[TV]
STATION ELEVEN
Mackenzie Davis as Kirsten — her Lear was the toast of Croydon.
★★★★
SHOWRUNNER Patrick Somerville
OUT NOW (STARZPLAY)
EPISODES WATCHED 10 OF 10
CAST Mackenzie Davis, Himesh Patel, Matilda Lawler, David Wilmot, Gael García Bernal
PLOT Twenty years after a pandemic causes the collapse of civilisation, Kirsten (Davis) and a band of performers travel the American Great Lakes, staging Shakespeare plays for other survivors. When their peaceful existence is threatened by a cult leader known as The Prophet (Zovatto), Kirsten must confront her past to save the people she loves.
STATION ELEVEN CUTS so close to the bone, you can practically feel the scraping of meat cleaver against femur. It wasn’t meant to be this way, of course: based on a 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel, this ambitious, ten-part pandemic drama from showrunner Patrick Somerville (Maniac, The Leftovers) was green-lit long before chilling phrases like “infection rates”, “quarantine” and “celebrity cover of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’” became part of our collective vocabulary. The outbreak depicted in the show is several notches worse than what we’ve been wrestling with in real-life, with 99.9 per cent of the global population wiped out in Station Eleven, but that won’t stop many reading this from wondering: who wants to watch a show about a pandemic-ravaged world, when we’ve all been living inside one for two exhausting years?