I Remember Damage - Station Eleven (2021) Ep1-2

Podcasts Jul 27, 2025

A stale wind blows in from over the bay, warm and foreboding, and you feel, more than know, that danger rides on the horizon, threatening the small life you've built after the collapse.

Starting our coverage of Patrick Somerville's Station Eleven (2021), David and Patrick are joined by ‪@DarthdYT‬ to open a tall glass of emotions and drink deep from the "wait... what is this show" bottle.

Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/

D.C. McNeill: Mandel's writing is very heavily focused on this kind of, she writes about this impossible task that we all try and accomplish every day, where we have this vast ocean of experiences, and we try and hold these experiences, and we take these buckets after bucket after bucket of this ocean, trying to hold the shape of the entire strangeness and disaster of life, and we try and make it into these buckets, we keep taking this water and trying to make it into a shape. And I think for Mandel, her work is about the way that grief exists in a perpetual state alongside having of something. Like, the grief of something and the having of something are in some ways the same thing, and that transcends time and space for Mandel.

And I think these first two episodes are a pretty clear indication to me that in Somerville's miniseries, he's trying to achieve the same thing. There's a lot of vacillation between a thought and a feeling and things being superimposed into places where they're not. And yeah, it's very unusual for a TV show, is my feeling.

Patrick: Yeah, that's well said. Yeah, the show seems to be most interested in stirring up intense emotions in the characters. And it's sort of like, you know, the traveling theater group is like a narrative conduit to express those themes, you know, via like comparison with, you know, like when she's when she's giving the, what are they what are they doing Hamlet? She's doing the Hamlet speech and it's contrasting against her losing her or finding out her parents are dead and just drawing a direct parallel between like, I don't know, self-fulfillment and sincere like true intense emotion. Like that's like the most important thing.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah. And I think maybe for one of the one, one of the things I want to put a pin in for us to kind of keep an eye on is like the place of art in this story. Because I think this is also a show intensely interested in like, like what is art? We'll talk about it when we get to the summary and some of the big pieces here, but like there is a physical object in this world that is like central to the narrative and central to the emotion of the thing. And it's a comic book, right? It's a piece of art. As is the traveling symphony who performed Shakespeare as you sort of alight at their path.

It's fascinating to have a show so specifically thinking and feeling about like, what is it to make something? Like what does memory mean? What does it mean to exist? And as you say, that scene which we'll talk about in some detail, where she's doing the Hamlet monologue while she's, and it's the Hamlet monologue where he's trying not to, his mom is basically like, hey, can you just get over this?

Like your dad's dead, I married your uncle, like you're being a bit of a bitch about this. And Hamlet's like, dude, that's not why I'm pissed off. And he can't say that he suspects that his uncle killed his dad. He has to sort of talk in circles around this grief and he gets increasingly upset throughout the scene. And as she's doing this, you're flashing back to when she found out her parents died. It's just, it's gut wrenching because it's like how much of that is actually acting and how much of that is just, she's reliving that moment. And every time they do Hamlet, is she just reliving that moment every time for that scene? And what does that mean? Is that where's the line with sincerity at that point? And is it authentic? And we can all sort of have questions like that.