Posted by Constellation, the new sci-fi series on Apple TV+ presents a complex plot, not always easy to follow: here, the main points are explained.
More than a mystery, Apple TV+’s Constellation is like a puzzle: at every new episode, the plot introduces new points of view, showing the events from a different perspective but never providing an explanation. As a viewer, you carefully watch every development, and in one way or another, you feel that things can be explained unequivocally. But instead of drawing an early conclusion, you prefer to wait: more elements will surely come in the next episode, right?
Right. Nevertheless, attempting an early guess is a fascinating game, especially with a series like this. Let’s do it together.
Apple TV+’s Constellation plot explained: what happens to Jo?
The Constellation plot starts on the ISS. During a standard procedure, the station is hit by a mysterious object, causing irreparable damage. Paul dies, the other three astronauts evacuate, and Jo, the protagonist, remains alone and disconnected in space, doing her best to return to Earth. She holds an awareness that will become problematic later: the object that hit the ISS was the corpse of a Russian astronaut from many years before. She sees it with her own eyes and has no reason to believe differently.
From the moment of the accident, things start being confusing for Jo. Already in the ISS, she sees things; she visions herself in other places. This will soon become a source of doubt: she doesn’t know if she can trust her own judgment. As her colleagues will imply during the investigation, the lack of oxygen she experienced after the accident can cause confusion and hallucinations. Jo never doubts what she saw, though. Still, she had to withdraw her statement, knowing they would have never accepted it. There is no record of female cosmonauts lost in old Russian projects.
What increases the confusion is what happens to Jo afterward, while the plot in Constellation evolves. The series shows us the mystery through scenes and sequences apparently belonging to different timelines, leaving the explanation unclear. Until the middle of Season 1, the Constellation plot is simply not explained. However, some elements stand out, and it’s crucial to understand them. Let’s list them:
- After the accident, people around Jo seem different. The principal doubt is about Alice, her daughter: suddenly, she no longer knows Swedish, the language she always spoke with her mother. She also recalls her reality differently: when she’s back home, she sees their blue car, but she remembers they had a red one. Somehow, it’s like she returned to a different version of her reality.
- Even Jo looks different to others. That’s an important point: it’s not only Jo’s perspective that sees the differences; others are puzzled, too. Her colleague doesn’t recognize her behavior; her husband is shocked to discover that their relationship seems fine now (they had big problems before the accident). To some extent, Jo doesn’t seem the same person she was when she left Earth.
- Henry/Bud Caldera also seems pretty disconnected from his reality. One moment, he’s an esteemed scientist; the moment after, he’s addressed as a scam. People call him Henry, but he insists his name is Bud. In some way, Caldera is experiencing something similar to Jo.
In Episode 4, a new element is introduced: Jo discovers the pills she got from ESA actually contain lithium, which has psychotropic effects. This confuses Jo, now wondering if she’s just hallucinating. But would that explain all the events we have seen so far, including the fact that she now loves her husband or that her child no longer knows Swedish? Besides, Henry Caldera is experiencing a similar reality alteration: if they are both hallucinating, then as viewers, we can no longer trust what we saw with our eyes. That would affect the coherence of the series; it’s unlikely that, after all, the Constellation plot would be explained as in “everything you saw wasn’t real,” right?
So can the Constellation plot be explained in one, unique, coherent way? Well, maybe.
The quantum physics explanation
There is a crucial scene in Constellation episode 3 where Caldera tries explaining quantum physics to Alice. He does that by describing one of its most fascinating aspects. If we start observing our reality among the smallest particles of matter, classic physics stops being able to explain it. What we discover is that reality seems able to be in two different states at the same time. It’s like a particle can be black in one universe and white in another universe, and sometimes, the same particle stands on the thin border between those two universes, being black and white at the same time. This stays true until someone observes it: in that exact moment, the particle “decides” its own state. It’s the Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox: you can read more about it on Wikipedia.
As you understand, this explanation is supposed to apply to Constellation‘s plot. After all, the ISS was transporting the CAL, an extraordinary experiment Caldera was running, looking for a new state of reality. The CAL recorded something: something that was never discovered before, an interference that seems to open new theories that can explain the world.
One way or another, after the accident, after the interference recorded by the CAL, the universe for Jo and Caldera seems fuzzy. It looks like their macroscopic world is now ruled by quantum physics: they live in two alternative realities simultaneously. One moment, he’s Henry; the moment after, he’s Bud Caldera. One moment, Jo holds Alice between her arms and recognizes her smell; the moment after, she doubts the girl behind her eyes is her own daughter.
The confusion in the Constellation plot is that every scene seems to belong to different timelines, making things impossible to explain so far. However, according to this explanation, they actually belong to different versions of the same reality, now mysteriously intertwined in Jo and Caldera’s experiences. This means that they can be explained separately, independently from each other; they just can’t be explained all together as part of the same reality: Jo’s car is blue. However, Joe’s car is also red. It just cannot be seen both red and blue at the same time: that’s not how quantum physics works.
From this point of view, both these statements may be true:
- The corpse of a Russian cosmonaut really hit the ISS, and Jo saw it;
- No corpse of any Russian cosmonaut has ever been floating in space.
The two things may belong to different realities, now somehow co-existing in the same dimension. If that’s true, the biggest plot twist may arrive soon: does that corpse actually belong to Irena, the head of Roscosmos who questions Jo on Earth? In a different version of reality, maybe Irena died in space in the ’60s, and somehow, her corpse broke into the current reality, hitting the ISS.
With quantum physics, things like this are possible, so we can consider it an open possibility in the Constellation plot: we’ll follow it together with you, episode after episode. Stay tuned.
