An actor playing King Lear collapses suddenly on stage, and a man training to be a paramedic leaps up from the audience to try and save him. The actor dies. Hours later, the paramedic gets a call from a doctor friend urging him to get out of town immediately: a new disease is spreading rapidly, leaving bodies in its wake. Decades after the pandemic has ravaged the planet, a roving group of actors and musicians called The Symphony return to a small town and find that things are not as they were before. These disparate stories are interconnected, not only by catastrophe but also by the challenge of building a new world. Station Eleven is oft referred to as a dystopia, but there’s more hope here than terror. A crisis is as much an opportunity to tear old systems down as it is to build anew.