Each week, Joe and Terry review an episode of HBO Max’s dystopian drama Station Eleven, alternating between our respective sites — queerhorrormovies.com and gaylydreadful.com.

Spoilers for episodes 8 and 9, “Who’s There?” and “Dr. Chaudhary.”

“Who’s There?”

TERRY

I don’t even know where to start with this episode, Joe, because there’s a lot of thematic weight going on here. After “Who’s There?”, we have two more episodes, but this dense episode feels like it could be the climax as it brings all of the characters together and explodes their worlds.

I’ll start with the continued refrain “I remember damage” that has been used throughout the entirety of Station Eleven, which by this point has become almost meaningless to me in its repetition. And yet, the series continually pelts us with representations of damage, both literal and metaphor, that paints that refrain as an almost thesis statement.

Last episode, you keyed in on the specter of mental health hanging over Jeevan, Frank and Kirsten during their time in Frank’s apartment. Each one of them is damaged in their own particular way. Kirsten is in the act of being traumatized at a young age, forced to understand her family’s mortality and hiding out with men who can barely take care of themselves, let alone her.

The characters we’ve met over the series, too, have all experienced intense trauma in some way, typically from events that happened in the Before, as Tyler/The Prophet (Daniel Zovatto) calls it. There’s Elizabeth (Caitlin FitzGerald), who was married to Arthur (Gael García Bernal) and who lost her son. There’s Sarah (Lori Petty), who was hurt by Gil (David Cross) and then devastated over his death. There Tyler, who’s so hurt he wants to blot out anything related to The Before, as if he can kill the pain inside him from that time period.

So much loss. So much damage.

Clark (David Wilmot) is still alive in 2040, though he’s now gray and melancholy. His damage is laid out bare on the screen as “Who’s There?” expertly mixes the traditional 2040 storyline and the flashback-heavy ones, using The Before to explain character motivations in 2040. Station Eleven has given us a Clark-focused episode before with “The Severn City Airport”, but here we get more clues about who and why he is the way he is.

While the 2040 portions of “Who’s There?” focus on reuniting characters and bringing the entire cast together, the flashback brings Clark and Arthur back together, after a long time apart. It’s obvious that their time away from each other was spent without even communicating as Arthur is surprised, for example, that Clark is seeing his partner Tim. Arthur, offering him a plethora of alcoholic choices, has also conveniently forgotten that Clark is nine years sober. What starts as an awkward reunion quickly falls back into familiar patterns for the two, with Tim texting Clark to remind him that Arthur triggers him and to manage his anger.

Before long, Clark is pouring himself a drink (then two) and arguing about art and commerce with Arthur, each one throwing barbs meant to harm the other. While Station Eleven has told us that Clark always plays second fiddle to Arthur, it’s here that we see just how much anger and hurt that brings Clark. He’s angry at Arthur’s talent, telling him, “you’re great and you shouldn’t be because you haven’t earned it.” Meanwhile, it’s inferred that Clark had to work hard at his creative endeavors and gave them up to be a “CEO Whisperer.”

I would also suggest that Clark is also deeply in love with Arthur and Arthur knows it. Earlier this season, Clark whispers into the nothingness, pretending it’s Arthur, that the difference between Arthur and Tyler is that Arthur was “never destructive.” This episode proves Clark was wrong. Arthur seems to want to hurt Clark, offering him the booze and then giving him the double temptation of a hot waiter who has eight balls on hand for them to party with. Gael García Bernal’s performance here is almost maniacal, a slight smile on his lips as he watches Clark consider the copious amounts of booze sitting in front of him.

And not once does Arthur stop him.

This sequence also explains the 2040 version of Clark, who we see for the first time this episode. He’s dressed almost as a Shakespearean version of a king, with robes on his shoulders and large, gaudy icons hanging around his neck. It turns out that Elizabeth wanted the Traveling Symphony to come and he humored her. But when his men find Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) and Tyler in the field and Clark forces them to prove their part of the Symphony by acting, he realizes that this theatre troupe is actually good. And that they’re performing Hamlet. These two things convinces him that having the Traveling Symphony perform is a terrible idea…why? Because of how “insolent” Hamlet is to the power structures. “The man insults the king!”, he shouts at Elizabeth, clearly positing himself as The King of the Museum of Civilization in this regard. For once he’s the first fiddle, at least in his mind. Not Elizabeth. Not Tyler. And certainly not Arthur. It’s Clark…and he’ll be damned to give it up.

“I remember damage,” indeed.

I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of this dense episode, Joe, and barely focused on the 2040 part of the story. What did you think of the Traveling Symphony’s tearful reunion with Kirsten and Sarah’s health issues? Are you starting to see similarities between Kirsten and Tyler’s focus on “damage” and “The Before”? And I’m curious to hear your thoughts about the figuratively explosive reunion between Tyler, Elizabeth and Clark and the (once again) literally explosive climax.

JOE

I’m happy that you raised the issue of trauma, Terry, because my notes are littered with references to the word. Perhaps it’s because we’ve never seen everyone collected in one place, but “Who’s There?” truly confirms just how fucked up this entire troupe is. They’ve been playing the roles of survivors for so long that they’ve internalized the fiction of their existence. When Elizabeth and Clark realize who Tyler is and what the Traveling Symphony represents for their sad, sheltered, quarantined lives, the whole facade comes crumbling down.

Or rather, as you said, it explodes - because that past is fucking done and there is no going back.

What intrigued me about so many of the 2040 scenes is how the characters do and don’t relate to each other. There’s that absolutely fantastic framing shot of Elizabeth perched on the stairs, her back to the adult son she believed dead, separated by a thick wall. There’s Clark standing in the center of his tower, the cast-aside actor standing in the middle of a production that has no need for him, realization dawning on him what true talent is…and how dangerous it is to the precarious power structure he’s cultivated among the sheltered citizens of the Severn City Airport. There’s Tyler and Kirsten, moving back and forth like hamsters on a wheel through the vents in pursuit of the answers that “the adults” don’t trust them with.

Throughout it all, we hear three different renditions of Ave Maria: a mournful love ballad that Miles (Milton Barnes) plays on the guitar for Clark in their bedroom, a distorted instrumental as Tyler and Kirsten reveal their past to each other, and finally an operatic choir rendition as Tyler’s plan is executed. I liked how each interpretation perfectly suits the scene it plays over, while collectively the different takes highlight how a single item can be reshaped and reworked by different people to mean different things.

Tyler and Kirsten are both children whose lives were irrevocably altered by the pandemic. They grew into very different adults, but their shared trauma and connection to Station Eleven unites them. Elizabeth and Clark have been jointly ruling the Severin Airport for twenty years, but they’re on completely opposite polarities in terms of leadership and goals. Hell, in this episode alone we even see that Clark met young Kirsten (Matilda Lawler) when he visited Arthur back in 2020!

As everyone finally gathers in a single location, the way that their journey has intertwined and impacted the others, often without their knowledge, is a spot-on depiction of the hilariously coincidental nature of life. It’s also why so much of “Who’s There?” feels heavy and dense: the air is thick with secrets waiting to be revealed and reunions that we have been anticipating for episodes.

In that capacity I was a little underwhelmed by Elizabeth’s realization of who Tyler is (perhaps I expected something more histrionic, though in hindsight their relationship has never been depicted as particularly emotive or even physical). The reunion of the Traveling Symphony, by comparison, is set to an exuberant, almost whimsical score and precipitated by Alex (Philippine Velge) performing Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” - a perfect choice considering Alex’s past temptation by Tyler, and also Kirsten’s current reluctance to stay within the gated confines of the airport. Similarly, Kirsten’s final conversation with Sarah, her latest dying surrogate parent, is filtered by both distance and the visual signifier of the vent (another set of prison bars).

Tellingly, Sarah’s final words to Kirsten as she retreats are “Nothing’s gone. Nothing’s ever gone”. It’s a statement that perfectly sums up Kirsten and Tyler’s repressed trauma, as well as Tyler’s return to the people who took him for dead, as well as his attempt to destroy the Before Times by blowing up Clark’s Museum of Civilization.

It also anticipates the arrival of Tyler’s disciples, who are seen snaking through the tall grass towards the airport as the explosion lights their way. But by now we’ve come to know that Station Eleven never resolved a cliffhanger that it could put off, so I fully anticipate that looming conflict will be shelved until the finale…

“Dr. Chaudhary”

…And I was correct!

With that said, even I couldn’t have predicted the direction that the penultimate episode of the limited series takes. While I anticipated that there would be some kind of resolution to the lingering mystery about what happened to Jeevan during that fateful night he went out in the dark to find Kirsten’s comic, I certainly didn’t expect that “Dr. Chaudhary” would almost entirely follow the unstable man as he finds a new lease on life.

Admittedly I’m torn about this episode. On one hand, it’s uplifting to see how the ill man who was talking to his dead siblings and lashing out at a child turned his life around when he found a new calling - first as a fake doctor, and then, eventually, as a real one. Unfortunately due to its placement in the series, dedicating a full hour in advance of the finale to wrap up Jeevan’s story is another test of patience for viewers eager to see what unfolds with the rest of the cast. Perhaps this would have been better served being slotted in earlier in the season?

Unlike other episodes dedicated to a single character, “Dr. Chaudhary” doesn’t offer much insight or connections to the larger plot. Consider our favourite episode “Hurricane” which focused on Miranda as she negotiated her complex feelings for Arthur as civilization crumbled around her. While that episode worked in large part because of Danielle Deadwyler’s incredible talent, it was also only the third episode, so the rest of the series’ mythology hadn’t been built up too much. Contrast that with “The Severn City Airport”, which is only a few episodes later, but ties much more directly into Station Eleven’s principal mythology about the origins of the Museum of Civilization and Tyler/the Prophet.

“Dr. Chaudhary” doesn’t offer the same complex emotional insight or the rich narrative connection. What it offers is resolution: the conclusion of Jeevan’s story from the point he mysteriously disappeared in the woods in the middle of the night, all of the way up to his happy ending with Lara, which includes several children, a cute house on the edge of the lake and a successful medical career. It’s a resolution that’s unlikely to befall the other characters in this world, which is maybe why it needed to be dealt with now.

Of course, thematically this episode is very much in keeping with the content of the rest of the series. By lying about his medical status on the radio, Jeevan is essentially “acting” as a doctor - which is why he’s first attacked, then saved by Lara and brought to the big box store that Terry has transformed into a maternity ward. Just as Jeevan was playing a role when he acted like a responsible parental figure to Kirsten (and eventually became one), here he’s pressed into service for a group of synched-up pregnant women until he actually becomes a “healer.”

It’s a novel twist on the more literal acting that we’ve seen from Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony, but no less convincing. Hell, even Terry (nee Deborah)’s adoption of her dead husband’s name is equivalent to how Shakespearean actors gender-flipped their roles.

In the Before Times, Terry was a disgraced Ponzi-schemer and Jeevan was a bad brother and son. Post-pandemic, however, these two save the lives of nearly a dozen women and their children and Jeevan gets a second chance at happiness, including a new career that ensures he can face his fear of seeing people die, get hurt or be in pain. As Terry explains when he protests that he’s not a doctor: “the courage to bear witness to death is the job”. And considering what he went through with Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan), over whose death he remains guilt-ridden, Jeevan is very much a witness.

Terry, I’ll turn it over to you: what did you think of Jeevan’s journey of discovery and how it subverted our expectations of his grisly death? What did you make of the fact that David, the pre-teen who tried to collect Rose’s baby after she died from complications of childbirth, was clearly a disciple of Tyler? Did you, like me, get emotional when Jeevan hugs the ghost of his dead brother as Frank reassures him that Kirsten will “find someone. She’s good at that. She found you”? And what are your theories as we head into the finale next week?

TERRY

It’s interesting that you said “David” was a disciple of Tyler, Joe, because I actually thought/think he was Tyler. It’s difficult to tell under the huge coat and hood, but that cherubic face reminds me a lot of Tyler.

Either way, that’s one of the few things the episode really gave us: a connective tissue between Jeevan and Tyler. More than anything else, Station Eleven has spent a lot of time developing these circular connections to show how everyone is connected in some way. Even when Jeevan exits Kirsten’s story, he’s still connected to the overarching story being told. Whether the kid is Tyler or a disciple, we see the momentary pause when Jeevan asks if he’d like to see Rose. It’s a conflicting moment for the child, particularly if it is Tyler, because with that small pause, we can almost see him trying to resist his decree of not caring about The Before.

It’s a small development (and maybe I’m just slow to figure this out), but The Before has always been a lofty statement for the pre-pandemic times. Tyler seems to have delineated everything as before he was on his own and after, but this little statement suggests that Tyler will turn away from anything bad. While the conception could have occurred pre-pandemic, the birth and death did not…and yet when given the opportunity to say goodbye to someone, he dismisses it with “There’s no Before.” It’s almost as if he doesn’t want to face anything bad and so delineates everything bad that happens as a “before” situation. It allows him to keep moving forward, without thinking about anyone who's left him; there is no before when a person is alone and cares only about himself, at least at this stage.

This episode certainly did subvert my expectations with Jeevan, which had me thinking one of two things: He died or he ran away. I honestly thought it was the latter, considering how annoyed he seems with his current situation. He makes a comment that he hasn’t been able to think just of himself this entire time because, he implies, he’s saddled with a kid who depends on an adult. With the tension and bickering high between the two of them, I expected him to just leave, if I’m being honest. So the fact he was set upon by wolves (the second show we’ve watched recently where that happens) and crawls into salvation was surprising…I just don’t think the episode was really necessary. I’m hoping the finale brings it all together because this episode’s placement really killed the momentum.

I understand why Station Eleven is structured as it is: they have ten episodes, the circular theme of repetition and characters interweaving into each other’s lives, and the need to build up the world as well as establish characters. Yes, I got emotional when Jeevan hugged Ghost Frank. Yes, I appreciated seeing Jeevan’s growth and salvation in the arms of pregnant women. And yes I also appreciated the irony of him leaving one young girl and being saddled with a dozen babies. I also loved the way the episode closed with Jeevan on the dock while A Tribe Called Quest played as a nice throwback to their apartment days. But the structure gives the 2040 section–where arguably the most action happens–a weird cadence that has kind of bothered me throughout the series. Unless Jeevan’s story–or, potentially, Rose’s baby’s story?–culminates with the final episode, I think this is the one bad apple of Station Eleven’s run.

As for the finale…I want to see what happened with Miranda because that’s one lingering question the show has failed to address. I need some closure with the Severn City Airport/Museum of Civilization. And I think the circle needs to finally close, bringing Kirsten, Jeevan and maybe Miranda back together. I don’t know if HBO Max intends for this to remain a limited series or if the streamer wants to continue telling stories post the novel, but there’s a lot to cover in this final episode.

I guess we’ll find out when we return to QueerHorrorMovies for the final episode, “Unbroken Circle.”