Past and present intertwine in the next two episodes of the post-apocalyptic drama

Ok! Calling all survivors! If there’s anyone out there, I’ve hit the half way point of Station 11, and I’m still hanging in here! Just about.

Episode 4 was tough going, a real endurance test. We were back with adult Kirsten (Mackenzie Davies) and her unbelievably tedious troupe of post apocalyptic Shakespearean players. All I can think is that there are people out there who are much cleverer than me who have the vaguest idea what these characters are on about for 80% of this episode. The other 20% is just about interesting enough to stop me from hitting fast forward. It involves a child stealing cult, an amount of explosive and a couple of plot turns in the final three minutes that managed to wake me out of my stupor.

Episode 5 was altogether more involving as we wound back twenty years to day one of the pandemic. We rejoin Clark (David Wilmot), the best friend of Arthur Leander, the improbable King Lear who died at the top of the series opener. Clark is on his way to Chicago to sort out Arthur’s affairs – clocking that Arthur’s second wife, Elizabeth (frostily played by Caitlin FitzGerald) and Arthur’s monosyllabic son, Tyler, are also on board. The plane is diverted to some nowhere airport in the back woods of Michigan as O’Hare closes to traffic as the pandemic hits.

This chapter is an engaging slow burn as the stranded passengers, led by Clark, hunker down to survive the best way they can in the semi-deserted departure lounge, a sort of anaemic gateway to the hell that is surely to come. I do enjoy the low-key way Station 11 plays out civilisation crumbling away, with everyone trying to do their best, rather than exploding in insanity and inhumanity and other apocalyptic tropes.

Finally, we start to see the narrative tendrils of the dangerous cult that will (hopefully) drive the second half of the series, coming together across the different time frames, and illustrating the folly of locking an emotionally unstable child in a private jet for a month with an incomprehensible graphic novel.

Verdict: I really do want to know what happens, but enough with the boring actors and their oblique Shakespearean references already! 6/10

Martin Jameson