WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Station Eleven, available now on HBO Max.
It may still feel too soon for a post-apocalyptic story about the world after a raging virus decimates the population, but HBO Max's adaptation of the acclaimed novel Station Eleven still lands. The story is perhaps most relevant to the COVID world, but it's more than just the pandemic that makes the mini-series feel relatable. References to Star Trek, both explicit and more subtle, highlight the show's science fiction leanings and make the sometimes surreal landscape feel familiar.
Station Eleven primarily follows Kirsten, a young girl when the pandemic strikes who has joined up with a theatrical caravan in the decades after. The troupe, called the Travelling Symphony, journies the Great Lakes region performing Shakespeare at various survivor encampments when a local cult leader starts to cause trouble for the survivors.
Star Trek: The Original Series makes an appearance in Episode 4, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren't Dead." As Kirsten waits out the pandemic in a Chicago apartment, she watches "The Conscience of the King," an episode from the very first season of Star Trek. The episode's title is a reference to the Shakespeare play Hamlet and features a performance of the play itself, paralleling the performance of the same play in Station Eleven.
Perhaps less noticeable, the next episode features a small Spock action figure. As one survivor sets up the first incarnation of his museum to Earth's past, he decorates a table with cell phones, an iPod, a Nintendo Switch, a gun, an American passport and the Spock figure, still in its original packaging. The museum is a strange mixture of deadly and playful, of electronic and analog, and the presence of the still-packaged action figure from The Original Series among these otherwise non-descript objects lends a note of color to the collection.
The most significant reference so far, however, is not to The Original Series but the more modern Voyager. Painted on the windows of the lead vehicle of the Travelling Symphony's caravan are the words "Survival is Insufficient." The phrase comes from the Voyager Season 6 episode "Survival Instinct," where Seven of Nine is forced to decide whether it is better to live a full life under the control of the Borg or have just one month as a truly free being.
The episode questions whether surviving without agency, without truly thriving, is any kind of life at all. While the reduced lifespan has no direct corollary in Station Eleven, the idea that surviving alone after the trauma of the apocalypse is not enough resonates throughout the series. Kirsten and the Travelling Symphony focus not on the mundane tasks of gathering food and ensuring shelter but on bringing art to survivors so that those who remain can enjoy this life. The symphony isn't content to just survive the pandemic, their goal is to make a life worth living.
The references to Star Trek in Station Eleven are bolstered by the continuing recurrence of the idea of the traveling astronaut from the fictional graphic novels that feature heavily within the show. The romance of space travel and journeying among the stars backbones these stories that have so enamored Kirsten and that inform the cult leader's religion. It's not directly Star Trek, but when coupled with the explicit references throughout the rest of the show, it's hard not to see the graphic novels as being inspired by the series.
While Station Eleven still has three episodes to go, the mini-series has already established deep roots in the Star Trek universe. It's hard to imagine that the series won't show up again as Station Eleven draws to its conclusion -- especially given that the author of the source material, Emily St. John Mandel, even includes an acknowledgment to Voyager and writer Ronald D. Moore on the back of her novel.
To see what other Star Trek references arise, new episodes of Station Eleven premiere Thursdays on HBO Max.