‘Constellation’ Review — Apple TV+’s Newest Sci-Fi Horror Series Is Stellar

The Big Picture

• Constellation
  is the latest Apple TV+ science fiction series that offers a unique and inventive vision.
• The series follows Jo, a troubled woman with memory issues, as she navigates time and space while trying to find answers.
• The series immerses viewers in strange and in-between spaces, delivering often emotionally resonant moments and beautiful visuals.

It has been said a thousand times at this point, but there is no streamer currently out there making science fiction such a centerpiece of their programming quite like Apple TV+. For All Mankind, Foundation, Invasion, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Severance, and, yes, even Silo have all left their stamp on the genre. Each, while distinct in both quality and tone, has felt like part of an emphasis that is not present on other streamers. Where those like HBO cancel inventive original science fiction shows like Raised by Wolves, Apple TV+ has become a hub for often strange and sweeping genre visions that you can’t get anywhere else. While not the best of the bunch, as that superlative still belongs to Lee Pace’s Foundation, creator Peter Harness‘ Constellation is now the next bold series in this intriguing trajectory for the streamer.

What Is ‘Constellation’ About?

The series begins with the troubled Jo (Noomi Rapace), who seems to be on the run from something with her confused daughter Alice (Davina and Rosie Coleman) right by her side. Where she is going or why is left uncertain, save for the story’s urgency that frequently plunges the viewer headfirst into horror elements at key moments. Namely, Jo appears to be having a hard time remembering things; more than that, it’s as if her body is not entirely sure where and when she should be. Soon, the series rips back through time to Jo on board the I.S.S., when disaster struck. As Constellation proves to be more engaging than a certain recent space thriller with a similar premise, Jo witnesses something that nobody else does in the course of making repairs. When she is subsequently left alone on the station, these strange instances begin happening even more frequently as time and space start slipping away. Jo manages to find her way home, despite what seems like unavoidable death, but that doesn’t solve her problems. Instead, the question then becomes: is the home Jo is returning to indeed the same one she left, or is she even the same person that she was when she departed?

Of course, the various people surrounding her try to come up with logical explanations for this — that is, if they aren’t outright delegitimizing what she remembers. Sometimes this can be very blunt, but this doesn’t doom the affair as it speaks to the way people may try to reduce the inexplicable into something simpler they can wrap their heads around. The most well-intentioned, including Jo’s husband Magnus (James D’Arcy), toss out potential theories ranging from stress to PTSD, but hardly anyone seems to be asking the bigger questions — except for former astronaut Henry Caldera. Played by Jonathan Banks of the brilliant Better Call Saul, Caldera is a bitter man who will also stroll in to offer a crash course on quantum mechanics. He too seems to have seen something himself and believes that his discovery could change our understanding of the universe as we know it.

Not only is Banks a delight, playing a refreshingly crotchety character, but he also hits the story’s grimmer notes when the audience realizes that something more sinister may be going on. The series even goes so far as to approach being a Jekyll and Hyde riff, which the veteran actor captures with a perfect sense of gleeful delight. Rapace is similarly solid, conveying authentic desperation and paranoia without ever overplaying the character as she begins to try to find the answers that are being kept from her. Although the way the character is written can be periodically one-note, Rapace makes her journey feel like something more as we get to see fear increasingly taking hold of Jo’s mind. When we are brought back to the present, as she starts to piece things together, Constellation truly takes hold.

‘Constellation’ Finds Life and Death in Sci-Fi’s Liminal Spaces

Any details about what shape or form the final two episodes of Constellation‘s season take require withholding to preserve the experience. What makes it all work is the way the show immerses us in the strange in-between places. These liminal spaces, which are occasionally bridged via clever dialogue tricks, collide with each other in the minds and bodies of the characters. This is felt from the very beginning, when Jo can go from the space station down to Earth and back in the blink of an eye, though the device burns brightest in the conclusion.

While nowhere as bold, there are echoes of the sensibilities of Skinamarink or The Outwaters at the core of Constellation, along with a slight sampling of something like Interstellar. The answers it uncovers aren’t wholly surprising, but they are as emotionally resonant as they are strikingly shot. The journey is one of profound loss just as it is flooring discovery, much like what defines the beauty and terror of the universe itself.

Constellation premieres with its first three episodes on February 21, exclusively on Apple TV+ in the U.S., and new episodes release every week thereafter.

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