#Jeevan and Kirsten

[patrickerville]

[rememberdamage]

[bluefiredesire]

I will never get over how Station 11 subverted the parent/child found family trope. They acknowledged resentment in a way I've never seen before. Jeevan literally told that kid to her face "I was only supposed to bring you home" implying that he didn't ask for this level of responsibility when her parents were nowhere to be found. Like he obviously loves her, but that scene was wild to me and so heartbreaking. I absolutely loved it.

[gael-garcia]

been reading Station Eleven and it is incredible how much the show improves upon it

[yorstudenttv]

Jeevan was really assigned Dad at pandemic and then a year later assigned doctor at kidnapping. What a man.

[atlascas]

this is not a joke i am putting a gun to everyone's head someone more insightful than me better watch station eleven right now because my brain is going to explode.

[dykedivorce]

by the end of the season i think someone should have made a devastating parallel post about the pandemic in tlou and the one in station eleven with quotes about like. the human spirit's frailty & indestructibility or about finding love in the darkest times or any other big statement about Humanity

[watney]

if u like tlou go read/watch station eleven PLEASE im serious u wont regret it

[allmyoldhaunts]

thinking about how kirsten and tyler were probably the only two people alive in year twenty who had read the station eleven book

and also how they performed a scene from it in front of two of the only people who could recognize the words and who wrote them

[clonerightsagenda]

Station 11 wrapup!

You all know I'm a stickler when it comes to adaptations. I just reread a whole bunch of books so I could nitpick their adaptations better. But Station 11 said fuck that. This is an adaptation. We're going to adapt.

Station 11 the book is about the power of art. Survival is insufficient! Art brings back joy in the apocalypse. The Prophet is there, yes, mostly as a generic post-apocalyptic predatory cult to move the plot along, and he's defeated after a moment of artistic connection. But the TV show says, hold up. Yes art can save us. It can allow us to speak to each other when we can't find the words. But it's not enough on its own. You can't keep telling the same story for 400 years and always have it land. You have to leave the wheel. You have to adapt. You have to ask yourself, what if it ends differently this time? If you don't - if you resist all change, if you can't handle going off course - you're going to wither and die. Frank unable to leave his house. The father dead on the sofa. Kirsten letting poison spread through her veins. Hamlet, who for four hundred years has been dead from the beginning. The finale music doesn't play at the end of the final episode of Station 11. It plays during the play, because that's the turning point, when this show's Hamlet holds a knife to Claudius's throat and doesn't stick it in. The play finally gets another ending.

It's not subtle about any of this. The metaphors, the narrative parallels, the masterfully done scene cuts, and the select quotes about Station 11 are all very blatant, but it clicks together well enough that it works and I don't care. When we get to the final episode and Miranda drops a tragic backstory that happens to connect to the problem at hand, I accept it because I'm not bought into this story as realism, I'm bought into it as a piece of well-constructed, very deliberate art.

Your art is your message. It's your last phone call. And maybe sometimes that last call saves an airport full of people. Maybe it condemns a plane full of passengers to die. Usually you don't know. Everyone's going to take it a different way. It might save someone. It might damn them. It might not do anything. Miranda starts Station 11 as her life collapses, burns it all down, and starts again, and then the world ends and two very different people find it and adapt it in two very different, disastrous ways. But you have to make it anyway. You have to talk to people even when they're not there. I don't want to live the wrong life and then die.

I love what the show did with Jeevan, turning a relatively minor character into an awkward millennial fumbling his way through the end of the world but genuinely wanting to do good. I loved the extra content we got from Miranda and the ways she touched people's lives even beyond her graphic novel. Clark's dark turn was unexpected but worked for the story. I'm still not sold on why everyone loved Arthur Leander, but I am constitutionally immune to movie stars. I liked that the show took the brief connection between Kirsten and the Prophet and turned it into two very lost people who remember damage and can't escape the stories they're telling themselves until someone else crashes into them and tells it a different way. Forget the generic Christofascist child bride cult. We've heard that before. Let's hear something else.

My one complaint is the child army thing got defused a bit mysteriously, but mostly it was tidy in the way a graphic novel is tidy. Every image is deliberate, every line counts. This is one of the rare instances where I think I actually like the adaptation better than the book, although it's very clear that they're doing different things. I probably should have saved this for last because now all the other TV shows are going to suffer for not being Station 11, but them's the breaks sometimes.

Highly recommend! Only if you can handle pandemic trauma though.

[patrickerville]

Over the weeks as S11 came out we got all this native stuff for social, which I’ll try to put here when I find it buried on my phone.

[soullistrations]

wept for like two straight hours as i finished station eleven today because. the airport. the wheel. jeevan on the subway. the race at the dock and the hotel on another continent. the timeloop in the book. none of them got to go home, they were all stuck in this liminal space when the apocalypse hit them--jeevan even walked kirsten home but she couldn't get into her house anymore because she didn't have a key! this recurring question, of if the past matters, if it should be destroyed or enshrined, if we can go home again after a world-shifting tragedy. (like doctor eleven--they always come back, but can they ever go home?)

and THEN. and then kirsten and jeevan's final exchange--"it was so cold. she forgot her key." "you walked her home." i am weeping i tell you. she's come unstuck from that place of transit. she's home.

[pedritoisapunk]

there’s this Lizzy McAlpine song that I kept replaying over and over after I finished watching Station Eleven (which is also SO GOOD if you like the whole post-apocalyptic survival thing) because it reminded me of the bond between Kirsten and Jeevan.

But the song applies even MORE to Ellie and Joel and I just need a gifted graphic maker to make a set of gifs of episode 5’s scene with Ellie on the ground and Joel looking after her from above, with the lyrics to Lizzy McAlpine’s “I Don’t Know You At All”

Feels like we’ve been through war together Feels like you've been right here forever But I don't even know you at all

This whole scene feels like war to me. Their bond is already so deep and instinctual that they can communicate with just looks from idk how many feet away. It’s how Joel knows Ellie’s next move is the car window. It’s how Ellie looks at him to tell him she’s going after Henry and Sam. It’s how Joel nods at her, letting her know he’s got her back.

I’m gonna be sick.

[laiqualaurelote]

Some people have said they'd like to hear about the meta behind all the men and women merely players and I was like "oh god are you sure" because there's a lot of it, but here goes:

The Shakespeare

Each chapter of this fic takes its framework from a different Shakespeare play, which is signalled by the title of the chapter and the opening epigraph. In some chapters (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry V) the influence is marginal; in others (Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing) it heavily informs the plot, motifs and atmosphere of the chapter. My model for this has been the Brexit seasonal quartet by Ali Smith, the four novels of which are each subtly patterned after a Shakespeare play (Autumn - The Tempest; Winter - Cymbeline; Spring - Pericles; Summer - The Winter's Tale). The way I went about it was to use the Shakespeare play as a scaffolding and let the story in that chapter grow up and around it like a climbing vine.

While each chapter has its own play, there are three plays that underpin the structure of the entire fic: As You Like It, Hamlet and The Tempest. They're all highly meta-theatrical and contain bad fathers (they are also my three favourite Shakespeare plays). As You Like It lays the ground in the way that Ted Lasso S1 did - it's a charming, relentlessly optimistic look at a form of exile and creates an idyllic bubble where any sense of wrongness is consistently subverted. Hamlet is the dark forest of S2, where nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so and everyone does too much bad thinking. The Tempest is S3, or what I had hoped S3 would be - a sea-change, in which the characters undergo a process of transmutation and have certain lost things restored to them or find things anew. They are respectively (to borrow the language of the magic trick) the pledge, the turn and the prestige of this fic.

If there is anything fantastic about this AU it is that everyone somehow seems to know Shakespeare by heart; that said, I think most people actually know more Shakespeare than they realise.

Station Eleven and Station Eleven

This AU draws very heavily on both Station Eleven the novel by Emily St John Mandel and Station Eleven the HBO TV adaptation. In terms of writing style and formal experimentation, I sought to be as Mandellian as possible, most notably in the CRIMM/LASSO interview sequence in Chapter 2, the "problem with the Richmond Players" run-on paragraph in Chapter 4 and the deserted theatres of London section in Chapter 8. Spoilers for Station Eleven ahead!

What I find most interesting about Station Eleven the TV show is that it is very consciously not a straightforward adaptation of the book; in fact, "adaptation" is one of the themes of the show, both in the sense that survival in the post-pandemic world requires adaptation, and in that it questions how adaptation occurs when a story is retold, restaged, reproduced or otherwise passed on. This fic is an adaptation of an adaptation of a novel which in its own way adapts old plays for a brave new world.

Another theme of the show is "connection/coincidence", and one such connection/coincidence is at the heart of the show's adaptation: the Kirsten & Jeevan storyline. In the book Kirsten and Jeevan pass each other like ships in the night. The show connects them, however, and their relationship and eventual separation forms the emotional core of the story - if they hadn't met by chance, if Jeevan had not taken Kirsten home with him, she would almost certainly have died that night. Trent and Miranda's relationship in the fic is based on Jeevan and Kirsten's - what could have been if they'd been able to stay together. ("You walked her home.")

Coincidental connections power Station Eleven. Miranda's graphic novel connects Kirsten and Tyler years before they meet, and each of them adapts it in their own way into a belief system, with drastic impacts on their lives and those around them. Miranda herself is a connector extraordinaire - she works in shipping and so her job is figuring out how to get a thing from point A to point B. She is on her way to safety when Clark's call about Arthur's death derails her; because of this, however, she makes the connection with the pilot of the Gitchegumee and convinces him not to let the infected passengers off the plane. Miranda would have lived if not for this coincidence, but she dies; everyone in the airport, including Clark, Elizabeth and Tyler, would have died, but they are saved because of Miranda.

It is no coincidence that Shakespeare relies heavily on coincidences in most of his plays. Funny thing, coincidences. Sometimes they just happen.

What I knew from the start

one of the very first scenes I wrote was the last scene where Miranda meets Henry on the beach. I knew from the beginning that this would be the endpoint, it was just a question of getting there

Rebecca had murdered Rupert to save Higgins and Bex

Nate was always going to be Hamlet

Nate's family, Roy's sister and Trent's father were dead. Jamie's mother's death came later

Rebecca would be reunited with Sassy and Nora at the Museum of Civilisation (where and what the Museum was was a different question which I only solved later)

What came later

my initial plan for this fic had petered out after the Much Ado About Nothing chapter - I did not know how we were going to get from there to the Museum of Civilisation, or what the Museum of Civilisation was (in earlier drafts it was an airport, a train station and even at one point an actual museum). Ted Lasso S3, for its many flaws, resolved this for me by, among other things, giving me a whole Dutch pilot and also Jade

this fic was not meant to be Roy/Keeley/Jamie, only Roy/Keeley. By S3 however the OT3 vibes were too compelling to be ignored; it also solved the problem of what to do with Jamie, whom I had left wandering the wilderness for way too many chapters

Roy's Sutton Hoo backstory, which came about entirely because one day I was at the British Museum looking at Anglo-Saxon stuff and thought "lol Sutton Hoo wouldn't it be great if somebody made a terrible movie franchise with that name". This has since become an unexpectedly popular headcanon

The Richmond Players

Plays the Richmond Players have actually performed include:

Hamlet (full cast list here)

As You Like It (starring Keeley as Rosalind, Jamie/Sam as Orlando. Bex as Celia, Zoreaux as Oliver, Roy as Jaques, Isaac as Charles the Wrestler)

Romeo & Juliet (starring Jamie as Romeo, Keeley as Juliet, Colin as Mercutio, Sam as Benvolio, Isaac as Tybalt, Sharon as the Nurse, Beard as the Friar)

Macbeth (starring Roy as Macbeth, Rebecca as Lady Macbeth, Beard as Duncan, O'Brien as Banquo, Isaac as Macduff, Bex as Lady Macduff, Diane as Baby Macduff)

Henry IV Part I (starring Jamie as Prince Hal, Roy as Hotspur, Keeley as Lady Percy, Beard as Falstaff, Sharon as Henry IV)

Coriolanus (starring Roy as Coriolanus and Isaac as Aufidius. I don't actually know who would have played Volumnia here - probably Rebecca or Sharon, but it'd have been weird as they're close in age to Roy)

Othello (starring Sharon as Othello, Dani as Desdemona, Rebecca as Iago, Bex as Cassio, Colin as Emilia and Richard as Bianca)

A Midsummer Night's Dream (starring Rebecca as Hippolyta/Titania, Roy as Oberon, Dani as Puck, Isaac as Bottom, Keeley as Hermia, Bex as Helena, Sam as Lysander, Bumbercatch as Demetrius)

The Tempest (starring Ted as Prospero, Miranda as Ariel, Jelka as Miranda, Colin as Caliban, Roy as Sebastian, Jan as Antonio, Beard as Alonso, Higgins as Gonzalo, Dani as Trinculo, Isaac as Stephano)

Pre-pandemic roles: Rebecca has played Katharine in The Taming Of The Shrew, Viola in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You Like It; Sassy has played Celia in As You Like It; Roy has played Hamlet; Bex has played Cordelia in King Lear; Colin has played Viola in Twelfth Night.

Dates

This fic begins on April 23, 2016 (Shakespeare's 400th birthday) and ends on April 24, 2028. Most of the fic takes place in 2021: Trent meets Ted again on April 23 and they reach Arden-by-the-sea somewhere in July, i.e. right about now! (Twelve years is the length of time that Prospero and Miranda spend in exile on the island in The Tempest.)

Geography

Everyone starts from London (Richmond, specifically, in Ted and Rebecca's case) but Trent meets Ted again at Mae's settlement around Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare's birthplace) and they progress north through Warwick (Jamie has diverted to Manchester by this point) and then towards the coast. Arden-by-the-sea is near Liverpool.

Music

The playlist for this fic is one of my favourites I've ever made - I'm especially proud of the In The House, In A Heartbeat/We'll Meet Again/Hopeless Wanderer transition.

Bob Dylan features a lot - I would be listening to him a great deal in the apocalypse, I reckon - both original tracks and covers, because Adaptation. Most notable of these is the Girl From The North Country version of Like A Rolling Stone, which I had envisioned Rebecca singing in the karaoke scene from quite early on, and which also contains a snippet of To Make You Feel My Love, which appears in Keeley's flashback later on.

Some songs come from other apocalypse media - Don't Think Twice, It's Alright is from Station Eleven and In The House, In A Heartbeat is from 28 Days Later.

At the time I put Hopeless Wanderer on the list, I actually had no idea that Jason Sudeikis had appeared in Mumford & Sons' music video, and that it was totally bonkers.

At least 10 of the songs were subsequently added during S3, including Spiegel im Spiegel, Everybody Knows (the Elizabeth and the Catapults cover), Bandits by Midlake, Strangers (the Feist cover - where the original by The Kinks goes "I see many people coming after me", Feist sings "I see many people looking out for me", which I think is more reflective of this AU) and of course Islands In The Stream, probably the most jarring song choice on the list, but we could not do without the Queen of Country and the Gambling Man.

If you've read all the way to the end of this ramble, I am amazed and thankful! please feel free to drop into my ask box with more questions about this fic, I will be very happy to answer them.

[rememberdamage]

“It was at this point that I reached Episode 7, where Kirsten puts on a play of Lannigan's death. Aside from her casting choices placing the three of them squarely in the center of Station Eleven the graphic novel, the very idea of a play-within-a-play is a celebrated aspect of Hamlet. Hamlet puts on the play to try to get Claudius to confess by making him emotional over the pretend death of an actor. This clearly draws the connection between Kirsten and Hamlet.

One has to wonder, what would have happened if the Red Bandana hadn't walked in? Jeevan was unable to say goodbye to Frank when his character died. Did Kirsten devise this so that Jeevan would try harder to convince Frank to leave with them? This is fascinating to me primarily because of those parallels between Hamlet and Kirsten, but also because of what we can imagine of Hamlet and Tyler in their own stories. Hamlet becoming an actor himself seems like a love letter to the core concept of Station Eleven– art is life. So what if Hamlet had turned to the arts to cope with his father’s death instead of murderous scheming? And what if Tyler had?

If you think about it, Tyler’s elaborate reconstruction of Station Eleven to tell to the Undersea kids, and his constant lying about his identity, is a play in its own right. But who is he trying to make feel guilty? Tyler’s role as the Prophet may very well be his way of punishing himself for the pain he has caused others, ensnaring children purely because their worship of him reminds him how twisted he’s become. Simultaneously ruining his life while trying to ruin the lives of the people who raised him seems pretty on-brand for the prince of Denmark.

So, these characters show us two ways Hamlet’s involvement with the arts could have gone. Either it would have served as an extension of his life, allowing him to infuse art into his reality and use it to manipulate the feelings of others, or it would have been a gateway into his madness, showing him that he can conjure up more depravity through art than he ever could murder. But when you think about it, these two outcomes are interchangeable, depending on how much you trust the actor playing them out. Here’s another theme of Station Eleven: madness vs. genius. When Tyler plans to stab Clark during the play, is that really more crazy than Kirsten using a scene with Alex to try and stop her from leaving? Who is insane, and who is an artist?

Nestled comfortably in the middle of this paradox, we find Kirsten and Tyler, the twin Hamlets.”

From my analysis of Station Eleven as a Hamlet adaptation.