In Constellation (Apple TV), Jo (Noomi Rapace) is on the international space station when orbital debris causes a breakdown, forcing the crew to abandon it. In a matter of hours, she encounters more disconcerting or traumatic events than her brain can process.
A colleague dies from the impact. She is horrified to identify what crashed into the station. In the midst of the chaos, he must ensure that he transports a quantum experiment to Henry (Jonathan Banks), a NASA commander who believes he has found something that escapes Earth’s scientific parameters.
However, it is when she returns to Earth that the astronaut’s true odyssey begins. Nothing is exactly as she remembers and, as she soon reveals to the viewer, she even has trouble recognizing her daughter Alice (Davina and Rosie Coleman).
The British screenwriter Peter Harness, who signed the latest television adaptation of The War of the Worlds, presents in Constellación a science fiction series that in the first episodes forces us to establish parallels with films such as Vida de Daniel Espinosa, where a capsule from Mars with extraterrestrial life caused chaos, or Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, in which Sandra Bullock, like Noomi Rapace here, entered a deadly race to return to Earth guided by the survival instinct.
The space aspect is the most stimulating due to the plausibility of the International Space Station, the frenetic pace in the zero-gravity environment and the ability of director Michelle MacLaren, also an executive producer, to generate suspense and address terror from insinuation. It is inevitable to remember MacLaren’s work in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul but Constellation is a direct successor to her past in The X-Files, where she was for three seasons.
The terrestrial part, on the other hand, is fed by rumors about health problems and the inexplicable consequences of astronauts after living in space. It maintains interest but, as so often happens in psychological thrillers, it encounters obstacles in the atmosphere of uncertainty and the repetition of suspicions.
To what extent can you invest in a fictional universe and the character dynamics when the viewer is warned at all times that they cannot trust anything, not even the protagonist herself?
It is a tone that, due to its questioning nature, has a better chance of success in cinema where the duration is more limited and, therefore, the tricks have less time to tire. This is one of the usual discussions on television today: scriptwriters think about adult projects in a television key because they know that there is a hunger in the studios for this type of stories, unlike movie theaters where adult drama is only thought about. in the key of an Oscar campaign, and this often leads to lengthening plots that, in reality, would always have been a 100 or 120 minute feature film.
The comfort with which it navigates the space and science fiction environment and the interpretations of Rapace and the Coleman sisters, who share the same character, allow Constellation to be an appreciable work despite its limitations.
And, among lovers of the genre, it forces us to be grateful once again for the production philosophy of Apple TV, which has become the official supplier of science fiction with series such as Fundación, For a better tomorrow, Calls, A challenging future , Monarch and the highly recommended Severance, Invasion, Silo and For All Mankind.
