‘Station Eleven’ Episode 6 Recap: Captives

They can’t all swing for the fences.

Titled “Survival Is Insufficient”—there’s no particular relationship I can detect between the title and the content; it’s almost like they just grabbed a phrase from the Station Eleven graphic novel out of a hat, but whatever—this is the slightest episode of the series so far. Which, to be clear, is perfectly fine! Sometimes you just need to push the story in a certain direction, making incremental progress toward your eventual goal. (This used to be much more of a thing in the days of twelve-to-thirteen-episode prestige-TV seasons, but even early seasons of, say, Game of Thrones bear this tendency. You learn to live with it.)

The episode concerns itself with two separate journeys. After the suicide-bombing-by-child that kills the Traveling Symphony’s retired co-founder Gil, the survivors debate their next move with Sarah, the Conductor, who wants to get back on the road. They’re tracked down by the mysterious representatives of the Museum of Civilization—just as garrulous as always, but this time wielding guns. They promise the troupe that its other half, the ones concerned with music rather than drama, have already made the journey to the Museum; the Conductor, who’s simultaneously drunk, hung over, grieving, and suffering from the breakage of her special glasses, agrees to go along.

When they arrive at the Museum’s complex, which sure does look a lot like a wing of a certain airport we recently visited, the reunion between the Symphony’s two halves is a joyous one…except for the seizure that the Conductor suffers. Dieter (Joe Pingue), one of the Symphony’s de facto leaders, rushes to her aid, a task a bit more difficult than usual because the Museum has enough working electricity to operate security doors, elevators, and who knows what else. 

But it’s Kirsten who goes on the real journey in this episode. Beginning with a flashback in which she loses the baby version of her eventual friend Alex and meets Gil for the first time, she navigates a world of constant peril. In the present, she and her friend Sayid (Andy McQueen), breaking off from the main group, discover a mock graveyard in which all of the Traveling Symphony’s members are “buried”; the threat of what will happen to them if they defy the mysterious Prophet is implicit. Ignoring the multicolored flares the Conductor sends up—they use a complex color code to communicate with each other from a distance—Kirsten sets out to find the Prophet on her own.

She’s waylaid by his child soldiers, all of whom are deeply embedded in the Station Eleven graphic-novel mythos, complete with makeshift space-age helmets. They take her to their proverbial leader, who she nearly kills once again before he convinces her, at least somewhat, that the Museum people are a greater threat, with a superior level of technology and weaponry. He needs her help, he says, to access their tower and regain something of his that they’ve taken; if she helps him find his treasure, he’ll help her reunite with her loved ones.

Kirsten and the Prophet, aka David, bond somewhat on their journey. She realizes how he and his second-in-command, Cody, use the Station Eleven mythos to help the children in their charge feel like their lives have a purpose. He explains to her that his father, a “selfish bastard,” used to talk shit about his first wife in Spanish, not realizing that she too could speak the language. And he wonders how Kirsten knows the Station Eleven story, a question that has to be just as pressing to him as the reverse is to her. In his own weird world, she’s as big an anomaly as he is in hers.

Then some bad business involving the macho survivalists known as the Red Bandanas goes down. Militia members attack Kirsten and the kids, killing Cody even as Kirsten uses her prodigious knife-throwing skills to kill one after another. In the end, though, she’s simply outnumbered, and that’s where the episode ends; from the pattern the show has established, we’re due for another flashback episode next, and thus the mystery of Kirsten’s fate must wait until next week.

Even if this is a mostly business-y episode, there are still plenty of gems to be found while sifting through. I really loved, for example, the way young Kirsten promises baby Alex, whom she lost track of while engrossed in her copy of Station Eleven, that she’ll never read the book again—the kind of painfully obvious lie that’s meant, full-hearted, when it’s uttered. I loved the fake graveyard for the Traveling Symphony, blunt and ominous. I loved the revelation of the Prophet’s child army as a sort of cargo cult, hanging on every word from a story in a comic book they’ve never even read. (Speaking as a long-time comic critic, if only the non-superhero ones had this kind of power!) I loved the detail of the main Museum of Civilization guy referring to a period of amnesia during which he left the Museum and returned; perhaps he’s the ridiculous agent with the Italian accent we saw in the airport episode after all. I loved Dan Romer’s slippery, constantly transforming score. I even enjoyed Kirsten’s Ghost of Tsushima–level ability to tangle with multiple Red Bandanas at once, much as it might have strained credulity otherwise.

I think one of the great ironies of Station Eleven is that even in showing us the aftermath of a far worse pandemic than the one plaguing us for the past two years, there’s still a tremendous sense of community—among the Symphony, among Gil’s retirement community, even among the members of the Museum of Civilization or the Prophet’s child cult. People need each other in this world, for better or for worse, just like they do in our own.

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 6 on HBO Max