Part sci-fi adventure and part creepy thriller, Constellation is finally on our screens, with the new Apple TV Plus original debuting its first three episodes on Wednesday, February 21.
The show stars Noomi Rapace as Jo, an astronaut on the International Space Station who starts to find things with her life aren't as they seem when she returns home after a calamity on the station.
A quicker-paced thriller than many other Apple shows, Constellation episode 1 starts to tease that something is amiss on Earth and in the skies, and we're left with a few lingering questions to bring forward into future episodes.
If you haven't seen the show yet, here's how to watch Constellation, or you can jump straight to using an Apple TV Plus free trial, because this recap of the debut episode will spoil a thing or two. And with that disclaimer out the way, here's what happened in Constellation episode 1, titled 'The Wounded Angel'.
A chilly road trip
We begin in the remote Swedish area of Vindelälven, where Jo is driving her daughter Alice (Rosie/Davina Coleman) somewhere, while the young girl repeatedly asks after her father. They're listening to a strange distress call on a cassette player, and when Jo sees a police car, she panics, though the car drives off. We also see that Jo is smuggling an artifact of some kind.
They arrive at a log cabin, which has some strange decorations including a creepy painting. As Jo starts to light a fire, Alice wants a story, but not from this mother. No, she retrieves an iPad and watches a video of Jo on the International Space Station (ISS) telling a bed-time story.
Later, when Alice is asleep, Jo patrols the area. When outside, she hears her daughter's voice, so rushes back into the cabin... but Alice is asleep. Then, Jo sees a light out over the frozen lake, so embarks on a journey to see what it is.
An experiment in space
Five weeks earlier, we're with Alice as well as her father Magnus (James D'Arcy) as they use an iPad to call up to Jo, who's on the ISS. Jo is preparing for a space walk, while her companions are preparing for some kind of experiment to look for a "new state of matter". On the call with these workers is Henry (Jonathan Banks), a technician in a lab in Pasadena.
Suddenly, the ISS is shaken by some kind of explosion, and Alice loses connection with her mother, so she goes to school. Her father works as a teacher in the same place.
All is not well in space, as the station is depressurized with items flying around and fires catching. Four of the five people aboard the station get to a shuttle, and they hide until the worst is over, but one man is stuck with his arm pinned down and blood everywhere.
As some people look after this man, others evaluate the damage to the station. As lots of systems are offline, they need to evacuate... but with only one shuttle remaining, there's only space for three people to get away! However if Jo continues with her planned space walk, she might be able to fix the other shuttle.
While this plays out, discussions are had on Earth about getting the astronauts home. While most of the space program leaders are okay with it, Henry isn't — his experiment was a success, and he thinks it's more important than the lives of the crew. Also, as he walks down a corridor, we see something very strange; his reflection in a glass panel he passes isn't mirroring his movements, but is staring straight at him!
Not quite a (space) walk in the park
In Kazakhstan, Sergei (Lenn Kudrjawizki) is directing Jo through her spacewalk, while the space program's leader watches over. As Jo evaluates the damage to the station, we see the other people on it amputate the arm of the injured man... until he dies of cardiac arrest.
Outside the station, Jo finds a strange rip in the side, and there's an odd orange fabric that's tangled around wires and tubes inside. Jo tugs at it... and finds it's the dead body of a female cosmonaut, wearing a Russian space suit! Jo jumps back in shock, and the body floats out into space, before she can retrieve it. Also, Jo's companion on the spacewalk never sees it.
Unfortunately, Jo also realizes that the damage to the station isn't reparable with the oxygen they have left. Of the four surviving occupants of the ISS, three are able to evacuate, and Jo remains behind, as she'll have enough oxygen to repair the shuttle now that the others are gone.
Hearing about the disaster, Magnus and Alice are flown out to Kazakhstan, where the rescue effort is being held. The man who died was the father of Alice's school friend, who joins them along with the mother and some people from the European Space Agency.
Power on the ISS is now solar-only, so Jo must carry out repairs in 45-minute chunks, between 45-minute breaks, when the station is in the sun. In the first batch of time, she makes a lot of progress with the repairs. At Henry's request, and despite the reservations of some space program leaders who think it caused the accident, mission command also asks her to retrieve the experiment. Jo seems flippant with the idea.
When the next 45-minute dark window approaches, Jo hunkers down in the damaged capsule to wait it out... until a repeated banging sound starts coming from the station. It sounds like knocking!
Jo ventures out to find where this is coming from, and passes the experiment from before, which is glowing strangely... in the same way that Jo's artifact from the first scene was!
However as Jo traverses the station, she seems to jump to a strange corridor... is this a flashback, or a vision? Who knows! Then she's back in the station, temporarily, before we jump back to our Vindelälven setting from the beginning of the episode.
Jo approaches a cabin, and there's a strange and eerie visual effect that makes it seem like two copies of her are approaching the cabin at once. It appears to be the cabin from before, but it's quite different. It looks abandoned, and a dead cat lies on the floor. Jo goes upstairs, to follow the banging, and finds a wardrobe with Alice's necklace on it.
And what's in the wardrobe? Well, it's Alice herself, who looks cold, tired and dirty, completely unlike the Alice that Jo left just a few minutes ago! And as the episode ends, Alice asks "where have you been?", which suggests Jo has been gone for ages!
