Slowly but surely, Apple TV Plus has transformed into arguably the premier destination for sci-fi streaming. (Or at least convey nameless science fiction Star Wars either Star Trek.) There are adaptations like Silo and Base; original stories like Invasion, For all humanityand Breaking off; and even a spin-off franchise with Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. There's a good variety of service offerings, and now it's adding another flavor with the premiere of Constellation. In its first few episodes, the show is dark, creepy, and will mess with your mind in a way that makes it ideal for those who are already missing. True Detective: Night Country.
The first three episodes of Constellation will be released on February 21 and follows an astronaut named Jo (Noomi Rapace), who is part of a small team working on the International Space Station. Also on board is a mysterious, experimental NASA device, and the moment she powers up for testing, all hell breaks loose. Something crashes into the ISS, and when Jo leaves to make repairs, she swears she sees the body of an old cosmonaut. Eventually, the rest of the crew aboard the ISS is forced to evacuate due to damage, while Jo stays behind to repair an escape capsule and hopefully return to Earth as well.
Jo eventually returns safely, which, yes, is a minor spoiler, but is also key to the structure of the show, as the story jumps between her time on the ISS and her life after her return to Earth. (And even though you know she survives, those moments are still incredibly stressful.) It's a story full of mysteries, the core of which is what the hell that NASA device is. The project is led by a legendary American astronaut named Henry (Jonathan Banks), who won a Nobel Prize decades ago, but who now appears as a guest at science fiction conferences and is desperate to return to the forefront of scientific discovery. At first, all we really know about his research is that it involves finding another state of matter, one that is apparently only possible in a zero-gravity environment, and Henry is so determined to unravel this mystery that he cares more about the results. of the proof that any of the human lives it ends up costing.
Whatever it is, the experiment has some very notable side effects, especially on Jo. Initially everything seems to be going well after her unlikely return to Earth; She immediately reunites with her husband and her daughter and attempts to return to some semblance of a normal life. But it finally becomes clear that things are not normal.
First, they are small details; Jo forgets what color the family car is and mistakes a friend's name. From there, everything becomes stranger and darker. When Jo gives a statement about what happened during the ISS disaster, her memory differs from the rest of the crew. Jo's visions hint at a strange disconnect between her current self and who she was before, and Rapace's performance almost makes you feel like you're watching two different characters at times. At certain points, Constellation tackles psychological horror, with haunting voices, blood and severed body parts floating in zero gravity, and constant jumps in time that make it difficult to tell what is real and what is one of Jo's hallucinations (if they are actually hallucinations) . Which, of course, is exactly how she feels.
I mentioned night country before because the shows share a similar vibe (and not just because they both feature big scenes involving someone searching in a blizzard in the dark). They are slow processes, taking time to share important clues and information and sometimes obscuring them under fragments of weirdness or horror. Of course, it is impossible to know yet whether Constellation actually delivers on all of its spooky promises, and there are plenty of examples of shows that get, say, lost, during that process. But it's off to a good start and offers another reason for sci-fi fans to check out Apple's streaming service.
Constellation premieres on Apple TV Plus on February 21, with new episodes on Wednesdays.
