‘Station Eleven’ Episode 5 Recap: Airport ‘21

“He’s a destroyer.” Tough talk about a child. But “The Severn City Airport,” the fifth episode of Station Eleven, is a tough hour of television.

Set in the titular, fictional airport during the collapse of global civilization, this episode is in some ways an illustration of how pockets of that civilization manage to reform and rebuild. In this case it takes a leader with the gift of gab, a corporate consultant who refers to himself as “a CEO Whisperer”—none other than Clark, the friend and rival of Arthur Leander whom we met a few episodes back. 

It also requires the power of celebrity in the form of Elizabeth, Arthur’s semi-estranged wife, who like Clark was flying to Chicago to handle arrangements surrounding Arthur’s death when the shit hit the fan. (Their son, Tyler, is the destroyer in question.)

The third member of the triumvirate around which the airport microcosm forms is Miles (Milton Barnes), an airport security guard who quits his job within hours of the flu toppling the world, but who maintains an air of officialdom and authority that the survivors respond to. Why wouldn’t they? In one of the episode’s main plotlines, a janitor poses as a Homeland Security official and lures an entire women’s soccer team into accompanying him on a flight to Miami. A lot of people want to “Back the Blue,” as the fascist bumper-sticker slogan goes. 

In other ways, the community that springs up in the airport in the aftermath of humanity’s destruction by the flu pandemic serves as a bitter parody of all that came before. The deference to authority, any authority; the instinctive hostility toward outsiders, seen as unclean vectors of disease; even a fatal police shooting, treated as a case of an honorable man (Miles) doing the right thing (killing the sole survivor of a plane full of flu victims) at considerable cost to his own mental well-being. (The mental well-being of the shooting victim doesn’t really matter, since he’s dead.)

Also? Clark briefly toys with creating a museum of artifacts from our fallen civlization; yes, he enshrines a Nintendo Switch. Also also, and potentially related? Enrico Colatoni, the actor who has played the ambassador from the Museum of Civilization who keeps asking the Traveling Symphony to pay the place a visit, shows up here as Brian, Elizabeth’s preposterously wigged and accented agent, who’s no younger here than he is when he shows up in the narrative 20 years later. No, I have no idea what any of that means.

But let’s come back to the killing of the very obviously immune man who staggers off that stranded plane full of flu victims, after a week and a half of what must have been a living hell. His rescuer is Tyler, Elizabeth and Arthur’s badly neglected kid. He spends most of his time on the internet, downloading as much of Wikipedia as he can. (There’s a funny bit where he toys with the idea of deleting the entry for capitalism; his mother says people will just make it up all over again.) He’s skeptical about Clark’s reflexive notion that the earth should be repopulated. 

Then Miles kills the man he guided from that plane, and Elizabeth runs to comfort him, and the angry crowd demands that mother and child be quarantined aboard a private plane in one of the airport’s hangars, for an entire month. Elizabeth weathers this experience relatively well, it must be said. Tyler is another story. He spends his time obsessively reading and re-reading Station Eleven, a copy of which his mother gave him in the middle of an emotionally savage but ultimately mendacious story about how she spent years burning his father’s letters to him. (She tells Clark that Tyler could sense she was lying, that his father in fact made no effort to remain a part of his life.)

When Elizabeth and Tyler return from quarantine, he’s badly scarred by the experience. “Tyler processed the quarantine as some sort of personal humiliation,” Clark tells Elizabeth, precipitating a huge fight in which he calls her one of the C-listers that B-lister Arthur surrounded himself with, and she responds by saying how awful Clark must feel about not having a fraction of Arthur’s magnetism. All of this happens over a live mic, and Tyler is listening.

He’s also listening when Clark does an “Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret” routine in which he speaks to Arthur about the danger Elizabeth and Tyler now pose to the community. Tyler tells Clark, whose horror-stricken face says it all in this moment, that he’s setting all of them free, then burns the jet full of dead people, presumably with himself inside.

But as Elizabeth screams in parental agony, Tyler simply walks off. And as you’d probably guessed by now, he grows up to be the Prophet, preaching Doctor Eleven’s nihilistic gospel.

Written by Cord Jefferson and directed by Lucy Tcherniak, this is a dense, rich episode—seriously, I’ve barely touched on the soccer team, and I haven’t even mentioned the nuns, or Clark rejecting Miles’s romantic advances because he’s grieving for his dead partner, or Clark spending most of his time blasted out of his skull on booze and MDMA he found in the belongings of the fake Homeland Security agent. (And that magnificent beard of his!) It’s the kind of thing you point to when you want to say no, the New Golden Age of Television is not over, there’s still enormously moving and intelligent work being done, coincidentally on a subject—pandemics—that now dominates every moment of our waking lives. I’m glad it exists.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch Station Eleven Episode 5 on HBO Max