Station Eleven Recap: The Unbroken Circle
* Spoiler Warning * *Trigger Warning: post discusses trauma*
This is my favorite show but I don't really write about it because it makes me too emotional to think about because of my own acute experiences with trauma. But The Unbroken Circle requires conversation.
By now we are 10 episodes deep into this universe driven by survival and the themes are written in neon.
Again our artists are on the precipice of their next great performance. Again we are given a play within a play. Again with Kirsten as the director, just as she was with Jeevan and Frank all those years ago.
Again, her turn as director lays bare her obsession with creating true art that exposes the emotional reality of the moment. We've been walking in Kiki's shoes for a while now, but this episode gives her to us at her highest pitch
It also gives us an absolutely gutting missed connection scene between Jeevan and Kiki, who are inches from each other yet still miss one another by seconds. The hope, then let down of that scene was crushing, but it functions as an aside would in a play and is later resolved in the end.
Fittingly the play here is Hamlet, which famously uses the play within a play conceit. This isn't even the first time they have done this with Hamlet in this show and it is enthralling every time!
This time we see Elizabeth and Clark as natural Claudius and Gertrude playing out the truth of their lives on stage. Alex's Laertes is similarly exposed.
Thusly, the thesis of the show plays out in meta layers: on one side we have Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony standing up for art as a mechanism of healing.
On the other end, you have The Prophet, and Clark; each of whom uses culture as a mechanism of control with Elizabeth as the conduit that spans both spaces.
In the end, all are humbled by the stage, succumbing to the truth in the artistic expression of the moment.
For The Prophet, it allows him to begin to heal what is broken between him and Elizabeth. Clark on the other hand finally sees The Prophet for what he is: a scared kid who is sad his father died.
This proves fleeting as the circle remains unbroken in the end with each warrior retreating to their familiar formula. The Prophet and Elizabeth run off with their child army, now armed with their "sacred text". And Kirsten is back on the wheel, creating art and collecting family--leaving so she can "come back". It ends in a kind of stasis, everyone back in their corner of the world though slightly changed.
The beauty of Jeevan and Kiki's reunion is the type of moment that elevates this show, it could so easily slip into schlock but is always buoyed by excellent writing and performances. "You walked her home" was the perfect goodbye as their paths fork away from each other and they scamper off to separate horizons.
On the other end of the world, we have Miranda in her last moments spilling her mysteries to a stranger and trying to save the world. It is the final example of our Unbroken Circle: the soft revelation that she is the reason Gitchegumee never deplaned.
Miranda is a ghost the whole season, literally and figuratively. Her presence is implied in the presence of the book her B story peeks in in whispers always shrouded in allure and red herrings. In the end, we learn that her influence is the core driver of all the action in the story in much more substantive ways than expected. Her revelation that her family died in front of her during hurricane Hugo really hammers home that her character is a clear reference to The Tempest.
[Further evidence of the allusion to the Tempest: She meets and quickly marries her husband, who cheats, she later chides him publicly for doing so just like in the dinner scene with Leander and Elizabeth etc etc side note: The Tempest is also a play with an example of a play within a play, “to the monsters we are monsters” is also probably an allusion to Caliban and Prospero *sigh* this is the only thing my English degree is useful for...].
Miranda's revelation helps us understand the symbolism in the Station Eleven comic. The idea of the flood creating the Undersea after all the grown-ups are killed. The idea of being "monsters to the monsters" paints a dark portrait of the Caribbean in the aftermath of a storm of that magnitude. It is a reminder that there isn't only one kind of apocalypse, and that other people might experience apocalypse in different ways in one lifetime.
Station Eleven the comic within the show and the show itself delve into reactions to trauma. Ironically, what appears to those around her to be a closely held secret pain eventually becomes the well-known story in the universe of Station Eleven. What was “just for her” ends up touching the world. Thus the act of healing trauma becomes a lit torch that saves others through the artistic pursuit of storytelling.
Miranda explains that she lost everyone she knew, lost the man she loved, everything, while she worked through her trauma---only through expressing it in art was she able to let it go. Just like Kiki, just like Elizabeth and The Prophet. It isn't until that pain is released that any one of these characters can be truly confronted—and in some instances reunited with—their past.
It's rare for a show to maintain this level of excellence throughout. Each story and choice is so purposeful and tenderly portrayed.
It feels real and human.
It is a story about what we have left when everything is stripped away.
It is a story about who we let ourselves become when we need to protect ourselves and those in our sphere.
It is a story, about the power of stories and it ended beautifully.