The first three episodes have dropped, and I’m hooked. It’s beautifully shot, filmed and written.
I haven’t read the book, though I’m familiar with the plot. I didn’t realize until after I’d watched it that the showrunner and at least some of the writers worked on The Leftovers, which I humbly believe to be the best television show ever made.
It only hit one sour note for me, and that was the phone call between Jeevan and his sister. It felt jarringly fake to me, and yanked me out of the moment. Not the phone call itself, but the sister’s dialogue and delivery. That was the only acting/writing false step, as far as I’m concerned, though.
I haven’t watched yet but am really looking forward to it once I have some time. It is one of my favorite books and I was excited when I saw it would get a full series treatment.
I highly recommend the book too. So many lines in it have stuck with me.
It’s been on my list forever, but the pandemic and general life stuff have conspired to sap my ability to concentrate. I’ll get to it at some point, and if anything, this makes me more interested in reading it.
Read the book. Not life changing, but entertaining. Especially so for a reader familiar w/ the Great Lakes region. Neat to think of how you would respond in such a situation.
I also read and really enjoyed the book, but don’t remember much of it. Which is probably perfect for enjoying the show because I won’t notice when the show is different from the book. Thanks for starting this thread- I hadn’t heard that this was a thing!
I thought the last episode, Goodbye My Damaged Home, was outstanding. Loved how the play foreshadowed what happened before Jevevan and Kirsten left the apartment and how they dealt with the isolation and shock of losing everything they knew.
Station Eleven has absolutely been one of my favorite books of the decade - even through the events of the last two years.
I was looking forward to watching it - there are absolutely things significantly changed from the book, and I’m finding that I’m generally fine with those choices because in the filming of it, we can’t see through Kirsten’s eyes the way we do in the book and we need the differing perspectives.
Like @LVBoPeep, I thought Goodbye My Damaged Home was fantastic in how it portrayed those first 80 days. And it solved an issue for me that I couldn’t figure out, namely how they were going to get rid of Frank before they left the apartment, because in the book he’s in a wheelchair and kills himself. I didn’t want him to die by suicide in this, and I ended up ok with how he did die.
I’m not sure I think of the series as highly as I do the book, but I am enjoying it and will finish watching it.
I really enjoyed the last two episodes as well including the finale- not sure I want to go into too many spoilers but just so relieved that Jeevan & Kirsten reunited and especially loved the Hamlet scene with Elizabeth as Gertrude , Clark as Claudius & Tyler as Hamlet - I just keep thinking of that scene and what it meant to the characters over and over, even more so than Kirsten’s inital Hamlet scene. I was just talking to a friend about this series and recommending it and was wanting to post because I felt like (except Succession, which I’m literally obsessed over) it was the best tv series I’ve seen in a couple of years.
If only television was filled with such complete and well-crafted shows. Absolutely everything about this was pitch-perfect. I’ll likely rewatch this quite soon - there are so many details that were used to flesh out this world: the banana painting on a shelf behind Clark in the last episode, the Dr. Eleven spaceman in the back of the bus with Miranda in her episode, and I can only imagine how much dialogue from the comic was echoed throughout.
I agree with the OP regarding The Leftovers, and this was as satisfying of a conclusion as that.
After watching the finale I really enjoyed most of this series. Sure, there were episodes I enjoyed less, but with just 10 episodes, they were all important in some ways.
Ultimately, I really like what they did with Miranda and the backstory she got, and how it tied in to the Gitchee Gumee plane. I didn’t really like what they did with Tyler/The Prophet, but I can see why they did it and I don’t think it was a bad choice, just one that I didn’t like.
I also appreciate the ties that it gave people - I was so worried that Kirsten and Jeevan weren’t going to meet when they were both at the airport. And I’m not sure how he recognized her (people change a lot from 9 years old to 29), but I’m not questioning it.
Finished it, it answered most of the questions I had, just not when I was asking them. It kind of did answer this one:
The landmine strapped to kids sent in to kill them. I had got the impression that the Prophet has been misjudged and someone else was doing this, it being so horrible, but no, the kid at the end confirmed that he was actually stealing children and sometime using them as suicide bombers. I’d say unforgivable and in need of a stabbing, no matter how estranged he was from his mother
It didn’t answer this one:
Enrico Colantoni, credited as Brian, who appears initially as the airports envoy inviting them to perform, then later (not sure if earlier), as Elizabeth’s boyfriend/associate, who isn’t easy to notice, as moves in the background a lot, has long hair, a hat, and Italian accent. That one gets on the escape plane, along with the fake Janitor and the soccer team (minus the Goalie). Modern Brian also has what looks like a horseshoe scar on his bald head.
I did have trouble keeping track of who had and what happened to which comic. There seemed to be a couple around. But my favourite moment is Jivan:
Attacked by wolves, left injured, pulling silver foil over his head, seeing the comic and proclaiming, exactly as I felt, “Soooo fucking pretentious!” (and that was Kirsten’s comic, so she had lost it then, unless Jivan left it somewhere for her, so not sure how she had it in the future, or did she?)
When I rewatched it, I caught that Tyler told Kirsten that it was , I think the girl’s name was Hazel, that had led the children to do that in response to Tyler being stabbed by Kirsten. He also made a comment after he “Lit the torch” that he was losing control of the story and they were acting on their own but there can be little doubt that was due to his influence and manipulation
Regarding the comic Kirsten went looking for Jeevan and found the comic covered in blood and knew something had happened to him so it is the same comic. When she was a kid, she hid the comic at the golf club and recovered it when she returned as an adult
I just read the book last month, having never heard of it until this year (I forget how I DID hear about it – maybe someone recommended it here on the boards?), and loved it. Reading it now, this far into the pandemic was probably better than if I had read it earlier, I think? It meant a lot more to me now, I suspect, than it would have in 2014…but who knows. Anyway I loved the writing, and since a lot of the beginning was set in Toronto, my home for my entire adult life (until right before the pandemic!), the book just hit all the right notes for me in the most wistful and poignant way.
Then I heard about the series (from here, definitely) and immediately set about finding a place to stream it. I just finished the finale this afternoon and I loved it all over again. It’s pretty different from the book in many ways (no Toronto?! come on! Everything is filmed there! ) and although that concerned me at first, I felt like the series stayed true to the characters while still giving them slightly different lives. I ended up thinking of it as a somewhat different story set in the same world, where the people are familiar but not exactly the same. I loved the way each episode told a little more about various people, or filled in more of the story – there was just enough foreshadowing and there were just enough callbacks, and for me that never felt too overbearing, or anything like that. It worked.
The series made me notice details about the production – the sets, the costumes the Travelling Symphony wore, the beautiful shots. Usually when I see that stuff it pulls me out of the story a bit, but this time it made the world richer. It’s rare for me to find things I want to rewatch or reread, but I will carry these with me and return to them sometime in the future, and I am already looking forward to that.
I didn’t really have many issues, which was refreshing. I didn’t understand Enrico Colantoni’s character(s?) either. And I was SO GLAD Jeevan and Kirsten reunited, I worried it wasn’t going to happen. I didn’t really care for the prophet but that might be for personal reasons. The score maybe got a smidge overbearing at times but overall I though it was beautiful, and pretty memorable. I feel like I’ll pick up on a lot more details when I rewatch this series – I love that feeling.
