Yes, this series makes some big changes to the book and those changes may at first be a bit difficult for fans of the novel to accept, but they are necessary and incredibly well done. It's an interesting choice, but it's one that allows the series to maintain the rich character study aspect of Mandel's novel despite the adaptation's radical changes. It's at time a little disorienting but disorienting in the way that time loses meaning after trauma. The story continues to weave back and forth through time, offering breadcrumbs of the early post-pandemic experiences of our characters as well as fleshing out the lives of others. Going forward, we end up following a now-grown-up Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) as a nomadic performer in the Traveling Symphony, a group that brings Shakespeare the remnants of civilization. It also brilliantly sets us up for everything else to come, both in look and feel. The first episode, directed by the immeasurably talented Hero Murai, is heady and disorienting, but necessary and if you can get through it - one must recognize that we've all been through our own small end of the world with our own pandemic, so elements of this first episode are almost too real for comfort, despite being beautifully done - the rest of the series is a bit easier to stomach. He does, taking Kirsten with him for a haunting supply stockpiling trip before holing up for the end of the world. People are dying within hours, and she urges Jeevan to take shelter with their brother, Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan). What would be just a strange and difficult evening soon takes a life-altering turn when Jeevan is informed by his physician sister that the flu that has been making headlines is vastly more catastrophic than they realized. It prompts an audience member, Jeevan (Himesh Patel) to try to save his life, ultimately ending up the accidental guardian for a young actor named Kirsten Raymonde (the child version played by Matilda Lawler). Fading actor Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) collapses and dies of a heart attack while performing King Lear on stage. The speed with which the world ends is brought to a fine point in the first episode which opens with a death unconnected to the story's apocalypse but on which much of the rest of the story hinges. In the story, everything begins with an ending, when a flu pandemic wipes out most of humanity with terrifying quickness and efficiency, in a sense changing the way time is perceived within the story. HBO Max's Station Eleven, somewhat fittingly, treats time very fluidly. It's one about hope and the things we hold onto and it is one of the best television series of the year by far. The Station Eleven adaptation is a haunting, at times beautiful, and quietly uplifting story about more than simple survival. John Mandel's massively popular 2014 novel about life after a catastrophic pandemic, Station Eleven, arrives and while it may be a stroke of odd timing and even surreal to be considering a book written before the pandemic about a world more dramatically impacted by a hauntingly similar disease as live-action entertainment, don't let any of that keep you from tuning in.
It's in this strange liminal space that HBO Max's adaptation of Emily St. COVID-19 continues to influence our day-to-day with not only infection concerns, but issues with supply chain and shortages as we try to forge forward in a world that is both the same and different jarringly all at once. It's December 2021 and humanity is very much living in the after or, perhaps, the during, of a life-altering pandemic.
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