‘Station Eleven’ Series Finale Recap: Final Destination

In the exchange that opens the final episode of Station Eleven, a young Kirsten Raymonde asks Miranda Carroll about her job. It’s logistics, Miranda tells her—“the path things take from A to B. It’s always made sense to me.”

Logistically speaking, Station Eleven took a circuitous path to get from A to B. Its inciting incident was the chance meeting between Kirsten and Jeevan Chaudhary, and its final moments saw them saying goodbye and going their separate ways. But oh, what a journey.

The big revelation of this episode (written by series creator Patrick Somerville and directed by Jeremy Podeswa) is that Miranda played a surprisingly outsized role in making that reunion possible—tracking down and calling the pilot of the stranded, flu-ridden Gitchegumee Air flight whose failure to de-plane its passengers saved the lives of Clark and Elizabeth and everyone else in the airport where Kirsten and Jeevan finally reunite. It was Miranda who, drawing on the horrible story of her own childhood—watching her family get electrocuted by a downed power line during Hurricane Hugo while she herself was spared—persuaded the pilot not to let the passengers off the plane. (She did this in the hotel room of her dying colleague Jim, whose passing is both peaceful and vaguely comical.)

It was also Miranda who created the Station Eleven graphic novel, which essentially guided both Kirsten and the Prophet, Tyler Leander, throughout their lives’ progress toward that airport. It’s what inspired his child army to invade the place with landmines, and it’s what enabled Kirsten to talk the bomber down. It’s also what gave Kirsten and Tyler a connection strong enough that she cast him as Hamlet in the Traveling Symphony’s climactic performance of the play, opposite Clark as Claudius and his mother Elizabeth as Gertrude.

Much else happens over the course of the hour. Sarah, the Conductor, dies as she holds the hand of Jeevan, now a traveling doctor. Brian, the Museum of Civlization’s goodwill ambassador, joins the Traveling Symphony. Alex departs it, to join Elizabeth and Tyler and his child army. Everyone seems to get over the burning of the Museum. And of course, Jeevan and Kirsten reunite.

Looking back over the course of the show, it becomes apparent that Kirsten is…kind of flaky? Not in the unreliable sense of the word—more the vibe from the word’s use in old Stephen King novels, meaning that she’s sort of frayed around the edges, unpredictable, odd and getting odder. After all, she goes from trying to murder the Prophet a few episodes ago to casting him as fucking Hamlet in the finale. Sure, he saved her life in the interim when he rescued her from a militia’s poison darts—but he also used brainwashed children to suicide bomb one of her oldest friends to death in that time period, so I think the two events cancel each other out. [UPDATE: A reader points out that Tyler denied giving this order, claiming the kids went rogue while he was out of commission. I’m not convinced he gets a free pass here given that he’s wandering around with a bunch of brainwashed children and landmines to begin with, but there you have it.]

Indeed, in this very episode, she acts with more suspicion when dealing with Clark and Elizabeth than she does with the child-soldier guy. She’s wrongly convinced herself that the quarantine under which the Symphony is being held is actually a hostage situation, and that the Museum’s airport complex is not a safe place for them to be; this latter point is true, strictly speaking, but only because the Prophet could potentially blow it sky-high with kid-bombers with the right signals. 

The point is, she never quite accurately reads other people. She’s both paranoid and blindly trusting, ready to kill and willing to forgive.

And why wouldn’t she be? She’s had an extremely fucked-up life! She watched the end of the world unfold, watched it claim her parents. She saw one of the two men who kept her alive in the first 100 days get stabbed to death before her eyes, and thought the other one had vanished on her, presuming him long dead.

As we see in the Prophet Tyler’s parallel journey, these early traumas can mess us up big-time, pretty much forever. The show makes no bones about how the results of Tyler’s snake-bitten attempt to rescue a passenger from the stranded Gitchegumee Air flight—watching the man get shot to death before his eyes, getting sentenced to a month-long quarantine for the crime of helping the guy—drove him to evil. (It also apparently made him hella persuasive, given that shot of what seems like at least a hundred child followers of his gospel.)

In the end, it seems as if the show grants Tyler forgiveness. He heads off into the sunset with his mother Elizabeth, his recent convert Alex, and dozens upon dozens of children. Certainly Kirsten forgave him, admitting to a change of heart after first trying to kill him, personally recruiting him into the play so he could work out his issues with Elizabeth and Clark, and so forth. 

It’s easy to imagine a world in which Kirsten, instead of embracing Jeevan, demanded first an account of his whereabouts for the past two decades and an apology for abandoning her, the fact that it wasn’t his fault notwithstanding. They don’t pick up as though they’d never parted or anything—he has a whole family of his own now, as he explains to her—but it goes pretty smoothly, all things considered.

And again, why wouldn’t it? In Station Eleven’s post-apocalyptic landscape, there’s a premium value placed on people—just their sheer existence in a world that nearly wiped them out within living memory. Simply put, there aren’t enough people to go around if you start looking at some of them as unforgivable. So the guy with the kamikaze kids is welcomed back into the fold of humanity. It’s not as if humanity can afford to lose him.

I think that might be why I look at Kirsten and Jeevan’s parting with such confidence that they will indeed reunite, as they both say they will. Station Eleven’s core belief is that even amid the worst of things, at least a few people will look out for a few people more. Sometimes this takes the form of art, created to bring joy to people’s otherwise difficult lives, but it can take other forms as well. Jeevan’s long-ago care for Kirsten didn’t save the world, any more than Miranda’s phone call to the pilot of that stranded airplane did. But they both saved some people, and in the world of this powerful, humane series, perhaps that will do. 
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 10 on HBO Max