Constellation Season 1 review – Noomi Rapace and Jonathan Banks lead tale of space travel, questions of identity, of what is and isn’t and more

3/5

Constellation Season 1 story: Aboard the International Space Station, a NASA experiment involving a Cold Atomic Lab (CAL) is underway, when a collision with an ‘unidentified object’ leaves one astronaut dead, three fleeing in a capsule to preserve energy and oxygen for the one who has to stay back and retrieve any remnants of the CAL before heading back home on the remaining capsule.

The astronaut, Johanna Ericsson, (Noomi Rapace), makes it back to earth and returns to her husband Magnus (James D’Arcy) and daughter Alice (twins Davina and Rosie Coleman), but soon enough realizes that things appear a lot different than when she left for her stint on the ISS. Her relationship with Magnus is strained, Alice doesn’t speak Swedish anymore, their car is a different colour and the space agencies that sent her aboard the ISS do not believe her version of events that what crashed into the space station was the floating dead body of a dead Russian astronaut.

Johanna, they reckon is experiencing astronaut burnout and having psychotic episodes, for which she is prescribed anti-psychotics. But is that really what’s going?

Constellation Season 1 review: In the first couple of episodes of Constellation, a fairly straight-forward narrative of an astronaut struggling to reconcile with life back on earth, while also dealing with PTSD following the death of a colleague onboard the ISS, plays out. But soon enough, it becomes apparent that Apple TV+ latest sci-fi series is a lot more complicated than initially thought.

Could it be that Johanna has returned to another dimension? A world in which she has returned and her colleague Paul Lancaster (William Catlett) is no more, and nothing else seems to tally with her earlier life. Or is she having visions of a world where she is no more and Paul is the one who has returned to his family; a dimension in which Alice does speak Swedish?

Johanna, though, is not the only one who’s seeing and hearing things that do not make sense to those around her. There’s a senior scientist and former astronaut Henry Caldera (Jonathan Banks), who, in another dimension, is not an accomplished man of science, while the first woman in space, Irena is the floating dead body in space, but also heads a scientific programme. It’s quite confusing, if you are not keeping track of the colour schemes used to denote the different dimensions – red and blue – because the narrative is non-linear.

Truth be told, it’s a lot to take in, when the question at large is about reality – what is and what’s not. As much as I dig sci-fi, a more non-nerdy straight-laced approach would have been easier to comprehend. The science, if any, maybe all bunkum and the theories laid out in Constellation, only figments of the writers’ hyper-active imagination, but all this confusion does get quite tiresome after a bit.

Perhaps, the series is best enjoyed when you don’t put too much thought into it. Breaking Bad’s Jonathan Banks is brilliant as Henry/Bud Calderra; the actor’s aged significantly since Breaking Bad or even Better Call Saul, for that matter, which is a tad painful to watch. Noomi Rapace remains in constant bewilderment, unsure if she’s going crazy as a direct result of PTSD or if she is not where she should be.

Constellation Season 1 verdict: Despite the element of mystery, Constellation is not the most engaging series, perhaps because of a lack of backstories for any of the central characters. You don’t feel or relate to any of them, despite the reputed names on the cast. It’s convoluted and complex, but not to the extent of being too high-brow for regular audiences. I found it tedious to plough through the 8 episodes of nearly an hour each, because the plot is quite limited in season 1. Perhaps the ‘other Johanna’ will spruce things up in season 2.