Screens/Streaming

Where: AppleTV+
What: Series, 8 episodes, 58 mins.
When: Now, new episodes Wednesdays
Genre: Science-fiction
Rating: NNN (out of 5)
Why you should watch: Space gets the Nordic Noir treatment in this creepy and confusing series that sees Swedish Astronaut Jo Ericsson (Noomi Rapace) survive — or does she? — a catastrophic accident on the International Space Station (ISS) that kills another crew member — or does it?

Jo frightens her husband Magnus (James D’Arcy) and 10-year-old daughter Alice (Rosie Coleman) upon return, her connection to reality increasingly tenuous, like the viewers’ experience of the show, as she struggles to determine what is real and what is “astronaut burnout.” She grows increasingly convinced the European Space Agency and NASA are involved in a massive cover-up of what happened and happens in space. Coleman is remarkable as Alice, her confusion, fear and attempts to make sense of incomprehensible situations showing the skill of a much older actor.

The scenes on the ISS are riveting, at times terrifying; Jo’s loneliness and fear when she’s left in the space station to make her own way back to Earth are disturbingly real. Many scenes back on Earth, filmed in winter in Finnish Lapland but representing Sweden, could be lifted right out of True Detective: Night Country: eerie snow, lit black-blue, the lonely crunch of tires and boots in that snow, and the unsettling dark empty spaces of wintery night in the north.

Parallel stories — and realities — abound in Constellation, like the space junk that caused the crash on the ISS. Despite solid leads, great space footage and hints of a successful premise, the mess that is Constellation is like searching for stars on a cloudy night: pointless.