In “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead,” Kirsten connives to reunite everyone at Pingtree once again. When Sarah found out, Gil retired to the golf course, and the Travelling Symphony, for one time only, edited the Wheel. Like a long-haul trucker with a wife at each end of his route, Gil cultivated a secret romance at Pingtree with a lady prof called Katrina. Back then, the Travelling Symphony would occasionally split, musicians moving in one direction and the actors visiting Pingtree, an impeccably named golf-course community populated by professors. Sarah is the troupe’s conductor, but the actors once had a director, too - Sarah’s husband, Gil (David Cross, whom I will always assume has jorts on under his costume, no matter the show). It takes the same route around Lake Michigan - they call it “The Wheel” - and it plays the same Shakespearean plays to the same outposts, over and over again, year after year, nothing changing but the symphony Sarah writes to accompany the action. Alex is the only post-pan in the Travelling Symphony, and the Travelling Symphony is a cobwebby institution. Post-pans don’t assume every stranger is a threat they don’t function out of fear. They crave the progress that pre-pans have seen with their own eyes but now deem impossible. The post-pans are the children born after the flu, the oldest of whom are around 20 - the perfect age for some good old-fashioned misbehaving. And if that’s all true, well, fair enough. The stereotype is that pre-pans are dishonest, too stuck in their own trauma to see the world as it is and too nostalgic to evolve past what it was. What they live in now is what’s left over what they do with their lives is survive. The pre-pans are the people who survived the pandemic and implicitly consider the civilization that they used to know - the “before” - the real world. The world is made up of two races now: pre-pans and post-pans. “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Aren’t Dead” pumps the brakes just enough to fill in some of the gaps on basic plot points, like who started the Travelling Symphony, what life was like immediately following the “first hundred,” and what Miranda’s graphic novel is even about. Instead of first meticulously building out its world, for example, the series urgently dives into characters and story. In some ways, Station Eleven subverts the storytelling norms of speculative fiction.
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