Constellation Review

Some nine years ago I wrote an essay about Peter Harness, then primarily known as a Doctor Who writer, perhaps most notable for writing Kill the Moon, a story for which I wrote a rave review that was, shall we say, somewhat out of step with the critical consensus. In this essay, I offered some anticipation of an imagined future Peter Harness project in which the promise of his Doctor Who work and his largely underrated adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell would be paid off.

And now, at last, comes Constellation—Harness’s first ever original concept sci-fi project. This has been some time in the making—Harness sent me a draft of the first episode written back in 2017, first scene almost identical to what finally dropped on Apple TV. So I suppose it’s time to go back and see how I did.

Some humility is required. Pinned into the self-imposed structure of an essay collection about tedious fascists, I focused on the political nature of his Doctor Who contributions, which married easily enough to talking about an adaptation of a book largely about class, gender, and race. This does not prove an especially fruitful lens for this show, which is set over a backdrop of vanilla liberal internationalism around the International Space Station, a setup designed to fade into the backdrop, which it does. Instead the show is largely more interested in character work, offering a lyrical and at times willfully disjointed account of its protagonist’s increasingly complicated mental state.

This would be Jo, a Swedish astronaut played by Noomi Rapace, who over the first three episodes (a leisurely start akin to Harness’s work on Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, its perils largely defused by Apple’s decision to drop all three episodes at once) survives an accident on the International Space Station only to come back to an Earth that is subtly wrong. Her car has changed color, and her daughter calls her “mummy” instead of “mamma.”

Harness depicts this, and the ensuing parallel universe plotline, with a televisually stylish gloss that, unlike the politics, largely validates my old arguments. The opening sequence is a masterpiece of casual deception, cutting freely between the two universes and counting on the fact that, amidst the bustle and confusion of being introduced to an entire cast of characters, viewers will simply fail to notice that one of them keeps shifting back and forth between two outfits. It’s effective, clever stuff, as are the periodic cuts forward in time to a remote cabin where Jo and her daughter are hiding from some initially unclear scandal or danger.

It is not fair to call Constellation a puzzle box, not least because few of its mysteries are especially held back. While Harness never goes so far as to have a character explain it all while pointing to a whiteboard, the parallel worlds aspect becomes evident reasonably quickly, and there’s a relative paucity of actual mysteries past that. But what I mean by this is at least a little precise. What’s absent are coherent but unanswered questions—things like “what’s with that polar bear” or “who is River Song.” The issue is that there’s also a relative paucity of things that have been explained to the point of satisfaction.

Sure, the show’s primary emotional arc—Jo and her daughters’ attempts to grapple with the fact that Jo is plainly in the wrong universe—comes to a resolution. But this emotional resolution sits within the context of a final episode that focuses on setting up the future (right down to a cliffhanger shot of the supposedly dead alternate universe Jo very much alive in space) more than it does on resolution, leaving Constellation needing a second season like a rapidly purpling newborn needs to cry. With that second season still uncommissioned, Constellation does not make for bad television, but it doesn’t make for good television either, and in a way that feels like a foolish own goal in an era where even successful shows can find themselves canceled and deleted for the sake of a balance sheet.

But this is, in many ways, a consequence of how Harness works. All of his Doctor Who scripts, over their development, started with a bonkers cornucopia of ideas that were revised into something with concision and focus. It’s a perfectly good approach, at least once the eventual process of revision is completed. And it’s clear that at least some of that process did happen—Harness has talked in interviews about an even stranger and more inscrutable ending that nobody but him understood. He’s undoubtedly brimming with ideas on what this poetic device could do. Of course his ending is forward-looking, with all the reckless optimism that entails. But it leaves Constellation feeling like something that is plausibly the first season of a great television show instead of one that is great in and of itself.