‘Station Eleven’ Episode 7 Recap: Excursions

“Goodbye My Damaged Home,” the seventh episode of Station Eleven, revolves in part around two or three complex pieces of music, depending on how you’re counting.

The first two are Art Blakey and the Jazz Messenger’s “A Chant for Bu” and A Tribe Called Quest’s “Excursions,” the latter a song that samples and reconfigures the time signature of the former. In the case of “A Chant for Bu,” the song is being played by Frank, the disabled ghostwriter brother of our old hero Jeevan, when he fields a phonecall from his (dying) doctor sister Siya, begging him to let Jeevan into his high-rise apartment.

In the case of “Excursions,” it’s a song Frank spontaneously recites after weeks of painstakingly re-editing and looping samples from a recording given to him by the unnamed rich person whose autobiography he’s ghostwriting. (Ghostwriting itself is a process so painful for this one-time prize-winning travel writer, whose hip was destroyed in a bombing in Sri Lanka years earlier, that he requires heroin to get through it.) Frank splices unintelligible snippets of the recording together to make it sound like the unmistakable “Excusions” beat. Some time before his and Jeevan’s ward Kirsten is to debut her theatrical adaptation of the Station Eleven graphic novel, he drops this recording and his performance of the song alike on their unsuspecting heads. At first it seems like evidence that he might be mentally ill, given the way he seems to argue that this was all a message implanted by the unnamed rich person. But by the end, when everyone’s dancing and having a good time, it simply seems like a playful ruse on the part of a guy who just so happens to like jazz and A Tribe Called Quest an awful lot.

The final piece of music involved here is “La campanella” by Franz Liszt, the sheet music of which Jeevan discovers when he unseals Frank’s apartment door and journeys across the hall to a snow-covered, west-facing apartment, whose previous owner clearly busted out the window and committed suicide. (This despite the presence of a ham radio; a few seconds listening to the despairing communications of the people still using such devices is all Jeevan needs to understand why the guy killed himself, I think.) Wikipedia does a pretty good job of explaining why the piece is so difficult; “It’s impossible” reads the hand-scrawled note on the suicidal apartment resident’s copy of the music. Only after Jeevan returns with the radio—and, extradiagetically, this song on the soundtrack—does Kirsten unveil her play, and with it the final act of her time with Jeevan and Frank.

Art sustained life for the Tribe-loving trio of Jeevan, Kirsten, and Frank; it’s reasonable to assume that art helped end the life of the frustrated Listz-lover across the hall. Such is the power, and the lack thereof, of art.

All of this is important to consider, I think, because Kirsten’s goal in this episode is explicitly about art. The entire episode is viewed in a sort of toxin-induced fever-dream presentation by the older version of Kirsten, who’s been poisoned by her Red Bandana enemies. Her job here in the past—mimicking a time-loop experienced by the graphic novel’s protagonist, who is both him/herself and the leader of the Undersea rebels—is to either persuade her younger self to leave Frank’s apartment a day early, before an insane neighbor barges into the apartment and stabs him to death in the middle of her play…and if that fails, persuade her younger self that staging the play, interrupted though it may have been by the killer, does not make Frank’s death her fault.

As is by now custom with Station Eleven, this episode (marvelously written by Kim Steele and directed by Lucy Tcherniak) is ripe with powerful details. Jeevan telling Kirsten everything’s going to be okay, and Kirsten replying that he’d just said “We’re fucked,” out loud. Jeevan “talking” to his dead sister, and the younger Kirsten showing her older self that this behavior started long before they staked out a cabin in the woods. Frank’s addiction, a direct result of war trauma, and Jeevan’s impatience with it: “We’re not heroin people. We’re barely even weed people!” The lone, Stand-esque voice on the television, fatalistically explaining how no one was prepared for “a flu that does not incubate, it just explodes…a one out of one thousand survival rate.” The terrific visual of the free-standing door that Kirsten passes through to access her memories. Older Kirsten crying at her youthful self’s optimism as she sings “The First Noel” to her new guardians. The passively suicidal Frank, who does not want to leave the familiarity of his apartment even though cold and starvation are now serious threats, refusing to vacate his home for the knife-wielding interloper. Kirsten’s adoption of the killer’s knife as a totem and her signature weapon.

It’s not a perfect episode; the costumes for Kirsten’s play are childlike only in the sense of adults trying to make something look childlike, and it takes you out of an important moment. But it’s a powerful episode nonetheless, in a series that seems to stack one such episode on top of the next. Like logs, or like bodies.

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 7 on HBO Max

Watch Station Eleven Episode 7 on HBO Max