‘Station Eleven’ Episode 8 Recap: Making It

Station Eleven doesn’t bounce between timeframes and plotlines, it glides between them. This can make writing episodic reviews—recaps, in the parlance of our times—a dicey proposition. Any given episode can show you the same character in extremis at different points in his or her life, for entirely different reasons. How do you determine which outburst or confrontation is more important? The show can can insert crucial moments in a character’s growth, in their understanding of the world and art’s place in it—not to mention their own—in a flashback that lasts mere seconds, between minutes of meaty material set in the here-and-now. How do you pull it all apart and piece it back together in a linear way, a way that makes sense?

Damned if I know! 

But it is possible to encapsulate this momentous and comparatively lengthy episode (“Who’s There?”) the usual way. To wit: Kirsten awakens from her poison-induced unconsciousness to discover she’s been nursed back to health by the Prophet, Tyler Leander. Traveling together, they’re brought into the Severn City Airport, home of the Museum of Civilization—still governed by the trifecta of Clark, Miles, and Elizabeth (all of them in very convincing age makeup, with Clark in particular looking appropriately Lear-like). 

Kirsten and the Prophet both claim to be actors in the Symphony, and they pass Clark’s smell test by acting out a scene from Station Eleven, their shared scripture. But before long, everyone seems to be aware that there’s something different about the Prophet—that he may even be Tyler Leander, Elizabeth’s son, long believed dead. He’s kept isolated while Elizabeth is reunited with the Traveling Symphony. There, she learns that Sarah the Conductor had a heart attack and is being held in a medical facility to which the Symphony has been denied access.

So Kirsten’s paranoia, fed in part by the Prophet’s warnings about the place, begins to grow. She tries to convince everyone that they’re in a prison rather than a quarantine, and that Sarah is the Museum of Civilization’s hostage rather than its patient. She goes along with the Prophet as he sneaks around through air ducts and jetways, communicating with Sarah while he’s off doing his own thing.

Kirsten and the Prophet reunite and head out into the airfield, where he torches a monument to the passengers of the flight that was denied access to the airport due to sickness onboard the day it all went down. Tyler tried to help one of those people, after all, and in response that person was shot to death in front of his very eyes. So he pays the Museum back, for that crime and for the crime of trying to bring back “the before,” and blows it to hell. Clark screams, Elizabeth—who by now knows for sure this man is her son—cries, Kirsten watches the inferno from afar, cut to black, the end.

But so much of the episode’s power derives from a storyline that’s really just an aside, a detour. In the past, three weeks before the world ends, Clark and Arthur Leander reunite and argue about art. (Their frenemy status is so intense that Clark just sort of casually falls off the wagon in the middle of it all.) Arthur, from his privileged perch as a movie star turned theatrical dilettante, criticizes Clark for his square job trying to turn CEO’s into genuine alpha males. What happened to just making things for the sake of it, the way Clark once did when he was a violinist in a punk band? Miranda—his ex-wife and the author of the Station Eleven graphic novel—always knew that, he says.

The argument continues from there, hinging largely on whether art has to be “great” to matter, as Arthur contends. (“I don’t wanna be great,” Clark says unconvincingly, although he does defend making things because you just have to.) Clark is also furious to have lost Miranda as a friend because of Arthur’s philandering—philandering which, it turns out, never actually happened. 

But the scene and its aftermath—Clark goes on a bender and accidentally badmouths Arthur with Tyler in earshot, though thankfully he had his headphones on—serve as more than just another dialogue about art and artists in a show full of them. It provides us with a vital contrast between a younger Clark and his older, lion-in-winter self—still full of so many of the same insecurities, even though he’s by now dedicated his whole life to preserving the memory of things people made. He illustrates the principle by showing a disinterested classroom of students a karaoke machine—the ultimate in ephemeral art, a thing that exists solely for in-the-moment pleasure. 

This, along with actor David Wilmot’s engrossing performance, is what makes the finale feel like such a punch in the gut. The end of the world forced Clark to forsake his alpha-male dayjob and become a guardian of both people and the things they once made for themselves. You can see how much he believes in the power of art when he gets cold feet about the Symphony’s production of Hamlet, which he fears will teach his teenage wards to direct their anger outwards. To have that all taken away from him now is a brutal punishment.

Arthur may have been an imperfect messenger, and in the end he may have gotten it wrong by saying only great work matters, but the blackout bender Clark goes on after the argument and the museum to which he dedicated his life both point to the same conclusion: Arthur was right. Making things matters. And so, I think, does Station Eleven.

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 8 on HBO Max