‘Constellation’: The Multiverse Meets Space Meets a Giant Headache
Doppelgangers, specters, and mirrored realities all play a central role in Constellation, yet more pedestrian elements like interesting characters and intriguing storytelling are sadly missing from Apple TV+ latest serialized series, which premiered Feb. 21. A turgid sci-fi saga whose mystery is obvious from the outset—or, at least, from the moment the show stops dawdling about with its protracted prologue—it’s a head-scratcher only in the sense that it’s difficult to imagine why anyone thought that this tale required eight hours when it could have been handled by a two-hour feature. When streaming services inevitably start cutting back on original productions, meandering and mundane ventures such as this will be first on the chopping block.
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 toward comrade Paul (William Catlett), he activates a top-secret experimental NASA gizmo known as the CAL (for “Cold Atomic Lab”) and the ISS is suddenly struck by an unknown object that wreaks havoc on its life support systems. Since Jo was already scheduled to embark on a spacewalk that day, she heads outside and locates the cause of their calamity: a desiccated corpse in an orange USSR cosmonaut suit from decades earlier. This is totally inexplicable, and to make matters worse for Jo, there are no cameras capturing this discovery, and the body floats away before she can corral it to show to others.
During this disaster, Paul is fatally injured, and with just one working escape capsule, Joe sends her fellow astronauts back to Earth and stays aboard the ISS to fix the remaining pod. As she endeavors to get herself off the station, Jo sees and hears various incomprehensible things (some involving Paul). She’s also ordered to recover the CAL by Henry Caldera (Jonathan Banks), the chief scientific consultant at Rocket Propulsion Laboratories, who’s convinced that during its few seconds of operation, the device succeeded in finding a new form of matter. Constellation spends the majority of its first one and a half episodes watching Jo tinker with batteries and cables in an effort to depart the ISS, thereby immediately establishing that showrunner Peter Harness’ narrative has been distended to laughable lengths.