Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Constellation’ On Apple TV+, Where An Astronaut Finds Pieces Of Her Life Missing Upon Returning To Earth After A Disaster

One of the reasons we do Stream It Or Skip It is that sometimes you just know if you’re going to keep watching a show after the first episode. In other words, if you’re engaged with the show during that first episode, you’re eager to watch more. But if you’re bored or just can’t get into the characters or situation, you know that life is too short and there are too many shows to watch to waste time on something that doesn’t grab you immediately. That’s what we felt while watching Apple TV+’s new psychological thriller.

CONSTELLATION: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A car drives down a darkened, snowy road, with someone speaking in Russian playing on a kid’s cassette player.

The Gist: Jo Ericsson (Noomi Rapace) is in a paranoid panic as she drives her daughter Alice (Davina and Rosie Coleman) to a remote cabin in northern Sweden. Alice keeps asking when her father, Magnus Taylor (James D’Arcy), will join them, and what’s happened to him. Outside the cabin, she hears what sounds like Alice screaming for her; despite the fact that Alice is sleeping inside, Jo runs out to find out where the screams are coming from.

Five weeks earlier, Alice and Magnus are at home in Cologne, Germany. Jo is in the middle of a yearlong stint on the International Space Station. Jo is about 85 days away from coming home, and the day she’s scheduled for a space walk, Alice FaceTimes with her to say hello.

As Jo brings her tablet with Alice through the station, something makes impact with the space station, causing extensive damage to one of the Soyuz capsules attached to the station. Paul Lancaster (William Catlett), a scientist conducting an experiment trying to find a new state of matter, is injured during the impact and is bleeding profusely from his arm. As two of the astronauts try to treat his injuries, Jo has been informed that the life support systems in the main station are compromised.

RoAs Magnus and Alice are intercepted at the European Space Agency-run school where Alice goes and Magnus teaches, NASA ground control in Houston and Roscosmos ground control in Kazakhstan manage Jo’s space walk, which has now become a repair mission. At the same time, Henry Caldera (Jonathan Banks), who leads the team managing the matter experiment at the Rocket Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, finds out that in the few seconds the experiment was running before impact, that new form of matter was discovered; he demands that the experiment be salvaged, while the ESA personnel and Roscosmos director Irene Lysenko (Barbara Sukowa) disagree.

During her space walk to survey the damage, Jo shockingly finds the body of a female Soviet cosmonaut that somehow made impact with the space station. She reports the body back to Roscosmos, but ground control doesn’t have a visual and when they send another astronaut out to retrieve her, the body has floated too far away for him to get a visual, either.

Back inside the ISS, Jo makes a command decision to stay behind and try to fix Soyuz 1 while the rest of the surviving crew take Soyuz 2 back to earth. She only has 19 hours of oxygen left, and she must stay inside the capsule during the half of the 90-minute orbit when the sun is no longer visible, given that the main station’s solar power capacity is compromised.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Constellation combines the isolation of The Martian, Gravity and Away with the paranoia of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Our Take: Created and written by Peter Harness (the first episode is directed by Breaking Bad veteran Michelle MacLaren), Constellation is less a space drama than it is a conspiracy drama. The action in the series alternates between Jo’s attempts to get herself back to Earth and the aftermath of her return. Yes, we know that she eventually survives the disaster and comes back home, but things are different when she gets back, including her teetering marriage falling apart.

The idea of the show is that what she found above the earth — likely having to do with the body of the female cosmonaut — will affect her life on solid ground. Some of the changes will likely be perpetrated by the various agencies and organizations that want to keep what she found quiet and make the accident somehow go away. But some of it might also be a product of the paranoia she develops as everything goes more haywire on the ground than they did in orbit.

What struck us about the first episode is that, despite the fact that there’s action as the ISS gets hit by the debris and a lot seems to happen, the pacing was still slow and deliberate. Harness is setting up a situation where things will be revealed slowly, likely to make the viewer try to relate to the paranoia Jo is feeling. But that also sets up the potential for viewer frustration, where you just want to find out what is being kept from Jo and why.

As it is, Jo is a bit of a blank slate as we get through the first episode. She loves her family, sure, but as one of the other astronauts says as they decide who stays, “We all have families.” She seems to have an ability to stay cool under pressure. But other than that, we don’t know much about her. The only other character we have any insight into is Caldera, and that might be because Jonathan Banks is so good at saying volumes with a look or a roll of his eyes.

All of the other characters are pretty generic, at least as the first episode closes. Will we find out more about them? Maybe. Or we won’t. It might not matter if the conspiracy that drives Jo nuts is at all interesting and not frustrating to unwind.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: As she follows the screaming, Jo goes to another, similar-looking cabin and finds Alice cowering inside a cupboard, tied shut by the necklace she made for her mother. “Where have you been?” she asks her mother. Jo, who thought she left Alice sleeping in the first cabin, wonders what the hell is going on.

Sleeper Star: As we mentioned, Jonathan Banks can communicate a lot with just an expression, and Caldera’s interest in what’s happening on the ISS is definitely more about the experiment than about saving people’s lives.

Most Pilot-y Line: There are some scenes, like Jo disconnecting a battery from another part of the ISS to use in Soyuz 1, that could have been cut down by at least 30 seconds with the same impact.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re reserving judgement about the slow pacing of Constellation until we get to see more episodes. But for a show that starts with a disaster and leads into a conspiracy, we were surprised at how little we were engaged with the material.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.