by Doppelgangers, mirrors, and mirrored realities all play a central role in constellation, the latest Apple TV+ series, which premiered on February 21, lacks even more pedestrian elements like interesting characters and interesting storytelling. A turgid sci-fi saga whose mystery is clear from the start – or, at least, from the moment the show stops rambling on with its lengthy introduction – it’s just a head-scratcher to the extent that it’s hard to imagine why anyone thought that this story needed eight hours when it could have handled a two-hour feature. When streaming services are sure to start cutting back on original productions, it’s the first on the chopping block will be fractious and controversial ventures like this one.
Aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Jo (Noomi Rapace) FaceTimes with her daughter Alice (Rosie and Davina Coleman), giving her a tour of the zero-gravity environment she’s called home for the past year. At the moment Jo turns her camera towards his comrade Paul (William Catlett), he activates a top-secret NASA experimental gizmo called the CAL (for “Cold Atomic Lab”) and the ISS is suddenly hit by an unknown object that destroys the t -horror. its life support systems. Since Jo was already scheduled to go on a spacewalk that day, she goes outside and discovers the cause of their predicament: a corpse trained in an orange USSR space suit from decades earlier. This is completely inexplicable, and to make matters worse for Jo, there are no cameras accompanying this discovery, and the body floats away before she can stir it up to show others.
During this disaster, Paul is fatally injured, and with only one working escape capsule, Joe sends his other astronauts back to Earth and stays aboard the ISS to repair the remaining pod. As she tries to remove herself from the station, Jo sees and hears various strange things (some of which are related to Paul). She is also ordered to retrieve the CAL by Henry Caldera (Jonathan Banks), the chief scientific advisor at Rocket Propulsion Laboratories, who is convinced that the device managed to discover a new form of matter during its few seconds in operation. constellation spends most of its first episode and a half watching Jo tinker with batteries and cables in an attempt to leave the ISS, which immediately sets the story of astronaut Peter Harness as far-fetched.
The fact that this film is occasionally broken up five weeks later on Earth does little to mitigate its mercy. In these future passages, Jo and Alice enter the dark snowy forests of Sweden. On this trip, Jo listens to static-y astronaut recordings on a Fisher Price tape deck that will feature prominently in the events that follow, and she hears – and then comes face to face – another flip-side Alice. the cabin where they live. This is the beginning of the hours Alice is heard crying “Mama!” making a sad face which is her only expression. Although this ghostly stuff worries him at first, everything is pointed out in short order, what with Jo telling Alice that she doesn’t smell like she used to, and Alice commenting that her mum looks different, and Jo’s husband Magnus (James D’Arcy) acting more than a little surprised by each other’s warmth towards him.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
Between these many baffling developments, as well as unnecessary shots of characters doubled in mirrors, comments about the world being turned upside down, strange encounters with other family members, and Henry providing a handy primer on quantum physics – and the urge to two objects, one light and one dark, can be in the same place at the same time – this is quickly evident constellation it is a work of multiple fiction. However, he does his best to confuse the audience by constantly teasing this fact, including through sequences involving Henry’s “brother” Bud (also Banks), a former astronaut who was bitter about a decades-old space disaster that he survived but took the lives of his colleagues. , and which a reporter continues to claim is an event that Bud is lying about. Since Henry is also a former adventurer who suffered a similar incident to return to Earth other than the deaths, it is easy to put two and two together and realize the true nature of their relationship.
Rapace looks very angry, frantic, and shaken throughout, but Jo is never a main character; it is just one of those many promises constellation he asks us to care about it without first providing a sufficient reason for doing so. Banks is weakened by the show’s early need to keep Henry’s underlying condition a secret, which means he’s just an opaque and slightly sleazy person yelling about CAL and his habit of producing results that he himself is capable of. to see. In the back half, the material gives him more colorful things to do, but by that point everything has gotten so bad that it’s too little, too late. Meanwhile, the rest of the team is rendered in one dimension, with Magnus the wet noodle husband always a step behind everyone else, and Alice the mopey little girl who’s always hiding in a cupboard (who so many of them there) .
constellation It’s all about the “liminal space” between two separate realities that are still connected, and also about establishing rules (ie this quantum physics phenomenon happens to astronauts) and then breaking them without explanation (ie , young Alice can see and visit both worlds). More frustrating than her inconsistency, however, is her inertia. Every other scene is superfluous, and the curse he adds to his drama is so great that it comes across as a case study in time warping. Entire episodes could be dismissed without any significant impact on the overall story, whose convolution is not as mysterious as the decision to devote so much energy to them. Even when he stops playing nice and gets down to business, he doesn’t make much sense, delivering twists that only raise further questions about how this works, what caused it to happen, and why it should. for us to care. At the end, it hints at Season 2 with more answers, but given the dullness of this initial run, it ultimately feels like cold comfort.
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