctor, only this time for real, to a surprisingly substantial number of pregnant women who all, mystically (yeeks, I guess there is more than one reality-defying element in this show), give birth on the winter solstice. He does this largely against his will, but Jeevan doesn’t seem to possess the ability to say no when someone needs his help. He also has a real penchant for imagining himself a doctor, but hey —no one’s perfect.
Jeevan pointedly rejects the dance floor during a party at said maternity ward, mechanically downing his glass of champagne and wheeling himself away. When Frank starts an impromptu rap session in the apartment, Jeevan is mildly irritated, then mildly amused, and at last cajoled by both Frank and a rapt young Kirsten, with the latter physically tugging him out of his seat to join them in beat-based reverie. Jeevan eventually complies, again acting against his will, out of love for Kirsten and Frank.
Jeevan’s the one we see outside doing the bloody work (emphasis on work) of skinning, gutting, and chopping a deer to feed Kirsten and himself. He’s the only one left to defend Kirsten in Frank’s apartment, killing an intruder after the stranger murders Frank. Are you wondering where their post-apartment gear and imperishables come from? Jeevan’s out in the suburbs scavenging through empty houses, navigating hand-to-hand combat with another survivor on a similar mission, while Kirsten’s busy reading Station Eleven and reneging on her lookout duties.
He’s the sole main character who insists on living fully and only in the immediate, physical world. People around him survive their many and ongoing corporeal threats because Jeevan is not living in a fantasy land, he is here for reality. And even strapped to that burden of rank utility, he is the main source of humor and light in a show full of self-serious thespians, writers, and composers. That David Cross elicits far fewer laughs than Patel demonstrates just how indispensable Jeevan is to making Station Eleven a success.
So: Jeevan, your pragmatism and aversion to flights of fancy make you the greatest asset in a show overly wrought with drama. I salute you, and may your kind live long and prosper, in the world of Station Eleven, as well as our own.
