This pattern comprises panic, dissolution of socioeconomic structures, and despair, succeeded by a makeshift return to normality once the disease has run its course. Station Eleven. Indeed, Mandel glosses over the blood-drenched years just after the collapse, the first unspeakable years which were, tellingly, spent on the road, travelling (Mandel, 2014: 48, 37). Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans. There are any number of access points for a comparison of these two shows. doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.206, Download XML Audience member Jeevan (Himesh Patel) tries to take her home, but they are overtaken by the collapse of civilisation and begin their new life navigating the disaster together. Even in 2014, I was sceptical that there would be such an appetite. Just like the parallels between the stories, the conclusion emphasises the individuals agency to shape the future and the openness of actual time, as opposed to the closure of time in traditional plots. The red bandanas turn up and disappear in one fell swoop to provide a cliffhanger between episodes; ditto the strained mystery of the the Prophet. Station Elevens plot itself consists of fragments from before and after the apocalypse, which challenges the teleological linearity of apocalyptic temporality. Among the 1% left Himesh Patel and Matilda Lawler in Station Eleven. Drawn from Emily St. John Mandels novel, the seriess speculative future edges up, in its most ill-conceived moments, to a kind of Walking Dead-meets-Terrence Malick self-indulgence, and it rarely convinced me, or held me by the throat, the way its speculative present did; I even weighed whether to skip the episodes set along the Wheel, the Great Lakes circle the Symphony traced. The website's critics consensus reads, " Station Eleven rewards patient viewers with an insightful and thematically rich assertion thateven in the post-apocalypsethe show must go on." Altre Modernit, 9: 6680. As Jeevan describes it, this night, was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life (Mandel, 2014: 20; emphasis in original). Just like McCarthys father and son, Jeevan and [A]lmost everyone was moving south in a silent landscape. Both texts expose how apocalyptic discourse is fabricated to push ideological agendas. ), entropy reigns. You know, I think I'd want to save a globe. Perhaps it's wishful thinking on my part, but I did like the idea that a Shakespearean company might be able to make it. | ISSN: 2056-6700 | Albeit more attentive to the materiality of labour, his tracing of the production process of this object conceals, and indeed, aestheticises, workers exploitation and alienation, as well as the inequalities of the global free market: Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms of snow, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2017.1369386. Toronto: Anansi. Twenty years after the pandemic, when Station Elevens post-apocalyptic narrative strand is mostly set, society has stabilised into an archipelago of small towns, and although almost everything, almost everyone [is lost,] there is still such beauty (Mandel, 2014: 48, 57). Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. The final minutes of the Station Eleven finale reunite Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) and Jeevan (Himesh Patel) after 19 years apart. Now that that's all mapped and charted out and there are no more frontiers that's left us with a certain restlessness, that I suppose gets channeled into our interest in this futuristic, speculative fiction. Station Eleven. Miranda, Arthurs ex-wife, was unprepared for [the fleets] beauty. Miranda curtly rebukes Elizabeths apocalyptic belief that everything happens because it was supposed to happen by saying Id prefer not to think that Im following a script (Mandel, 2014: 106). Thirdly, while in the first half of Cloud Atlas the chronological order of the narratives encourages readers to look for clues foreshadowing an ending which will integrate, and make sense of, the various strands, there are gaps in the history traced by the novel and the shifts from one era to the other remain unexplained. Author Emily St. John Mandel was not involved in the adaptation of her hit novel. (Not to worry, I slogged through.). Or more nuancedly, as Clark, a good friend of Arthurs, comments to Tyler: its not a question of having been bad or the people [who died] were just in the wrong place at the wrong time (Mandel, 2014: 260; ellipsis in original). That we secretly desire a situation in which this entire apparatus is blown up and we all start over again on perfect equal footing. Id long since grown skeptical of most topical art, often so calculated in its conclusions, but as Omicron surged and 2022 plans were suddenly canceled, Station Eleven began to feel like the first great screen fiction about the pandemic. She had ample experience to draw from. ), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents, and Repercussions, pp. However, Station Elevens post-apocalyptic scenario is very different from McCarthys and, signifying the shift away from The Road, not only does Jeevan keep out of the road, but Kirsten cannot, and does not want to, remember anything about the traumatic year she spent on the road immediately following the catastrophe (Mandel, 2014: 195, 295). Why in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? On the recent popularity of post-apocalyptic fictionA suggestion that I hear quite often is that our interest in post-apocalyptic fiction is a natural expression of the anxiety we feel. They discuss both shows and recap the events of Station Eleven, then halfway into the podcast, set the two shows against each other in a head-to-head battle. Having established its And though I admire HBO Max for releasing a show about a fictional deadly pandemic in the middle of an actual pandemic (after the shows production was shut down for months by same), I was not interested in any kind of survival guide. Obviously, it is a narrative cheat to just slide on by all the work and infighting that went into creating those communities, but that isnt what Station Eleven is about. On what she'd want to save in an apocalypse. Read full review Heffernan, T 2008 Post-Apocalyptic Culture. The first few episodes look beautiful but move at a stately pace. Available at: https://www.booklistonline.com/Station-Eleven-Emily-St-John-Mandel/pid=6862248 [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Derrida, J 1992 Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy. So I would want a globe, just to remember that there was a world out there. Instead of examining all the light/dark political dynamics of rebuilding a post-catastrophe society, it concedes that capturing mass trauma is impossible and potentially unhelpful. As children learn in, The critical appropriation of apocalyptic tropes to foreground their complicity with oppressive power dynamics is typical of contemporary post-apocalyptic novels. Atwood, M 2004 Writing Oryx and Crake. The author has no competing interests to declare. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a grey-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers (Mandel, 2014: 255). the Prophet, reconciles with his mother (Caitlin FitzGerald); graphic novelist Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler) meets her fate; Sarah (Lori Petty) shuffles off this mortal coil; and, most importantly, Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis as a adult, Matilda Lawler as a child) reunites with Jeevan (Himesh Patel), capping off one of the most finely wrought love stories in recent TV history. Still, my sense that the series is too Pollyanna-ish for its own good that its conclusions about the uses of art in the world are ultimately unearned stems from the fact that these sections are often dramatically inert to begin with. Station Eleven and The Last of Us share one more very specific similarity: juxtaposing destruction with art. We begin, really, to care, to wonder, to ask more questions. As one of the survivors puts it, Elizabeths [the prophets mother] a fucking lunatic (Mandel, 2014: 253). Jeevan avoided it, stayed mostly in the woods. And, as a sniper, he believes he is clearing the way for gods new utopian order, for [T]he people [he] shot bothered God. Therefore, the plot of pestilence is not so much a fiction of an end as a fiction of an end indefinitely postponed. Mackenzie Davis, left, with Caitlin FitzGerald in Station Eleven., Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Meet the cinematographer whose controlled naturalism is changing the face of TV, Station Eleven made major changes from the book. ), Station Eleven celebrates the beauty of the pre-apocalyptic world and mourns its loss. Or at least part of it is. But series creator Patrick Somerville had her blessing to change it. Thus, the critical temporalities of contemporary post-apocalyptic fictions challenge the hegemonic temporality of modernity: time as a neutral, homogeneous and teleological continuum. In particular, progress, the modern metanarrative par excellence, represents the main example of the secularization of apocalypse and of its utopian telos (Keller, 1996: 6). Open Library of Humanities, 4(2): 8, 123. Mackenzie Davis, left, leads the sprawling cast of HBO Maxs (post-)apocalyptic series Station Eleven.. There is no emotion and it is not greatly Frankly I was grateful to skip all the store-looting and scavenging we are inevitably treated to in these kinds of tales. (Sorry, it all always comes back to Lord of the Rings.) Because this is an epic quest and those kinds of stories make certain demands. In Player One, Bertis justifies his murders through a similar self-righteous moral dualism and teleology. Get Screen Gab for everything about the TV shows and streaming movies everyones talking about. This structure articulates a critical temporality that undermines the apocalyptic sense of an ending and, more specifically, foreshadowing, which, with its view of the present as the harbinger of an already determined future, is at the core of the temporality of traditional plots and apocalyptic history alike (Bernstein, 1994: 12). Though their plague is much more devastating than ours (it has a 99% fatality rate), it is still quite something to see people coughing in enclosed spaces while those nearby bristle, and others wonder about masks or gather supplies so they can hunker in apartments until the virus has burned itself out. These fictions also target the nexus between narrativity and apocalyptic logic captured by Kermode through the notion of the sense of an ending. In: Patrides, C A and Wittreich, J (Eds. On the Traveling Symphony's motto, "survival is insufficient"It is not from Shakespeare. DOI: http://doi.org/10.13130/2035-7680/2987, De Cristofaro, D 2018 Time, no arrow, no boomerang, but a concertina: Cloud Atlas and the Anti-Apocalyptic Critical Temporalities of the Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel. Station Elevens structure similarly articulates a critical temporality that complicates the sense of an ending. Station Eleven replicates what Gomel identifies as the plague pattern, where there is no place for millenarian rebirth. So that line became almost the thesis statement of the entire novel. This critique of teleology is reflected in Station Eleven s narrative structure. Time, Paul Ricoeur contends, becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative ( 1984: 3 ). "don't have any 7-eleven stores where I live so when I seen that there 7-eleven's my one" Convenience Store in This biblical passage contains a prophecy about the city of Babylon, symbol of the sinful Roman empire, being destroyed by plagues for mighty is the Lord God who judges her (Mandel, 2014: 259) an obvious parallel with the Georgia Flu and with the prophets argument that the pandemic targeted those who were found lacking by god. The theory that I found the most interesting was suggested to me by a bookseller in England last year: she thought perhaps our interest in these futuristic narratives had to do with the fact that there are no more frontiers. The critical temporalities of the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel not only expose the apocalyptic conception of history as a narrative construct enmeshed within power structures through their critical appropriation of religious apocalyptic tropes and the subversion of utopian teleology, but, through their structures, these fictions challenge what is an essentially apocalyptic model of narrative dominated by the end and invite us to conceive of history beyond the determinism of the sense of an ending. In her study of contemporary Canadian apocalyptic narratives, Marlene Goldman writes that: Canadian authors introduce particular twists to the familiar myth of the end by challenging rather than embracing apocalypses key features, specifically, the purgation of the non-elect and the violent destruction of the earthly world in preparation for the creation of a divine one (2005: 6). A scene depicts Tyler as a child reading Revelation 18 to the victims of the Flu sealed forever in a quarantined plane (Mandel, 2014: 259). They were shown maps and globes, the lines of the borders that the Internet had transcended (Mandel, 2014: 262). These are elevated by the catastrophe to the status of artworks, beautiful objects which move Clark because of the human enterprise each object had required (Mandel, 2014: 255). 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