11 details you missed in 'Station Eleven,' so far

"Station Eleven" premiered on December 16, adapting Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 novel of the same name into an HBO Max limited series.

A pandemic show based on a pandemic novel airing two years into a global pandemic, "Station Eleven" may seem fatigue-inducing. However, as The Ringer's Alison Herman wrote, the show leverages our own experience of the pandemic to indoctrinate it into its own vision. Even after incredible loss, the apocalypse of "Station Eleven" is green, lush, and full of humanity and art.

Like the book, the series juggles multiple timelines and characters that overlap and unfold gradually episode-to-episode. It's also full of details, symbols, and brief references that enrich your understanding of the series: — here are 11 that you might have missed in the first three episodes.

Within the show's first minute, we see a playbill for the "King Lear" production starring Arthur Leander that kicks off the story's action.

The shot shows the playbill lying unfolded in a puddle, surrounded by dim greenery and miraculously still intact. As the sequence progresses, we learn that this is the theater in which Leander's final performance took place, and where "Station Eleven" begins.

After Arthur and Kirsten prematurely get off the L on the way to her home, the screen on top of the stairs flips to an advertisement for the "King Lear" production starring Arthur Leander.

It's the same image that appears on the Playbill at the beginning of the first episode.

Jeevan buys three bottles of Yoo-hoo, a flavored drink, during his grocery trip with Kirsten. He gets three bottles: two chocolate and one strawberry, hearkening back to his earlier conversation with his sister Siya in the first episode.

After Siya breaks the news about the flu to Jeevan on the train, she talks him down from an apparent panic attack by recounting a story from their childhood.

"Everyone had chocolate but you found that one strawberry," Siya tells Jeevan over the phone.

Arthur Leander and (older) Kirsten read the same page in "Station Eleven," Miranda's completed graphic novel, twenty years apart in the show's first episode, "Wheel of Fire."

The page shows Dr. Eleven, the spaceman of her novel, with a speech bubble. "To the monsters we're the monsters," he says.

In the episode, Arthur cracks open the book after Miranda visits him in Chicago, later passing it on to Kirsten. A relic of the pre-pandemic past, Kirsten carries the novel with her into adulthood. In the first sequence in which we see her as an adult, played by Mackenzie Davis, she's lying in the sand reading the book.

In the second episode, the mysterious man (credited on IMDb as the Prophet) quotes this line back at Kirsten, heightening her suspicion of him.

Dan, a familiar stranger, approaches the Traveling Symphony on their way to St. Deborah by the Water in the show's second episode, "A Hawk from a Handsaw." He, and other members of the Traveling Symphony, wheedle Dieter to allow him to audition with non-Shakespeare material.

He proceeds to give a monologue from the 1996 alien invasion film "Independence Day" that was originally delivered by Bill Pullman as President Thomas J. Whitmore.

"Good morning," Dan says, his voice echoing as if he was speaking into a megaphone. "In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world."

There are a few glimpses of the Traveling Symphony's motto, "survival is insufficient," on the side of a truck in the second episode.

The motto nods to the symphony's mission of bringing music and theater to post-pandemic communities.

The multiple, small tattoos on Kirsten's hand match a symbol that she finds intertwined with a sign on the sign of the road in the second episode.

Later in the episode, Kirsten observes the same symbol drawn in the suspicious man's blood on the rocks where she stabbed him.

When a member of the Traveling Symphony (played by actor Prince Amponsah) presents Kirsten with a switchblade, she quotes Hamlet, the play that the symphony is performing that evening.

"This likes me well," she says, quoting Hamlet in Act 5, Scene 2 of the play, when he selects a rapier.

Miranda draws the J-shaped cross symbol on a napkin in the series' third episode, shortly after meeting Arthur Leander for the first time.

While the symbol cropped up multiple times in the second episode, this is chronologically the first time it appears. Miranda describes it as "a feeling" to Clark.

"What's the feeling?" he asks.

"Cut and run," she replies. "When a squall comes up so fast, you got to cut the anchor and just go."

Miranda cheekily references "Hamlet," the Shakespeare tragedy of the previous episode, while talking with Clark and Arthur at a bar in episode three.

She asks which one is Rosencrantz and which is Guildenstern, referring to the two characters, who are Hamlet's old friends that he turns on when they prove untrustworthy. The characters are, in essence, two halves of one whole, as Clark and Arthur joke in the episode, saying that they're "interchangeable."

"You guys end up the same, at least," Miranda says. "You both get killed by Hamlet."

In episode three, Miranda scrolls through the #arthurleander tag on Instagram after learning about his death. The first post she sees is a black-and-white image of Arthur, uploaded by an account with the handle @Kikiacts1. The profile image is of young Kirsten, presumably in her "King Lear" costume.

It's possible that Kirsten uploaded the image during the continuity of the first episode, as Jeevan watches her scroll through Instagram while waiting for the L.