One of the very first sounds of Apple TV+’s Constellation is a woman’s terrified voice on a cassette tape, insisting in Russian that “the world is the wrong way around.” As statements go, it’s completely impenetrable — what does that mean? — an only more upsetting for it. It is, in short, the perfect way to set the tone for a series that, if nothing else, excels at tapping into the uncanny.
Over the season’s eight hour-long episodes, time goes missing, reflections refuse to do as they’re told, the dead return to life and then vanish again. It’s no wonder astronaut Jo Ericsson (Noomi Rapace) feels so unmoored from the Earth that she’s returned to — and for a while, Constellation runs on the sheer unsettling thrill of watching Jo try to puzzle out what’s really going on. But vibes only go so far when satisfying answers aren’t forthcoming, and by the end of its first season, the drama has run out of steam.
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Constellation
Still, what a start. Constellation hits the ground running so quickly there’s no time, at first, to be bored. An in-media-res opening reveals Jo and her 10-year-old daughter, Alice (Rosie and Davina Coleman), in a car speeding through snowy Swedish hills. What they’re fleeing from, or toward, isn’t immediately clear, but upon their arrival at a cabin they’re immediately beset by uncanny phenomena — like the unmistakable sound of Alice screaming for help from the woods, even as Jo can see Alice is asleep in bed. From there, creator Peter Harness jumps back five weeks to trace the start of Jo’s troubles to the International Space Station, where we spend just a couple minutes getting introduced to Jo’s crew before they’re struck by a catastrophic accident.
These early episodes combine the nail-biting tension of Gravity with the eerie dread of a haunted house, to deliciously spooky effect. Tapping into the terror overwhelming the crew in the immediate wake of the crash, director Michelle MacLaren does not skimp on unnerving sights like giant globs of blood suspended in zero gravity (courtesy of a severely injured scientist played by William Catlett). The quiet that follows the chaos is no less disturbing. Left alone to problem-solve her way home, Jo hears inexplicable bangs, and voices that couldn’t possibly be there. She walks down corridors that transform without warning into a hallway at home, and then back into the space station, within the blink of an eye.
All the while, Constellation signals that whatever’s going wrong in space will turn out to be nothing compared to whatever awaits Jo on Earth. Landing back home, she’s struck by the sense that her life is not as she remembers it, in ways both small (her car is blue, not red) and enormous (she has no memory of the affair that apparently ruined her marriage to James D’Arcy’s Magnus). Her account of what occurred up there is dismissed as madness, and so are her insistences that reality has shifted in some way. Yet there are clearly some who know more than they’re saying about what’s really at play — like Henry (Jonathan Banks), a scientist who seems almost hysterically fixated on the readings from the CAL, a cutting-edge piece of equipment that may have caused the crash.
Why Henry is so obsessed this experiment, he’s loath to explain. But Constellation drops hints by making time for Henry to spell out quantum physics principles like entanglement and the observer effect; by having characters make reference to changelings and ghosts and celestial beings; and by nudging us toward the idea that all of these phenomena might, somehow, be one and the same. It’s thrillingly heady stuff that raises tons of juicy questions, some straightforwardly narrative (who’s covering up these truths, and why?) and some of it grandly philosophical (what is reality, when you really get down to it?). Collectively, they tease an ambitious conspiracy that could extend far beyond this one woman’s predicament to upend everything these characters think they know about how the world works.
Yet as Constellation goes on, its scope begins to shrink rather than expand. The series never lets go of its faintly bonkers vibe, but it increasingly lays its emotional stakes on Jo’s personal journey. In theory, it’s not a bad idea. Strip away the high-concept bells and whistles, and Jo’s difficulties with her family are rooted in the more grounded guilt of a parent who’s been away from her child, only to discover they’re no longer on the same wavelength. Take the sci-fi intrigue out of the equation, and Jo’s professional struggle becomes the familiar story of a woman who’s condemned as crazy for exposing truths that others cannot bring themselves to admit or to believe.
The problem is that once you take away the trippy stuff, Constellation‘s interpersonal drama looks awfully flimsy. Jo’s crisis is easy to sympathize with on a broad, abstract level, but the series never offers any deep sense of who Jo is outside of it, or why we should care very much about what becomes of her. Her relationships with Magnus and Alice are even less clearly defined. In fairness, it is a plot point that Jo complains that this Magnus and Alice do not feel like “her” Magnus and Alice. But it means that we’re being asked to invest in relationships that the characters themselves don’t really seem to understand, while having scant idea of what it means for Jo in the first place to lose the Magnus and Alice she remembers.
Constellation is clearly built with multiple seasons in mind, so it’s not necessarily a surprise that the series doesn’t get around to resolving every mystery it raises. Yet even the answers it does supply hardly land as bombshells. By the time they come, they play only as confirmations of stuff we’ve figured out already. Jo’s story starts with such a bang. Pity it goes out on such a disappointing whimper.
