Gettin' My Eps In: Constellation S1E1

Beginning an episodic look at an interesting TV series that somebody else must have watched.

I’m planning to do some episode-by-episode reviews of interesting-looking TV series that I haven’t heard too much about, starting with:

Constellation
Season 1, Episode 1: “The Wounded Angel”
Written by Peter Harness, Ragna Wei, and Sean Jablonski
Directed by Michelle McLaren
Streaming on Apple TV+

It seems like Apple’s streaming service is where interesting shows go to disappear (with a few exceptions, such as Ted Lasso or Severance). I’ve heard very little about several series that had interesting premises, seemed to have very high production values, and involved notable actors and directors. Did anybody watch stuff like Sugar, Silo, or For All Mankind? Should I bother trying those out, or are they going to disappear from the cultural memory within a matter of months? Is it worth watching anything in this era of “peak TV” that has a mind-numbing array of options?

I figured I might as well take the plunge on one of these series, and Constellation seems like a potentially intriguing sci-fi mystery show, with trailers promising something about an astronaut who survives an accident in space and finds reality shifting around her after she returns to earth. The director of the first episode is Michelle MacLaren, who was responsible for a number of episodes of Breaking Bad, as well as some on Better Call Saul, and another potentially interesting Apple TV series, Shining Girls. Plus, it’s got a pretty good cast, including another Breaking Bad alum, Jonathan Banks.

Sure enough, the pilot is kind of intriguing, but it only barely sets things up, not really giving us much in the way of an understanding of what the series is going to be about. It starts with a flash-forward as the main character, played by Noomi Rapace, is driving through a snowy landscape in Sweden with her daughter in the backseat, seeming worried. It looks like she’s fleeing from something, since she gets especially nervous when it seems like a police car is tailing her. They end up at a remote cabin, but after putting her daughter to bed (she seems to be more comfortable watching a video of her mom reading her a story from the International Space Station than she does with the actual woman), she hears something outside and starts looking in the snow for a voice that may or may not have been her daughter yelling “Mom!”

And that’s all we get with the opening for now, as we immediately jump back five weeks (according to a caption). Jo (Rapace) is an astronaut on the ISS, and she’s preparing for a spacewalk. However, before she gets the chance to do so, there’s some sort of accident that makes everything shake around, and Paul, one of her fellow astronauts (William Catlett, who was in the excellent movie A Thousand and One), gets his arm trapped between two pieces of equipment. As the crew scrambles to assess the damage, he quickly goes into shock, and they’re forced to amputate his arm.

Meanwhile, Jo gets to go on her spacewalk after all to try to figure out what hit the space station and whether the damage can be repaired. Unfortunately, it’s pretty bad, to the point that the station will need to be evacuated. As she investigates what appears to be the point of impact, she pulls a strange object out of the machinery, and it turns out to be a dead body in an old Soviet space suit. However, her suit’s camera conveniently goes out, and the body floats away before anyone else sees it.

Back on the station, the injured astronaut is in a bad way, and the crew is unable to save him after he goes into cardiac arrest. To make matters worse, it looks like only one of the two landing capsules will be usable. Since there are four living crew members, and the working capsule only holds three people, one person will have to stay aboard and perform some repairs before they can escape using the other capsule. As the ranking crew member, Jo insists on staying behind.

So, she’s left alone in space, alternating between trying to perform repairs during the 45-minute windows when the station is on the sunlight side of Earth and can function on solar power and bunking down in the remaining capsule when on the dark side. I assume she’s eventually going to be able to get things working and land back on Earth, but it doesn’t happen this episode. Instead, some weird shit starts happening, including time seeming to speed up occasionally and even a strange shift into other time periods, with Jo suddenly finding herself walking down a hallway or even jumping forward to what happened in the prologue. We don’t get any sort of explanation for this yet, and I’m sure it’s a mystery that’s going to last for the rest of the season, but for what we do get, it’s basically just a tease for future episodes, with neither us nor Jo being able to get a handle on the nature of the predicament.

It looks like the mystery is going to have something to do with a quantum experiment that was being conducted on the ISS. Among the people on the ground who are attempting to determine what happened and coordinate the rescue is Jonathan Banks as Henry, a NASA scientist who was communicating with the doomed astronaut just before the accident happened. He was installing some sort of circuitry, and apparently it was working for six seconds before everything went to hell, so Henry is desperate to get those parts back to Earth so that he’ll be able to review the data. He makes some cryptic comments about how it’s a new state of matter that only exists in zero gravity, and he also complains that due to the “political situation” on Earth, the ISS will be abandoned for good once the astronauts evacuate, preventing him from ever getting the information he needs. It seems like he’s possibly going to be the antagonist for the series, since he’s more focused on scientific research than on the lives of the astronauts. But since he’s Jonathan Banks, he does it forcefully and persuasively, relying on his age and perceived wisdom to get people to do what he wants. We’ll have to see what role he’ll play in the continuing weirdness.

As I said, the main thrust of the plot is something of a mystery, so it’s hard to tell whether it’ll shape itself into something compelling. Fortunately, I’m enjoying the details of the show for the most part, including some nice effects work in the space scenes and memorable details such as a crew member bracing her feet on the opposite wall in order to perform zero-G CPR on Paul. I’m hoping things won’t devolve into a mishmash of shifting timelines and people not believing Jo when she tells them what’s going on. We’ll see how it goes, but so far, it’s got enough promise to keep me interested.