Published 9:44 pm Sunday, September 22, 2024 By Joshua Windus There are two series I’ve enjoyed seeing recently. Dune, though the third movie hasn’t been released yet, and Station 11, a television series that I finished awhile back ago. They are both post-apocalyptic stories.
Dune takes place generations after a machine uprising that came so close to defeating humanity that they placed religious restrictions on the development of robotics, forcing them to develop the human mind. The world is feudal and Machiavellian, with noble houses vying for control over each other and a mind-enhancing substance called spice. Station 11 is also science fiction, but it tells a much different story about humanities downfall.
During a COVID-like flu a young girl is orphaned, leaving her to forge a connection with an unlikely father figure who struggles with a responsibility he did not ask for. The aftermath of the flu leaves sees small bands of survivors clinging to each other for survival against the backdrop of a nearly emptied world where cities are quickly becoming overgrown. Both films have very different things to say about human nature.
Dune has inspired countless commentaries. A favorite of mine, by Pilgrim’s Pass, described how the brutal realism of Dune’s environment forces a character who starts out as an archetypical hero to make more and more horrific choices in order to survive in a hostile environment and culture that overwhelms his initial moral reservations. In Station 11, characters are also shaped by fear.
A man potentially contaminated by the Flu is shot to protect the community, because everyone in quarantine is terrified at the return of death and destruction. The incident leaves one character so traumatized that he is bent on destroying any memory of the old world before the pandemic in a desperate attempt to destroy the fear he sees in the eyes of those who have lived through it. But while both stories deal with fear, there is something beautiful about Station 11’s survivors.
For most of them, survival leads people to come closer together. Artists band together to form a traveling theatre group. A single man is forced to take on an orphaned girl as his daughter, and later become a doctor, because there is no one else to do the job.
The words emblazoned on the carriage of the traveling troop sum up the philosophy of the show: “survival is insufficient.” Death is still very real. A midwife loses a mother but is able to save a child.
Characters endure heart-rending goodbyes. But unlike Dune, violence isn’t the means to thwart death, but relationships. The protagonist in Dune master’s the sword.
While the blade isn’t lacking in Station 11, the story of a man learning to become a healer takes a central role. Dune does have a sublime beauty as the rugged environment shapes the characters who live in it. Frank Herbert meant it as a cautionary tale, but it’s also a seductive one.
The very discipline of the characters, shaped by their raw world, contains a beauty of its own. But while the story may very well have a soul, it’s hard to say it has a heart. Every character is so bent on survival, their very humanity becomes warped, which is ironic, since it is a story of how very human decisions can lead people to commit inhumane acts.
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