Station Elevenenvisions a post-pandemic future that isnt a total downer.
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The seriesStation Elevenis the inverse of everything weve come to expect from the postapocalyptic genre.
Rather than a gray, desaturated landscape, the shows post-pandemic world is lush, green, alive.
It isnt this Cormac McCarthybleak desert landscape, director Hiro Murai says.
It has, weirdly, a childlike wonder to it.
Showrunner Patrick Somerville took his cues from the source material.
Its a looping story that slips swiftly from a present-day pandemic to 20 years later then back again.
Any dully frightening visual adaptation would be an impoverished iteration of the books pragmatic but humane worldview.
The biggest obstacle for the show was how to transform Mandels detached yet loving tone into a visual vernacular.
The series could cohere only if there was unity in how each director understood the project.
Murais visual template combined Somervilles picture of an intimate postapocalypse with Dr. Elevens presence.
He became the shows omniscient narrator.
His perspective was realized through visuals alone without the assistance of a clunky voice-over.
Someone cares about them even at the end of the world.
Its not likeThe Walking Deadversion of things, says Podeswa, who directed three episodes.
For most such shows, he continues, everywhere holds danger; theres dark corners everywhere.
This is the show without dark corners.
1.The Flash-forward Glimpses
1.
Brief flashes interrupt the scene images of the same landscape two decades later.
Somerville calls them instances of hyperintense, sudden objectivity.
Initially, there is a foreboding quality to these flash-forward glimpses.
The world in them is nearly unrecognizable.
It felt deserted and wistful, he says, but it was also serene and warm.
2.The Dr. ElevenEye View
2.
Instead, we see them through the windshield of an abandoned bus, muted and softened by heavy snowfall.
That bus is full of death: Before this shot, Jeevan warns Kirsten away and shields her eyes.
But the perspective from inside the bus places the viewer within the nightmare without needing to depict it.
What happens next, though, is the defining perspective shift for the entire series.
Out of that ghost view, the scene cuts to a drone shot looking down on Jeevan and Kirsten.
Then the camera swoops into a space station hovering above Earth, where Dr. Eleven stands watching it all.
3.The Intimate Close-up
3.
Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) is an adult now, sprawled on a sandy hill reading a book.
It also returns viewers to a sense of closeness.
This postapocalypse is warm, and theres an implicit sense of safety.
Is he this embodied narrator?
Is he an invention within the show?
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