(courtesy IMP awards)
——————– SPOILERS AHEAD !!!!!!!!!! ——————–
AppleTV+ is showing a brilliant inclination for commissioning thoughtful, epic sci-fi television (Foundation, Silo, Invasion), and Constellation, created and written by Peter Harness, based on concept by Sean Jablonski, is yet another feather in an already considerable cap.
This slow-burning story of one woman astronaut’s battle with the bending and warping of reality, and the dark and terrible things that flow from it, is a masterclass in how to unspool a story in satisfyingly beguiling ways while still retaining an air of otherworldly, status quo-defying intrigue.
It’s a delicate balancing act – if too much of the curtain is pulled back, where’s the attendant mystery to keep you hooked?; too little and all you have is brooding what-ifs and not much else which eventually saps any satisfying watchability – but Constellation pulls its off its elegantly, delivering a story that is part-horror, part-domestic drama, and part what-the-ever-living-f**k-is-going-on.
The story starts with an explosion of sorts aboard the International Space Station (ISS), six seconds after an experiment meant to see if you can generate another state of matter in space, goes terribly wrong; no one is sure if the two are connected but then, the five astronauts onboard have too much to deal with to examine esoteric cause and effect.
The commander of the current mission, Paul Lancaster (William Catlett) has been grievously injured, while the remaining four members of the crew including Swede Johanna “Jo” Ericsson (Noomi Rapace) and Russian Ilya Andreev (Henry David), rush to respond and deal with the life-threatening fallout.
But before all of this gripping drama takes place, which includes a scary spacewalk (a USSR corpse in space anyone?), zero gravity blood spurting and the loss of power and environmental controls (not optimal in space), the episode, and thus the series starts with a woman and her daughter driving into heavily snowy Swedish countryside, a getaway which quickly goes from bucolic escape to mind-tripping weird in very short but alarming order.
This weird trip to the countryside, which seems to split reality into two similar but different enough halves where the same person, in this case Jo’s daughter Alice (Davina Coleman and Rosie Coleman) appears to exist in two places at once – a warm bath and a cosy bed – sits somewhere in the near-future, but first we see Jo desperately trying to get the rest of the crew off the station and repairing her own means of escape so she can get back to her daughter and her emotionally estranged English husband Magnus Taylor (James D’Arcy).
Over two tight, gripping episodes, where Jo begins to hear weird banging and see people and things that simply can’t be there, a catastrophic incident in space quickly becomes something disturbingly strange and unusual where many things seem as they should be but which are off just enough for Jo to begin to question her sanity and the inherent nature of the world around her.
This mindf**k of a start to proceedings, which at this stage is as much pulse-pounding action as it is thoughtful rumination on a state of being, is masterfully done, with enough time given over to strange and unnerving twists in the fabric of reality, to dreams and nightmarish moments intruding upon waking consciousness that should be given over to simple, brutalist survival, to elevate a simple race to get off the ISS in time to something else entirely.
Something that in episodes three and four, when Jo has returned to Earth,is marked by degrees of detail just off the normal enough for Jo to wonder what on earth is going on.
While she’s bothered by the fact that her family’s car is now blue, not red, and everything in the kitchen is arranged entirely differently, Jo has bigger issues to worry about with an inquiry into the significant loss of the ISS – which means an end to international space cooperation given the current poisonously fractious geopolitical environment – overseen by Jo’s boss Frederic Duverger (Julian Looman) and Russian space boss Irena Lysenko (Barbara Sukowa) underway and looking to blame Jo for things she simply can’t explain, and her marriage close to imploding with her loving but exasperated husband convinced she has been unfaithful to him (she has but Jo has no memory of this).
While all this is going on, famous moon-walking astronaut Henry Caldera (Jonathan Banks), the man behind the explosion which totalled the ISS – though, of course, no one is blaming that for some reason even if it is surely the obvious culprit – is obsessed with seeing if his experiment, which he insisted be brought back by Jo even as risk to her life, is truly the game-changing moment in science he think it is.
He will stop at nothing to get his findings validated, and while it’s supposedly impossible to perform the same experiments on Earth as has been done, rather disastrously, in space, he persists, convinced that this way the elevated future of humanity lies.
Strangely, and yes that word is going to be used a lot in a series that adore the idea and uses it well, he is also shown as a washed-up astronaut on the convention circuit, a man who goes from gig to gig with his only worthwhile accomplishment in life, getting to the moon, questioned by a moon landing sceptic that the media loves to set him against.
How can he, and Jo and her daughter for that matter, be in too places at once?
If you’re an avid devourer of sci-fi, you will be well aware the multiverse if the much-loved and often well-used narrative drive du jour, and as episode four really picks up its trippy pace, it becomes clear that that is likely what is at work here, with some dark and twisty broken humanity thrown in for good measure.
Constellation is thrillingly, cleverly, marvellously good, as much a dramatic descent into the netherworld of human experience as it is an emotionally thoughtful rumination that all those strange things astronauts hear happening in space might have some basis in truth and that reality, which we treat as solid and unchanging, may not be compliant to our need for safety and surety after all and that maybe we should question everything, lest the world consume us with what it is while we’re still trying to shove it into the box of what we want and wish it could be.
Constellation streams on AppleTV+ with the four remaining episodes releasing weekly until 27 March.
Halo (S2, E4-5)
It has asked whether there is any honour in war?
Perhaps, though its hard to see something so dark and terrible as possessing anything as good as honour or glory, but in the case of Halo season two, and episodes four and five when war has come to the capital planet Reach, there little to be little other than duplicity, betrayal, death and sheer, gritty survival.
It isn’t pretty, it isn’t laudable and though people like the Master Chief Petty Officer John 117 (Pablo Schrieber) and his Spartan Silver Team mates Riz-028 (Natalie Culzac) and Vannak-134 (Bentley Kalu) fight valiantly against what’s left of Reach’s military forces after the Covenant sets off what seem to be simultaneous subterranean explosions and surprise attacks across the planet, they are no match for superior forces who have had plenty of time to strategise how they would bring the heart of human civilisation down.
The lack of honour is most glaring in the actions of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), especially Admiral Margaret Parangosky (Shabana Azmi) and Colonel James Ackerson (Joseph Morgan) who knew the Covenant were on reach and who abandoned billions of innocent people to their deaths, reasoning, quite cold bloodedly, that it was necessary for them to be able to fight another day.
Pragmatic, maybe but hardly honourable, and though the Spartans, and some others such as Soren-066 (Bokeem Woodbine) do their best to hold the line so as many civilians as possible can escape, the actions of the ONI demonstrate that honour has no place in war or in the hearts of those who are calling the shots in a war that is increasingly looking less like a battle between good and evil and more like one between two sides of equally flawed nightmarish fundamentalism.
As a deep dive into the soul of humanity, it’s not a pretty one in any way shape or form, and it marks Halo as something special, an action-oriented sci-fi show with heart and brains that delivers up some epic battle scenes but allows enough time for the dark-hearted actions of certain people to come to the fore and demonstrate that war is never honourable or good.
It is also never controllable as Dr Catherine Halsey (Natascha McElhone) observes as one point to Soren that war really stays where you want it to; it ism you suspect not able to be moulded and shaped at will, and while Paragonsky and Ackerson believe their actions to be the only sensible ones to take since it puts them in a position to steer the war, the truth is that any sort of control is illusory.
In fact, by the end of these two episodes, it becomes increasingly clear that the loss of Reach is all bout the Covenant seeking to take the upper hand, and their strategists no doubt believe themselves to hold all the winning cards, their confidence in victory is as delusional as that of the humans, especially when it becomes clear that Makee (Charlie Murphy), a human who’s seen by the Covenant as their “Chosen One” begins to seed rebellion among her adopted people.
By the final scene of episode five, “Aleria”, we see humanity strutting its military stuff – Kai-125 (Kate Kennedy) is in charge of a huge number of Spartan soldiers at the humans’ new base in the Zeta Doradus system and the Covenant confident of victory, but you have to wonder who is really going to emerge as a winner.
On the planet Aleria, a mining colony that John, Riz, Halsey, Soren, wife Laera (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) and Kwan Ha (Yerin Ha) flee to – it’s the latter two who rescue the others off the planet, including the body of Vannik who Riz refuses to leave behind, despite the great physical cost it exacts – at least one small part of humanity decides to fight on, even if the mission is simply one of vengeance.
One thing is for sure at this point – people need to decide that it is they will do in the wake of great loss – for Ackerson, Kai etc it is fight mindlessly on, doing the same thing you’ve always done, and for John etc, it is to keep on fighting for all the right reasons, even if it is simply to uphold whatever is left of their honour and innate humanity.
Meanwhile Makee and Viktor Åkerblom as Var ‘Gatanai / The Arbiter, a member of the Covenant elite have to make a decision to fight for what they see as true faith even as the rest of humanity’s enemy decides to pull back and reassess where they are.
Episode five then is one of reassessment and renewal, or at least the illusion of it, and while there is no doubt a real sense of taking brave new steps to places unknown – which includes Riz deciding to save behind on Aleria to find some sense of peace after a lifetime of fighting herself and others – you get the feeling there are no real winners in the mix, no honour and no glory; simply, a staggering towards goals which seem important and vital but which, like war itself, might prove to be hollow and meaningless in the long run.
Halo streams on Paramount+