The Prophet wreaks his revenge.

During the last awful two years in the real world, we have all learned that the pandemic doesn’t discriminate. What Station Eleven teaches us, however, is that this future (and thankfully fictional) pandemic will be extremely discriminating indeed. Billions on the planet have died but seemingly you will be spared if:

  • You are incapable of replying to anything that is said to you with anything less than a five second pause before speaking, preferably accompanied by a meaningful look. Several meaningful looks.
  • When you do speak, it is either to quote knowingly from Hamlet, or from a dreary incomprehensible graphic novel which for some reason has obsessed you, possibly because no one has ever shown you something decent such as the Sandman series, or a copy of The Beano.
  • You are a wholemeal / gluten-free, Kumbaya lower middle-class, hand wringing American liberal – with a perm – but no transferable skills whatsoever, aside from singing MOR FM ballads and a few rudimentary acrobatic rope tricks.

In the opening episodes of Station Eleven, I applauded the way it avoided many overly familiar post-apocalyptic tropes such as psychotic, paranoid rednecks waving assault rifles around. A month later and please please please, there must be some assault-rifle-waving-psychotic-rednecks left on the planet somewhere?! One would do. Preferably able to take out any actor who didn’t pick up their cue immediately when spoken to.

Episode 8 (Who’s There?) has to be the slowest yet. I’d be amazed if the script is more than twenty pages but it still manages to fill a seemingly endless 55 minutes of screen time. The Prophet has found his way back into what is now known as ‘The Museum of Civilisation’ and it takes an absolute age for anyone to recognise him, mainly because, for about the ten zillionth time in this interminable series, the other characters are preoccupied with whether to put on a stupid play or not. I’m starting to think Oliver Cromwell had the right idea in banning theatre. Anyway, our bad guy is very upset and does a nasty thing (after talking with Mackenzie Davies very slowly for ten minutes) – but the thing, when it comes, is nowhere near nasty enough for this reviewer.

In Episode 9 (Dr Chaudhary) we are back with Himesh Patel’s Jeevan, easily the best performance and the most interesting character in the whole series. This is the series at its strongest. In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, Patel is the one unpretentious ordinary Joe trying to survive, struggling to care for the annoying nine-year-old Kirsten, and we really care about him. He’s now the only character left who I don’t personally wish to inject with Ebola.

The episode takes Jeevan to one of the more enjoyably surreal locations, an impromptu post-apocalyptic maternity unit squirreled away in a deserted department store. On the down side, all the expectant mums are of the wholemeal Kumbaya variety, prone to speaking in Fortune Cookie platitudes, but Patel plays the whole thing with bemusement and conviction and it’s a rewarding sequence after so many hours of pretentious twaddle.

Verdict: Station Eleven has to be one of the most frustrating series of recent years. When it is bad it is laughable, but occasionally it shines, and I fear that I’m in for the duration. 6/10

Martin Jameson