1/11/2024 0 Comments Station 11 recap episode 7If my choices were a smelly caravan of theater kids and nerds with pitch and putt, I’d stay in Pingtree, too.ĭespite the recent tragedy, Gil and Sarah still manage to push each other’s buttons in the mode of exes with unfinished business. People sleep and eat indoors, they educate their children and dine on MREs. Deborah by the Water, life at Pingtree is civilized. And maybe they will! Compared to what we saw at St. (Katrina, of course, is super-alive and not at all dead, as Kirsten told Sarah to convince her to leave the Wheel in the first place.) The Pingtree U faculty are rattled and paranoid, but rather than look for the missing children, they’ve surrounded the clubhouse with mines hoping they’ll come back on their own (but somehow also know to avoid the new mines?). The Prophet’s already hobbled through town on his crutches, kidnapping Katrina’s grandkids on his way out. Regardless, Kirsten tracking down her copy of Station Eleven is a good thing because the people in Pingtree are languishing. For the Prophet, it’s the novel’s message that holds him: “There is no Before.” Maybe she needed to believe that when she was young and cold and lonely and the book was the only talisman she had to connect her to her own Before. Why Kirsten is so convinced she owns the only copy is beyond me. David is a prophet, his followers are a cult, and their bible is the sacred text that arguably ended Miranda’s marriage - the same one that Kirsten hid in Pingtree before they changed the Wheel. The kids want to use time travel to go back to Earth in the future, but the captain says no, and Eleven is agnostic. Some accident onboard killed the adults, and now there’s just the captain and the kids - the first generation to be free from trauma. Eleven gets stuck on a crewless, broken space station, captained by a guy who looks like a haggard, defeated Arthur. This week, via young Kirsten’s voice-over, we get a little bit of a Station Eleven plot synopsis: The spaceman Dr. The notion is familiar to Kirsten, an echo of a sentiment from Miranda’s book. “The first generation to be free from trauma,” Alex tells Kirsten. He goes from town to town, picking off the post-pans, wooing them away from their families by telling them they’re special. “the Prophet.” According to a hand-drawn “Wanted” poster Alex finds along the road, that’s what he’s called. Deb’s, but the conversation still revolves around the drifter, a.k.a. A week’s gone by since the players left St. In “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead,” Kirsten connives to reunite everyone at Pingtree once again. When Sarah found out, Gil retired to the golf course, and the Travelling Symphony, for one time only, edited the Wheel. Like a long-haul trucker with a wife at each end of his route, Gil cultivated a secret romance at Pingtree with a lady prof called Katrina. Back then, the Travelling Symphony would occasionally split, musicians moving in one direction and the actors visiting Pingtree, an impeccably named golf-course community populated by professors. Sarah is the troupe’s conductor, but the actors once had a director, too - Sarah’s husband, Gil (David Cross, whom I will always assume has jorts on under his costume, no matter the show). It takes the same route around Lake Michigan - they call it “The Wheel” - and it plays the same Shakespearean plays to the same outposts, over and over again, year after year, nothing changing but the symphony Sarah writes to accompany the action. Alex is the only post-pan in the Travelling Symphony, and the Travelling Symphony is a cobwebby institution. Post-pans don’t assume every stranger is a threat they don’t function out of fear. They crave the progress that pre-pans have seen with their own eyes but now deem impossible. The post-pans are the children born after the flu, the oldest of whom are around 20 - the perfect age for some good old-fashioned misbehaving. And if that’s all true, well, fair enough. The stereotype is that pre-pans are dishonest, too stuck in their own trauma to see the world as it is and too nostalgic to evolve past what it was. What they live in now is what’s left over what they do with their lives is survive. The pre-pans are the people who survived the pandemic and implicitly consider the civilization that they used to know - the “before” - the real world. The world is made up of two races now: pre-pans and post-pans. “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead” pumps the brakes just enough to fill in some of the gaps on basic plot points, like who started the Travelling Symphony, what life was like immediately following the “first hundred,” and what Miranda’s graphic novel is even about. Instead of first meticulously building out its world, for example, the series urgently dives into characters and story. In some ways, Station Eleven subverts the storytelling norms of speculative fiction.
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