Does Apple TV+’s Constellation Already Have Your Head Spinning? ‘Bear With Me… It Pays Off,’ Says Star

Matt Webb Mitovich
·3 min read

The following contains mild spoilers from the first three episodes of Constellation, now streaming on Apple TV+.

With each of its first three episodes, Apple TV+’s Constellation has more and more shown itself to be the “conspiracy-based psychological thriller” it was billed as. Yet so many questions have been raised thus far, it’s understandable if you feel like you’ve been hit with a few g’s upon reentry.

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But series star Noomi Rapace is here to urge you to complete your mission, and watch all eight episodes (now releasing one-per-week).

Created/written by Peter Harness (Wallander, The War of the Worlds), Constellation stars Rapace as Jo Ericsson, an astronaut for the European Space Agency who was at the International Space Station when something — a Skylab garbage bag, or a long-dead cosmonaut?! — collided with the station and set in motion a crisis.

The rest of Jo’s crew made tracks for Earth, while she stayed behind with the one crew member, Paul, who’d suffered a fatal injury during the commotion, until she could jerry-rig her own way home. Once Jo finally, though barely, got back to Earth, she found her accounting of events aboard the ISS questioned. And on the home front, she has slowly noticed that pieces of her life seem… different.

Episode 3, though, really got Jo questioning reality — and in turn perhaps left viewers wondering which way is up, as well.

To name but a few of the third episode’s head-scratchers and jaw-droppers:

  • Jo briefly saw Paul standing before her — alive — when visiting his grave.

  • At home, Jo was puzzled to see that the family car is blue, when she remembers it being red.

  • Husband Magnus clearly has a different POV on what the state of their marriage was before Jo’s mission.

  • Former astronaut “Bud” Caldera (played by Jonathan Banks) — who looks very much like physicist Henry Caldera (also Banks), but is currently in the middle of the ocean on a cruise ship — just pitched over the railing a critic who had challenged his memoir. Simultaneously, Henry himself saw Russian lady friend Irene briefly turn into a skeletal corpse!

  • And then there is Jo and Magnus’ daughter Alice, who doesn’t seem to dabble in Mummy’s Swedish anymore. At the close of Episode 3, Jo and Alice were seen trekking across a frozen lake that pops up now and again in the series, searching for a cabin that… maybe doesn’t exist? “I don’t want to hurt you… or make you upset,” Jo said to Alice, but “I don’t think you’re my daughter.” Though Alice had suspected same, the tyke anxiously replied, “But if I’m not, then who are you…? What have you done to my Mummy?!”

And then we saw a group of police cars speeding along a snow-caked highway, headed towards said lake….

That’s a whole lot of weirdness to heap into one episode (on top of the events of the first two), TVLine noted to star Noomi Rapace. So what is the actress’ message to those clamoring for at least a few answers nearly halfway through the season?

“Bear with me. Stay in there with me,” Rapace encouraged viewers, “because it pays off and you will feel slightly more safe.”

As for how Rapace herself kept straight everything in this clearly non-linear tale, she credits “preparation, conversations with my directors, with Peter Harness…. And also, sometimes Jo is not supposed to know. Also, it’s quite nice to not always be in full control and knowing, because you can allow yourself to just discover what’s going on.”

Want scoop on Constellation, or for any other TV show ? Email InsideLine@tvline.com, and your question may be answered via Matt’s Inside Line!

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