Saturday, August 6, 2022

Emmy Catch-Up: Station Eleven

Station Eleven: Season 1, Episode 7 “Goodbye My Damaged Home” (B)

I’m not sure why I expected an intense cliffhanger like the one that closed the sixth episode to result in a clear-cut continuation of the story, but I didn’t think that it would be a purely memory-oriented hour that found the adult Kirsten transported back to formative memories of Jeevan and Frank. I don’t know if we’re supposed to assume that she hid the antidote on her but repressed that memory, and it’s also not clear how she was able to wake up on the ground still alive with the many people who were around her also unconscious in the snow. Seeing a bit of Frank’s backstory showed that he dumped all of his drugs when he heard that Jeevan and Kirsten were at his door, and that he managed to do pretty well considering the withdrawal he should have been undergoing, especially with two unexpected guests in his home. As they watched those news reports about a flu that doesn’t incubate and the terrible state of the world, it was intoxicating to watch Frank get up and lip-sync. While he was set on finishing a ghostwritten autobiography and Kirsten just wanted to finish her play, Jeevan was thinking about the movie “Alive” where a rugby team has to eat their deceased teammates after a plane crash, which I was recently reading about being inspired to a similar real-life story as “Yellowjackets,” which is purely fictional. The themes of saying goodbye in Kirsten’s play hit a bit too close to home, especially considering an intruder then showed up to declare that this was his home now. Frank wasn’t in any mood to be evicted, and it was understandable that Kirsten blamed what happened next on her desire to put on the play. Ending with an adult Kirsten back in the present talking to a skeleton on a bed of flowers was peculiar, and I wonder whether we’ll get back to the main narrative or if it really was an existential confrontation rather than a literal one.

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