Only toward the end of this medieval-looking diversion does it become clear that the adults are acting out the famous scene from The Empire Strikes Back in which Darth Vader informs Luke Skywalker just how closely the two of them are related.
The new HBO 10-episode limited series based on the novel may believe in immortal stories, but it makes so many changes to Mandel’s novel that it probably doesn’t count Station Eleven among them.
The flu that rips through the world in Station Eleven has only a 1 percent survival rate, so after it strikes, infecting and killing its victims within a few days, it burns itself out, leaving behind a handful of people who managed to isolate themselves in time.
One character, Arthur’s first wife, Miranda get stranded in a small airport where a few dozen of the uninfected must form a new community.
There’s no electricity or running water and all fuel reserves have been exhausted, so the Traveling Symphony has become a whiz at throwing hunting knives at potential attackers, but a tentative peace has settled over the land.
From what we’re told of the comic, it seems remarkably short on action, its characters spending all their time musing over the past and intoning Beckett-esque lines like “I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die.” This does not strike me as catnip for the 8-year-old imagination.
The end of the world is exquisitely photographed, whether it’s images of a theater or hotel room segueing into the same place, years later, taken over by grass, ferns, and animals, or the eerily vast, dim, low-ceilinged spaces of a chain department store that’s been converted into a post-apocalyptic birthing center.
His motives make no sense until you realize that the series, in search of more drama than Mandel’s novel can supply, is setting up a performance of Hamlet in the airport as a climactic moment.
Miranda’s comic—perhaps the purest artistic work in the story, because it is made with no audience in mind besides its own creator—may come in a genre package, but it is as sedate, mournful, and brooding as any work of literary fiction.
The series seems oddly unconcerned with portraying the enduring power of Shakespeare’s work, but then what writer wants to fill his screenplay with testimonials to another, long-dead writer with whom he can never hope to compete? Among the many changes the series makes to the novel is the introduction of a mantra, repeated by the prophet: “There’s no before.” In contrast to Clark, who assembles a “museum of civilization” in the former air traffic controllers’ tower featuring displays of defunct technology, the prophet wants to erase the memory of “before” and start anew, with followers who were born after the pandemic.
This idea has, obviously, plenty of resonance for viewers currently working out our own complicated, yearning relationship to “before.” But it’s a counterintuitive message to draw from Mandel’s novel, a book in which all of the culture of significance belongs to “before,” and in which only death on an incomprehensible scale and a hardscrabble life can persuade the rude public to appreciate serious, quality art.