‘Station Eleven’ Episode 4 Recap: Art Attack

It’s the end of the world, and for good or ill, art lives on. Even art about the end of the world—or a world, or a space-station simulacrum thereof. Station Eleven Episode 4 is all about art’s ability to soothe or exacerbate the world’s wounds; even its title, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead,” cheekily paraphrases the name of Tom Stoppard’s play, itself a riff on Hamlet, a play performed in a modernized version by the characters in the show. Sample quote: “Fuck you, Hamlet.” Times have changed, and art changes with the times. Even the End Times.

As the real world’s Bread & Puppet Theater, a troupe that Station Eleven’s Traveling Symphony would surely recognize as kindred spirits, put it in their Why Cheap Art? Manifesto, “Art is food. You can’t eat it but it feeds you. Art has to be cheap & available to everybody. It needs to be everywhere because it is the inside of the world.” That’s essentially the Traveling Symphony’s ethos, and it’s why they’re greeted so effusively by their former director, Gil (David Cross), and his wife Katrina (Sarah Orenstein), for whom Gil jilted Sarah the Conductor and left the troupe a couple of years past.

Gil and Katrina’s genteel community of former professors—“a country club,” as he puts it self-effacingly—is guarded by an active minefield, but it was too little, too late: The Prophet, whom we met as “David” in the previous episode, has wooed away all of the community’s children, Pied Piper–style. So the “life and light” of the Traveling Symphony is a welcome diversion. 

Much of the episode rests on the shoulders of Kirsten, who surrenders her leading role as Hamlet to her younger friend Alex (Philippine Velge) as the troupe tries out a new version of the play set in 1990s Portland, written by one of their own, Wendy (Deborah Cox). It’s Kirsten who bullshits the Conductor into revisiting Gil and Katrina’s community by saying she heard a rumor that Katrina died. (The Conductor tried to kill Gil when he left her for Katrina; it’s all water under the bridge by now.)

It’s Kirsten, too, who debates Alex about the words of the Prophet, with whom Alex spent considerable time. (Kirsten’s revelation that she stabbed the dude does not go over well with her younger friend.) The Prophet gears his preaching to the “post-pan” youths who have no memory of the world before the flu that wiped humanity out. “There is no before” is their mantra. 

It’s Kirsten who realizes that this slogan is taken directly from the pages of Station Eleven, a book of which she’s spent most of her life convinced she has the only copy. (She hid it in Gil’s desk, which is why she talks the Conductor into returning to his community.) In this episode we learn that it’s a post-apocalyptic narrative, of a sort: In its pages, the mysterious spaceman Doctor Eleven finds himself stranded on a broken-down space station in which an artificial ocean has wiped out virtually all adults, leaving children called “the Underseas” to attempt to form a new society. 

However the book came into the Prophet’s possession, it certainly made an impression. He sends a pair of children, whom we see creepily spying upon Gil’s community from a distance in one of the episode’s more unnerving shots, to destroy what they left behind when they joined him. They’re suicide bombers rigged with landmines on their chests, and when they hug Gil, the world goes white. 

Alex, meanwhile, rides off on a white horse, presumably to join the Prophet’s ranks. In short, it’s all a disaster.

For an incredibly complex episode—I haven’t even touched on the brief flashbacks, and I mean blink-and-you’ll-miss-them brief at times, that show young Kirsten and her guardian Jeevan living and arguing in a cabin in a snowy forest somewhere—it all hangs together brilliantly. We have Mackenzie Davis’s lead performance as Kirsten to thank for that, as well as the expert direction by Helen Shaver, the dreamlike editing by Anna Hauger and Yoni Reiss, and a tight, thoughtful script by Nick Cuse. (Can I just say what a pleasure it is to see some of the writers who made the jump from The Leftovers, which was incredible, to Watchmen, which was a spectacularly overrated mess, return to form here?) I’d also credit the incredible, versatile score by Dan Romer, who by the end of the episode is doing a full-on homage to Mica Levi’s haunting work on Jonathan Glazer’s horror masterpiece Under the Skin. 

I suppose the overall point I’m trying to make is that in Station Eleven, art matters. It brightens the lives of performers and audiences alike—the Conductor’s piano performance in the rain near the end of the episode is really rapturous—but it can also provide a skeleton upon which sinister forces like those of the Prophet can drape their poisonous ideas and actions. There’s no reason to believe end-of-the-world narratives wouldn’t catch on in a big way after an end-of-the-world scenario. I mean, look around you, y’know?

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 4 on HBO Max