CONSTELLATION – Review by Susan Granger
Sci-fi reigns supreme as Apple TV+ continues Constellation, its newest space saga. What evolves as a spooky, eight-episode mystery begins in Sweden as a woman is seen driving through a snowy forest with her young daughter.
She’s Johanna “Jo” Ericsson (Noomi Rapace), an astronaut who recently returned from a disastrous mission on the International Space Station, where Commander Paul Lancaster (William Catlett) died after a mysterious ‘collision’ and her colleagues – Russian cosmonaut Ilya Andreev (Henry David), ESA astronaut Yasmina Sun (Sandra Tele) and French astronaut Audrey Brostin (Carole Weyers) – took to an escape pod to conserve oxygen and power for Jo.
After pleas from ground control, Jo manages to save the extraordinary CAL (“Cold Atom Laboratory”) experiment master-minded by aging Nobel Prize-winning scientist/astronaut Henry Caldera (Jonathan Banks) and his cosmic twin Bud.
Described by ‘quantum entanglement’ mumbo-jumbo, its enigmatic purpose somehow relates to an 89-year-old Thought Experiment: “Schrodinger’s Cat.”
(Irish physicist Edwin Schrodinger imagined a hypothetical cat in a box with a mechanism that releases radioactive poison. Until you look inside, the cat is both alive and dead – simultaneously – posing the question of when exactly superposition ends and reality resolves into one possibility or the other.)
So how does this CAL capsule – showing how one particle can exist in two different states simultaneously – relate to Jo? At one point, Henry looks at her, noting that “curiosity killed the cat.” Is that a warning not to try to break the space-time fabric and observe the unknown?
What Jo does come to realize is that the life she comes back to does not appear to be the life she left behind. Her car, once red, is now blue. Her 10-year-old daughter Alice (twins Davina & Rosie Coleman) no longer speaks Swedish and hides in cupboards to escape “the Valya.” Plus, Jo’s marital relationship with husband Magnus (James D’Arcy) has changed.
(Fans of The Matrix may relate to a pivotal choice between reality and illusion that evokes memories of Neo’s red pill/blue pill parallel universe quest.)
Although Jo cannot play piano, when she sits down at the keyboard, she expertly executes Sergei Rachmaninoff’s difficult classical prelude #3, reading the intricate sheet music and exhibiting amazing physical dexterity.
Above all, why is no one willing to acknowledge that – somehow – in space there was a sudden collision with the desiccated corpse of a long-dead USSR female cosmonaut?
Created as a baffling, non-linear, psychological thriller by Peter Harness (BBC’s War of the Worlds miniseries), it’s based on an idea from Sean Jablonski, and directed by Michelle MacLaren, Oliver Hirschbiegel and Joseph Cedar.
The production involved designer Andy Nicholson creating an almost full-scale space station at Germany’s Studio Babelberg, including special effects coordinator Martin Goeres’ camera platforms and microgravity simulator harnesses for weightlessness.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, Constellation is a confusing yet compelling, slow-paced 7, streaming on Apple TV+ with the finale airing on Wednesday, March 27.
