The Wrong Life - Station Eleven (2021) Ep3-4

Podcasts Aug 10, 2025

Wind ripples through the grass, the blades pale and grey in the starlight, and the shifting trees and blank horizon remind you of that feeling, serenity, the feeling of cosmic logic with your first love, a lifetime ago, before the world ended.

David and Patrick are joined by ‪@DarthdYT‬ to dive head-first into a bottle episode, and then deal with the Prophet's violent ends.

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

Patrick: I mean, I, you know, I could be completely wrong, but I feel like this show is, like, the sci-fi part, the astronaut part was kind of a red herring. It's not, it's not going to go into that at all, I think. I think it's just going to be about, I think it's just going to be about people going on.

D.C. McNeill: He's calling his shot, folks. He's calling his shot. There you go. Let's see, shall we? Yeah, I do agree with you that it this, to me, these two episodes, in particular, the Miranda episode is just, it's the most like as a TV show and like as a writer, you could sit down, spin your chair around and like say to camera, this is my pieces on like what this show is about.

One of the things I did want to give you, this is from an article by David Collins, specifically about Lauren Cass. I'm not going to talk about the Lauren Cass bit. Sorry, the article is by Max Reinan about David Collins. It's called Associative Structure and the Absence of Casual Narrative Progression. I just want to give you a little section here, which I think maybe expands a little bit on some of the frustrations Darth has. But I just think it gives us some language that we can use to talk about what makes the show different than what you're expecting from normal television or normal stories. He starts with this Greg Curry line from Greg's 2006 book where he says:

"One way to test any theory about the determinant features of any narrative is to construct cases in which those determinants, or the things you claim are determinants, are varied in the service of then seeing whether intuitively, this results in a variation in the narrative, in the narrativity of the discourse. While causality, conflict, and change are almost universally held to be necessary conditions of narrative itself, not every fictional work that plausibly counts as a narrative, in fact, contains these elements.

Among the small number of films that downplay or deemphasize casual causal connections between scenes and events, most tend to fall into one of two groups. The first consists of films containing multiple storylines that are only loosely related, e.g. Nashville, Code Unknown, and many of Guillermo Arriaga's screenplays. The second consists of anthology films comprised of a number of separate, self-contained segments linked by a common thread or theme, e.g. Dreams by Kurosawa, Slacker by Linkler, Three Times by Who. What is notable about the film I want to focus on here, Chris Fuller's Lauren Cass, is not only that it issues all three Cs, causality, conflict and chance, but it is also non-causally based plot doesn't fit into either of the above groups and more closely instead resembles outliers such as Gummo and The Exiles in its approach to structure and character. These last films fall within a subgenre of American independent cinema" and then he goes on. But the things I wanted to put forward were causality and conflict as the two bits of language that I think we need to access here in order to sort of better articulate some of the maneuvers that Station Eleven is doing.

Because for example, the Miranda episode does not necessarily logically causally follow the end of the previous episode. The end of the previous episode, episode two, ends with Alex singing her dirge and Kirsten stabbing the stranger and then the stranger vanishing the next morning. This Miranda episode doesn't have anything causally to do with that previous episode nor is there any conflict that is generated by that previous episode that is carried through to the Miranda episode, right?

And so I just wanted to give us that language here because I think one of the things that Ryan does in that article that I think is something that we will end up doing is going, okay, if that's the case, what does that produce for us? Where does that provide limitations in the text? And what does that do to how we're taught by the text how to read the text, right? How does watching the television show and going, okay, that episode didn't seem to have a lot to do with that previous episode, why is it here? How does that teach us to better meet the text where it is? And how does that teach us how to understand what's going on? Right?

Because I think a more cynical person could look at that Miranda episode and go, it's a bottle episode. That was a waste of time. It didn't progress the plot.

I think that's like, that's a thing I could see some people thinking, that you have to, that's crazy to me. But like, I think you could reasonably attend that position and hold that with a fair amount of confidence if you're not sort of thinking too deeply about what the episode is saying, right? Like, there's a difference between an episode containing themes and then an episode expanding on those themes and having something to say about them.

And that Miranda episode to me is going, here's a thesis about like art and the human experience and in some ways love. And also, here is a thesis about this guy, Arthur Leander, right? I mean, we also have to keep in mind that Arthur is ostensibly so far the connective tissue between every character, right?

Every character that we have is one degree of separation away from Arthur Leander in some way. He is sort of the central figure in Station Eleven at the moment. Obviously, he's not the protagonist, right? That's Kirsten.

But that is also something to keep in mind, is that if we think of this as an anthology story, instead these anthologies are connected by Arthur as the kind of the common element in all the anthologies, if you like.

Patrick: Yeah, he gets imbued with like some sort of cosmic significance.

D.C. McNeill: Yeah, he seems like he's not a great person to have in your life either. That's something that I think we'll increasingly talk about is like Arthur might be a little bit like a piece of shit kind of, maybe, which is pretty fun.

Darth: I had an interesting thought while you were giving that description. And I think I couldn't answer this question until the entire series is finished. And then I can go back and rewatch Episode 3.

But I'm wondering if it will make more sense if it does tie into the previous episode, because you get these glimpses of her writing the book over the course of however many years or whatever. And do some of the drawings change over time?

Do some of the text, some of the dialogue in the book, does it not make it into the final version? And does that text that we see little clips of, does that change the context of Episode 2 or tie into it in any way? So I kept trying to figure out if that was going on during Episode 3 and I just didn't know enough to catch it yet or anyway.