Constellation Is a Mother of a Space Story
Space exploration has become such an allegory for fatherhood that there’s a whole cinematic subgenre populated by sad dads stepping into astronaut suits, hurtling themselves into the unknown, and trying to feel something, anything, remotely close to emotional equilibrium. In Apple TV+’s latest sci-fi series Constellation, Noomi Rapace’s Johanna Ericsson has no patience for such lugubrious paternal indulgence. She’s a space mom, and Constellation spins into an increasingly beguiling and horrifying watch as it uses her to invert our assumptions about the galactic expanse as a place for self-discovery.
Constellation presents motherhood as an esteemed role and also something that should be a choice, a responsibility to which one can only authentically devote themselves if they crave its demands and rigors, rather than resigning themselves to it. Similar to a high-stress career — like, say, an astronaut on an international space station — it requires a level of attention and effort that must be recommitted to over and over again. But being a space mom doesn’t require a jaunt beyond Earth’s orbit to make one realize how much they value their family. In Ad Astra, Interstellar, and First Man, the immensity and alienness of our galaxy mirror the unknowability of our fathers; their loneliness and emotional distance is first impenetrable, then something to overcome so they can return to Earth cleansed. Constellation, meanwhile, never questions the devotion and centrality Rapace’s Jo has to her family unit, instead putting its energy toward pondering the assumed neutrality of space. What if space has its own agenda and intentions, its own memories and designs? Constellation leans into depicting motherhood as a negotiation between a mother and her child while also entertaining the nightmarish suggestion that space itself could be sentient, and Rapace is riveting as the link between these two ideas.
In the series premiere, Jo survives a catastrophic accident on the International Space Station and returns to Earth with an account of what happened that none of the other astronauts backs up: She insists that a dead body collided with the station, causing the death of an American astronaut and destroying so much of the ISS’s interior that the entire installation has to be abandoned. Jo sticks with her story, even when belligerently debriefed by Roscomos official Irena Lysenko (Barbara Sukowa), treated skeptically by her husband Magnus (James D’Arcy), and challenged by Constellation itself as it messes around with the narrative timeline. Could Jo’s memories be wrong? There are other little things that she’s messing up, too, like the color of her family’s car and the layout of their living room. NASA commander Henry Caldera (Jonathan Banks) asks her about the data from an ISS experiment, but she has no idea what he’s talking about. (Banks’s storyline is the series’s most opaque and tied up in science gobbledygook, but it also unlocks Constellation’s driving theoretical idea while giving Banks the opportunity to play someone entertainingly nasty.) Even Jo’s relationship with her daughter Alice (Rosie and Davina Coleman) doesn’t seem entirely right; the 10-year-old is so distant from her mother that she seems practically disinterested in her return.
Rapace excels in roles that ask her first to hover on the edge of a commitment and then dive into resolution, and Jo does this over and over professionally as she tries to convince her colleagues of what she saw, heard, and felt on the ISS. But the series’s real stakes are in how Jo handles that decisiveness personally, and in how her version of motherhood (authoritative, fierce, warm) morphs and adapts to her own changing sense of self. Who Jo and Alice are supposed to be to each other is Constellation’s primary concern, and although the series follows in the footsteps of the legendary Aliens and the underseen Proxima in its depiction of the mother-daughter bond, it deviates from both by sinking into the contradictory undercurrents of adoration, suspicion, mimicry, and jealousy that can fuel that relationship. Alice might be one of the most annoyingly sassy and pouty TV children in recent memory, but the Colemans do impressive work nailing her deep loneliness and mercurial temper, as does Rapace as a mother sure of both what she saw on the ISS and her love for her daughter, but unsure whether the two can coexist.
Rapace’s post–Lisbeth Salander characters in Close, Lamb, and the paired Prometheus and Alien: Covenant positioned her as principled, protective women who wonder how much caring for another living thing — whether birthed of their body or not — will alter them. Constellation places Rapace in a tweaked version of that framing: Can Jo care for herself if her body does things she was unaware it could do? In episode four, she plays a piano with no prior knowledge of how to do so, appearing to hold back a scream as her fingers fly over the keys, seemingly independent of the rest of her body. Rapace conveys how her anatomy’s capability for reproduction and repetition is a source of terror, but also something she can wrest under her control, and she grounds Constellation, and the wild body-horror events of its later episodes, with that balance.
The Jo-Alice relationship is one pillar of this eight-episode first season, and Constellation’s method of examination, cross-examination, and then hold up, wait, let me look at that first evidence one more time reexamination is another. Creator Peter Harness starts the series near the end, then rewinds to add more dialogue and context to certain events and interactions, and then proceeds forward again with additional knowledge but also the possibility of even more alteration down the line. It’s not unlike Dark, 1899, Archive 81, Dead Ringers, or Bodies in that approach, which feels like a microcosm of the series’s larger obsession with the process of decision — with interrogating why someone would listen to an order or ignore it, sacrifice their life or take another’s, turn left at a crossroads or turn right — and what happens after that selection is made. The series generates puzzle-box mysteries and tension through those propositions, and then expands those queries into grander ones about human behavior. Is international collaboration, especially between the United States and Russia, actually possible when the countries still hide so many secrets from each other? (A foundational concern of fellow Apple TV+ series For All Mankind, too.) How do we honor the people who pulled off some of our greatest feats of engineering and daring, like the moon landing, when accusations of fake news and conspiracy theories are more normalized than they’ve ever been? And are the same genius minds that do so well with esoteric quantum-theory stuff potentially more susceptible to blur the lines between the real and not-real — to put their belief in what might be imagination and hallucination instead of fact?
That last uncertainty provides the rationale for the series’s most irrational — and most unsettling — images and sounds, which director Michelle MacLaren deploys with finesse: a cabinet that disappears and reappears, a booming din reverberating in its absence; a fabric veil, a dismembered arm, and spurts of blood floating like ghosts in zero-gravity; elements of Hugo Simberg paintings “The Wounded Angel” and “The Devil by the Pot” bleeding together into distorted images. Each episode becomes its own contained exercise in “can you spot the difference?” — and it works! A scene in second episode “Live and Let Die” in which Jo and Alice are first seated together in a helicopter, then inexplicably lose sight of each other, is a fascinating example of the series using framing and editing to contemplate the connection between a mother and her child. As Jo and Alice react to the other’s sudden absence, Constellation uses limited perspectives to craft the characters’ own fragmented realities — and to offer an alternative to the unknowability at the heart of the space-dad film. Amid the debris of so many galactic stories that came before it, Constellation charts its own outlook on the mysterious expanse of space.
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