How would a contemporary Ophelia look in our age when patriarchy is replaced by a globalized perversion and when the confused fragments that compose our digital communication already look like Ophelia’s madness? To paraphrase one of Hegel’s best-known phrases (“everything turns on grasping the Absolute not only as Substance but also as Subject”), the lesson of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) is that everything depends on grasping the Absolute not only as Substance (the selfless slime of self-reproducing life) but also as two subjects (as a subject divided into two, Gertrud and Ophelia – or, in the movie, Elisabeth and Sue).

Elisabeth, once a celebrity big enough to earn a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, fears getting old so much that she signs on to an obviously Faustian bargain proposed by a mysterious smooth-faced stranger: if she injects herself regularly with the glowing yellow-green “substance,” for seven days of every 14 she will continue to live in her own less than youthful but still fit and gorgeous body. For the next seven days, her body will go into a coma-like state of hibernation, nourished with food from a tube, while the impossibly attractive Sue will assume her role. Both women are warned that they are two different manifestations of the same being, so any deviation from the rules will end up harming them both. But the relationship between Elisabeth and Sue—who, because their bodies share a single consciousness, never see each other in a waking state—soon becomes a ferocious rivalry, as each tries to wangle a few extra days of embodiment, or to take revenge on the other in different ways. Each successive body switch is more horrendous than the last, and we watch the two disintegrate in unison. Realizing Elisabeth’s intent to terminate her, Sue attacks and kills Elisabeth; without Elisabeth, Sue’s body begins to rapidly deteriorate. In a panic, she attempts to create a new version of herself using the leftover activator serum, despite the single-use warning. This results in the creation of a grotesque mutated body, “Monstro Elisasue”, with both Sue and Elisabeth’s faces, which gradually collapses and explodes into viscera.[1]

The duality of Elisabeth and Sue is immanent to Elisabeth herself. It would be too simple to say that this second split is a product of her internalization of patriarchal male fantasies: it’s not about sex or desire but about show business, about her declining career. So what if we locate Elisabeth and Sue as the split other (subject) in the (very specific form of) analyst’s discourse? Jacques-Alain Miller[2] proposed that, today, the discourse of Master is no longer the “obverse” of the discourse of the Analyst. Today, on the contrary, our “civilization” itself (its hegemonic symbolic matrix, as it were) fits the formula of the discourse of the Analyst: the “agent” of the social link is surplus-enjoyment, the superego injunction to enjoy, and it is this injunction that addresses $ (the divided subject) who is put to work in order to live up to this injunction. The “truth” of this social link is S2, scientific-expertly knowledge in its different guises, and the goal is to generate S1, the self-mastery of the subject, i.e., to enable the subject to “cope with” the stress of the call to enjoyment. Does this formula not render perfectly the coordinates of The Substance? The “substance” (the yellow-green glowing liquid which gives body to the scientific knowledge on which it is based) splits the affected subject into Elisabeth and Sue, and triggers in her a desperate attempt to achieve mastery over her fate.

How, then, does this version of the analyst’s discourse relate to the analyst’s discourse proper? Perhaps, one reaches here the limit of Lacan’s formalization of discourses, so that one should introduce another set of distinctions specifying how the same discourse can function in different modalities. What one should do is distinguish between the two aspects of objet a clearly discernible in Lacan’s theory: objet a as the void around which desire and/or drive circulate, and objet a as the fascinating element that fills this void (since, as Lacan repeatedly emphasizes, objet a has no substantial consistency; it is just the positivization of a void). So, in order to enact the shift from the capitalist’s to the analyst’s discourse, one just has to break the spell of objet a, to recognize beneath the fascinating agalma (the Holyt Grail of desire) the void that it covers. This is what neither Elizabeth in Substance nor Ophelia in Hamlet were able to do.

There is, however, another Ophelia figure who did it, namely Kirsten from Station Eleven. A whole series of features distinguishes Station Eleven, the novel[3] as well as the mini-series[4], from the predominant formula of post-apocalyptic narratives. The sudden epidemic that wipes out almost all of humanity is not presented as a rupture that opens up the space for the full actualization of previous social antagonisms (rich and poor, racism, sexual oppression…), but also new forms of solidarity. (Fred Jameson liked to bring out the utopian potential of apocalyptic stories: the survivors are compelled to practice a properly Communist collaboration). In Station Eleven we get just a cut before/after, and “before” is read from the perspective of the “after,” not the other way round. There is no key to the catastrophe provided by the preceding social or family or individual tensions, as in the classic formula. In some sense, we even get a happy ending through cultural activity: theatre performances (of Shakespeare plays) by a group of survivors called Travelling Symphony provide the main link among the dispersed communities that survived the catastrophe.

There is a figure of the big Other in the story, and also something that fits the role of a fundamental fantasy. The latter is obviously the comic book Station Eleven which plays a key role: it is obsessively read by some characters and written by the star actor’s first wife Miranda (who dies at year 0). Nonetheless, this book in a book is also not to be mystified into the key for all that goes on—in the end, Kirsten says to Tyler who is obsessed by the book and is thus duped by his fantasy: “Just a book.” As for the big Other, he is a neutral observer and all-knowing narrator, an anonymous astronaut (as he figures in Miranda’s comics book). It is not clear if he exists in reality or not, but even if he is just a figure in a virtual universe, he stands for the big Other. So here is the chronologically ordered storyline[5] which involves six main characters: Miranda Carroll, Arthur Leander, Kirsten Raymonde, Jeevan Chaudhary, Clark Thompson, Elizabeth Colton and Tyler (her and Arthur’s son).

— 2005: Arthur is a movie star and Miranda is working on her Station Eleven comic book when they meet at a diner. He invites her to attend his best friend Clark’s birthday party, igniting their romantic relationship.

— 2007: Two years later, Arthur and Miranda are unhappily married. While attending a film premiere, his co-star Elizabeth tells Miranda to disregard any rumors that she and Arthur are having an affair. Later, at one of Arthur’s dinner parties, Miranda realizes that they are indeed having an affair. She tells Arthur she’s leaving him and sets the pool house containing all of her Station Eleven drawings on fire.

— December 2020: Just before the day 0, Miranda meets Arthur in his dressing room at the Chicago theatre where he stars in a production of King Lear. She gives him a finished copy of Station Eleven, which he later gives to young Kirsten, the eight-year-old actress who happens to be in the room when Miranda visits. Afterwards, Miranda flies to Malaysia for a business trip. At approximately the same time, Arthur gives another copy of Station Eleven to his ex-wife Elizabeth for their son Tyler to have.

— Day 0:  On the day of the flu outbreak, Jeevan and his girlfriend attend a performance of King Lear. Arthur suffers a heart attack in the middle of a monologue, prompting Jeevan to run onto the stage and call a medic. Arthur dies a few minutes later as a traumatized Kirsten watches from the wings. Jeevan exits the theater to find that his girlfriend has gone home and Kirsten is standing alone outside, her caretaker (and Arthur’s mistress) Tanya having gone in the ambulance with Arthur. As Jeevan accompanies Kirsten home, his sister calls from the hospital she works at and warns him about the severity of the flu. Following her advice, he decides to go to his disabled brother Frank’s apartment. Since Kirsten’s parents are nowhere to be found, he takes her with him.

Meanwhile, Clark calls Miranda to break the news about Arthur’s passing; at this point, she is already in Malaysia, attempting to leave the country by sneaking onto a boat that her boss booked for her. Missing the boat, she returns to her hotel and seals up the vents in her room with masking tape.

Clark flies to Chicago to take care of Arthur’s estate, leaving his boyfriend behind. On the plane, he runs into Elizabeth and Tyler, who are headed to Chicago for the same reason. The plane gets redirected to Severn City Airport in Michigan because of the virus. Another plane touches down soon after, but none of the passengers are allowed to exit because some of them are infected. As it turns out, this is Miranda’s doing. As she and Jim wait to die in her hotel room in Malaysia, she checks Clark’s flight and realizes that another plane is coming in. She contacts the pilot and she begs him not to let anyone off the plane so that the people in the airport will have a chance to survive. Moved by her appeal, the pilot obliges and sacrifices all the passengers, himself included.

— Year 1:  Kirsten, Jeevan and Frank live together in Frank’s apartment. Kirsten learns that her parents are dead. When their food supply starts to run low, Jeevan decides that it’s time to go, but Kirsten insists on staying until her Station Eleven play based on the comic book is complete. At the end of the performance of her play, an intruder breaks into the apartment and demands that they vacate the premises. Frank refuses and the intruder stabs him to death.

After wandering through post-apocalyptic Chicago wilderness for some time, Jeevan and Kirsten move into an abandoned home for the winter. Resenting the move, Kirsten becomes engrossed in reading and re-reading Station Eleven to Jeevan’s frustration. One day, Kirsten goes missing during a scavenging mission, leaving Jeevan to fend off an attack by a stranger. In his fury he takes the book when she’s distracted and drops it in the snow. When she confronts him about it, he heads back out later that night to retrieve it, but a wolf attacks him.

Jeevan awakens in a department store turned makeshift maternity ward inhabited by a community of women who are set to give birth on or around the same day. The resident doctor has saved his life (and amputated one of his feet) because she believes him to be a doctor. Although reluctant at first, Jeevan helps the doctor deliver several babies, inspiring him to devote his post-pandemic career to becoming a healer. Eventually, he returns with one of the women to the house, but Kirsten is gone. He gets married to this woman and they live with their children in a different settlement community, where he is a healer – in short, he lives a happy life.

At the airport, Clark gives the remaining inhabitants a rousing speech and becomes the leader of the airport community. During a holiday party, Elizabeth gives Tyler a copy of Station Eleven and lies that Arthur has been writing him letters for years. Later that night, Tyler sees a passenger force his way out of the grounded plane and brings him into the airport. Elizabeth runs over to her son just before a former airport employee shoots the infected passenger. The community decides to quarantine Tyler and Elizabeth for a month in a different part of the airport. While quarantining, Tyler becomes obsessed with Station Eleven and starts to believe that the virus was meant to happen for some higher purpose. After he overhears Clark say that he and Elizabeth need to leave, Tyler sets the grounded plane on fire and runs away, leaving everyone to think that he died.

— A Few Years Later: Kirsten, now traveling alone, joins the Traveling Symphony.

— Year 2020 – the Present:   Kirsten is now a longtime member of the Traveling Symphony. While passing through the town of St. Deborah’s By The Water, she meets a mysterious stranger of whom she is instantly suspicious. He speaks of a man called the Prophet, a spiritual guru who lords over the town. When he threatens Kirsten, she stabs him but he gets away. When she later crosses paths again with the mysterious stranger, she realizes he is the Prophet. The Prophet, who is recovering from the stab wound she inflicted on him earlier, is now accompanied by an army of young disciples (kidnapped from their parents in the dispersed villages). He informs her that, against his wishes, the Symphony is on its way to the Museum of Traveling Civilization to perform Shakespeare there. He proposes a pact: he will lead her to the Symphony in exchange for disguising him as a member of the Symphony, so that he can retrieve something of his they’ve taken.

Once they reach the Severn City Airport, the children disperse into the surrounding woods, while the Prophet poses as a fellow actor. To prove that they are who they say they are, Clark and Elizabeth (now much older) ask them to perform something inside the Museum of Civilization. They improvise a powerful performance from Station Eleven; when nobody’s looking, the Prophet plants some kind of device in one of the walls. Rigid in his ways, a distrustful Clark wants to cancel the Symphony performance, while Elizabeth wants it to go on. They realize who Kirsten is around the same time that they realize who the Prophet is: Tyler.

Tyler blows up the Museum of Civilization, revealing his identity to all. He is locked up in a makeshift prison while Kirsten joins her Symphony friends in quarantine. After suffering a heart attack, the Conductor is moved into an emergency care unit. Kirsten appoints herself director of Hamlet and casts Clark as Claudius, Elizabeth as Gertrude, and Tyler – who will only speak to her through his character – as Hamlet. Midway through the performance, Tyler pulls a knife on Clark, but retreats after Clark says he loved Arthur too. Later, one of the child soldiers brings a bag of land mines to the airport, but Kirsten dissuades her from detonating them by reading from her copy of Station Eleven, demonstrating that Tyler’s “prophecies” are just lines from the book.

Jeevan (who had to be in contact with Kirsten for 20 years) makes his way to Severn City Airport to treat the Conductor (who passes away). After the performance of Hamlet, he locks eyes with Kirsten and the two reunite. The next morning, the Prophet, the children who accompany him, and Elizabeth leave together and the Symphony moves on to their next destination. Kirsten and Jeevan walk together until they reach a fork in the road. They promise to see each other again and part ways.

However, the story is not told in this linear way. Each of the ten episodes of the TV series is focused on a unique event, with supplements from the past (and future):

1 – Wheels of Fire: Zero. Chicago, Arthur’s death, Jeevan with Kirsten at Frank’s place plus wandering around, flash-forward to 20 years later with Kirsten as actress.

2 – A Hawk from a Handsaw: Two years after. A lone Kirsten meets Travelling Symphony and the Prophet.

3 – Hurricane: Prequel. Arthur and Miranda, jump to Zero, Miranda giving two copies of her book to Arthur, leaves for Malaysia and dies there.

4 – Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead: One year after Zero. Jeevan and Kirsten live alone in a cabin, have a conflict with Prophet’s cult members and are separated.

5 – The Severn City Airport: From Zero on. My favorite part of the series is this episode 5 (Chapter 42 in the book), which describes how a group of passengers forced to land at a small airport close to Chicago gradually has to accept that they will have to stay there for an indefinite time. Slow passage from perceiving it as a brief necessary landing to awareness that this will go on forever – and the birth of a new Leader (Clark).

6 – Survival Is Insufficient: The present (year 20). The unusual pact between Kirsten and the Prophet who convinces Kirsten to take him to Severn Airport.

7 – Goodbye My Damaged Home: a delirious Kirsten is thrown back to year 2 and remembers her past with Jeevan and Frank, postponing departure for staging her play based on the comic book Station Eleven.

8 – Who’s There? The present (year 20). Travelling Symphony accepted at Severn; flashback to the time before Zero depicting Clark’s conflict with Arthur.

9 – Chaudhary: A year after Zero till now (20 years). The story of Jeevan alone who, split from Kirsten, finds a new home as a paramedic, marries and has children.

10 – Unbroken Circle. Back to year Zero. Miranda asks Clark to take care of Elisabeth and Tyler, and saves the lives of those in the Severn airport building by asking the second plane passengers to stay in. Now (20 years later), all are reunited at Severn, and the reconciliation occurs through the staging of Hamlet. Tyler is accepted into the community with his children; Jeevan and Kirsten part on friendly terms.

These temporal jumps are common to the novel and the TV series, though there are many differences between the two. Let’s mention just the main one.[6] The novel ends soon after Kirsten arrives at Severn Airport and reunites with the Traveling Symphony, and at this point the Prophet is already dead. In the TV series, not only is Tyler still alive, he also infiltrates the airport alongside Kirsten with the plan to kill Clark, and is then redeemed through playing the role of Hamlet in a performance.  (One can draw parallels further: Is Arthur not Hamlet’s dead father?) We get here a case of how truth has the structure of a fiction: performing a Shakespeare play resolves the actual tension…

Of the other changes, suffice it to mention just one which is, I think, a change for the worse: in the TV series, after Arthur’s death Kirsten joins Jeevan, they spend a year at Frank’s apartment and then wander together before being separated later, while in the novel, they just meet very briefly after Arthur’s death when Jeevan takes her home. This makes their final reunion much more intense and miraculous, as if their brief meeting was so significant that it made them wait for twenty years to get finally reunified.

Neither Clark nor Tyler are good leaders. Tyler needs meaning to endure the catastrophe: the catastrophe didn’t just happen, it was caused by a higher power as a revenge for the decadent life of humanity, so all remainders of the world “before” should be erased or destroyed. For Clark, on the contrary, all the meaning of our life is concentrated in the world as it was before the catastrophe, and that’s why he builds the Museum of Civilization: we should stick to the memory of the past and preserve as much as possible from it. The mediating stance is advocated by Kirsten: we, the survivors and the newborn, have to settle accounts with the past and properly say goodbye to it. That’s why Kirsten has to meet Jeevan again to properly say goodbye to him. One should note here that a similar situation of how to deal with the past occurred in the ex-GDR after German reunification in 1990: the much-maligned Ostalgie was not sustained by a real desire to return to the GDR, but was more an attempt to depart from the GDR past properly, to make sure that this past would not continue to haunt Germany as a ghost.

Kirsten embodies Travelling Symphony’s spirit. Mere survival is not enough, “the show must go on” for a very precise reason: only through staging symbolic fictions can we resolve actual problems. That’s why a direct deep conversation between Tyler, Clark and Elisabeth would not work: only by way of participating in a fiction (each of them playing a role in the staging of Hamlet) can they come to terms with their destructive tensions.

This, of course, is what doesn’t happen in Shakespeare’s Hamlet which is also focused on a similar problem (how to let the past go in peace, i.e., how to properly bury the dead so that they will not return as ghosts). It happens neither in the play itself nor in the play within the play: the performance by the actors of Travelling Symphony doesn’t bring peace but just raises the tensions to the point of explosion. In Station Eleven, the peace performed is Hamlet itself, and it is this fiction that as it were falls into reality. Tyler-Hamlet really wants to kill Clark-Claudius who departs from Shakespeare’s finale by assuring Tyler-Hamlet that he also loved Tyler’s father Arthur. Arthur, the old Hamlet figure who dies at the beginning of the series, is presented as a ruthless narcissist exploiting all around him, and the solution is not to reject him as a monster but to declare that all loved him as he was.

Such a twist is unimaginable in Shakespeare’s play: if, in the final conflict, Claudius were to tell Hamlet that he also loved and respected his father, this would appear as a manipulative lie. But what if Hamlet were to write a different story for the visiting actors to perform, a story in which Claudius doesn’t murder the king but the king just dies of an accident (like a virus in Station Eleven)? This would cast a totally new light on the father-ghost who would appear as an evil manipulator and liar – Hamlet himself has suspicions pointing in this direction. Or, what if the play within a play were to be performed as it was written by Hamlet, and Claudius would react to it not with the implicit admission of guilt but with a simple “Not true! I loved my brother king!”?

So, the Travelling Symphony has Shakespeare, but in a very specific way, not with absolute fidelity to the past advocated by Clark. Along similar lines, The Fast Runner, a unique film retelling an old Inuit (Eskimo) legend, was made by the Canadian Inuits themselves in 2001. The director Zacharias Kunuk decided to change the ending, replacing the original slaughter in which all participants die with a more conciliatory conclusion. When a culturally sensitive journalist accused Kunuk of betraying authentic tradition for the cheap appeal to contemporary public, Kunuk replied by accusing the journalist of cultural ignorance: this very readiness to adapt the story to today’s specific needs attests to the fact that the authors were still part of the ancient Inuit tradition.

Such an “opportunistic” rewriting is a feature of premodern cultures, while the very notion of “fidelity to the original” signals that we are already in the space of modernity, that we have lost our immediate contact with tradition. This is how we should approach numerous recent attempts to stage some classical operas by not only transposing their action into a different (most often contemporary) era, but also by changing some basic facts of the narrative itself. There is no a priori abstract criterion which would allow us to judge success or failure: each such intervention is a risky act and must be judged by its own immanent standards. Such experiments often but not always ridiculously misfire, and there is no way to tell it in advance, so one has to take the risk. Only one thing is sure: the only way to be faithful to a classic work is to take such a risk. Avoiding it, sticking to the traditional letter, is the safest way to betray the spirit of the classic. In other words, the only way to keep a classical work alive is to treat it as “open,” pointing towards the future, or, to use the metaphor evoked by Walter Benjamin, to act as if the classic work is a film for which the appropriate chemical liquid to develop it was invented only later, so that it is only today that we can get the full picture. And this is also how Travelling Symphony treats Shakespeare.

What is really refreshing about Station Eleven is that Kirsten (who vaguely plays the role of Ophelia) is very different from Shakespeare’s Ophelia: actively engaged, the true star of Travelling Symphony, with no trace of madness in her. This, of course, is no longer Shakespeare’s Ophelia. In Station Eleven the madman is none other than Tyler, the figure of Hamlet itself, who is in the end redeemed, rid of his madness and rejoins the Travelling Symphony. True, in one of the key episodes—the seventh—Kirsten as a child comes dangerously close to madness: she is fully obsessed with the comic book Station Eleven, insisting that with Jeevan and Frank they stage it in the apartment where they are stuck, although this may cost them their lives. But you cannot directly stage the fundamental fantasy: only when Kirsten discovers Travelling Symphony and joins it, can she find peace.

What we should bear in mind is that this reconciliation is into the series form itself. As it already happens in the novel, the story is not told in a linear way but through a complex network of temporal jumps. This mixture of past and present is not just a stylistic exercise: the alteration between storytelling modes gives the series a specific rhythm. The odd-numbered episodes expand character development to a full hour of television (say, Miranda’s story makes up the entirety of the third episode, and the Jeevan story all of the ninth episode), while the even-numbered chapters trace Kirsten’s journeys to and with the Travelling Symphony, gradually exploring the sorrows and the joys of a post-apocalyptic world till she finds reconciliation in her performances.[7]

Temporal jumps also happen in each of the ten episodes, and, in an extraordinarily subtle way, the network of temporal jumps within each episode makes it an organic whole. (The unity of every episode is also sustained by musical texture: in episode 8 it is “Ave Maria,” in episode 6 “Campanella,” in the finale “United We Stand,” plus numerous contemporary rock and blues fragments.) Each temporal jump is grounded on a continuity of a thematic line which reaches across linear time. The paradox is that if the story were to be told in a continuous linear way, it would have been much more fragmented – true continuity is beyond linear temporality. The supreme case occurs at the beginning of the last episode which jumps back to Miranda waiting to die in her hotel room in Malaysia. As we have already seen, Miranda checks Clark’s flight and realizes that another plane is coming in; she contacts the pilot and begs him not to let anyone off the plane. But there is another temporal jump back in this scene: when Miranda speaks with the pilot of the other plane trying to convince him not to exit the plane, she tells the pilot about her past trauma (when she was a small girl, her entire family died in a tornado and she was the only survivor), and it was this trauma that motivated her to write Station Eleven… If this trauma were to be directly presented at the beginning, as the origin of the Book, it would be meaningless: the original trauma can only be properly presented from a top-down standpoint, when we already know the final outcome of the events, since it acquires its role retroactively.

There is a basic moment (or extended period) of time for each episode. In episode 1 it is Year Zero, the viral catastrophe, and, as expected, we get many jumps to the past (Arthur’s life) and, at the end, to the future (Kirsten as the actress at Travelling Symphony). Again, each temporal jump is grounded on a continuity of a thematic line which reaches across linear time. Say, when Arthur or Clark are shown talking about their past friendship, we jump to a short scene from their past, usually depicting a conflict. When Kirsten, still a very young girl, displays her obsession with acting, we jump to her future when she effectively is a popular actress. To reiterate, the paradox is that if the story were to be told in a continuous linear way, it would have been much more fragmented: it is the texture of temporal jumps that, instead of interrupting the linear deployment of the narrative, fills in its gaps and thereby creates an organic unity, a unity beyond linear temporality. Only at this level is reconciliation possible.

Although at the end we remain in the same ruined world, the atmosphere is that of reconciliation. Both “deviations,” the Rightist (Clark’s fixation on the past before the catastrophe) as well as the Leftist (Tyler’s “cultural revolution,” a total erasure of the past), are left behind. The fixation on the Severn City Airport where the group survived isolated for twenty years under Clark’s leadership is over. Tyler does the right thing (although for the wrong reason) when he burns and destroys the Museum of Civilization. Severn City Airport is no longer the fixed focal point; the link between communities is established by a group of permanent travelers. We thus reach a kind of proper ending, a new community which enables all the groups to get rid of the pressure of the past and of the Catastrophe itself.

And to conclude with a point ignored by everyone: after the catastrophe, the new society that is emerging is a Communist one. No money, no salaries, a true war Communism. Now, Station Eleven is not alone in this pro-Communist twist. How can one not like The Last of Us, if for no other reason than for the fact that the only post-apocalyptic community that is not caught in the cycle of self-destructive violence—a small thriving community in Jackson, Wyoming, reached by Joel and Ellie in episode 6, in which basic solidarity and cooperation prevail—is explicitly designated by one of its citizens as Communist? There definitely is a Communist dimension in many portraits of a post-apocalyptic world.

 

Notes:

[1]  Resumed from The Substance is allegedly the feminist horror movie of the year. I hated it and The Substance – Wikipedia

[2] See “La passe. Conférence de Jacques-Alain Miller,” IV Congrès de l’AMP – 2004, Comandatuba – Bahia, Brasil.

[3] Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven, New York: Knopf 2014.

2 Station Eleven, created by Patrick Somerville, HBO 2024.

[5] ‘Station Eleven’: All the Timelines in the HBO Max Miniseries Explained (thewrap.com)

[6] See ‘Station Eleven’ Book-to-TV Differences – How Is HBO Max’s ‘Station Eleven’ Different From Emily St. John Mandel’s Novel? (esquire.com).

[7] Station Eleven review: The HBO Max show invents a cozy post-apocalypse | Vox.