Welcome listeners to another Film fancy episode here on you’re listening to radio revel. This is a one-two punch at two sci-fi series I recently binged, The Signal and Constellation. Let’s jump right in, shall we?
The first thought that came to mind after having seen all four episodes of The Signal and the first moments of Constellation was a question: did they share the International Space Station set? Or were the two sets so faithfully recreated from the real ISS that they were twins built in separate studios? I’ll try to find out the answer to that question before I finish these comments.
So, The Signal was the first one I saw. Besides the fact that I like this type of series in general, it helped that somehow, somewhere, it was related to the twenty seventeen 2017 series Dark, which may not be the best series I’ve ever seen (that one is The Leftovers, has been since I first saw it, then saw again, no series has taken it down from its podium, though Six feet under came pretty close, but that’s comparing apples and oranges, really.), but Dark may have been one of the best sci-fi series I’ve enjoyed. Note to self: go rewatch Dark.
The story of The Signal is simple to explain. A very rich woman sponsors a female scientist, Paula, to be sent to the International Space Station to do some experiments somehow related to cell regeneration. Paula’s additionally motivated by the possibility of helping her 10-year-old deaf daughter hear with her own ears rather than through a cochlear device.
While on that mission, Paula receives a message from out in space which may be a hallucination from prior LSD use, or may be E.T. saying “hello”…. literally, the message is limited to the single word “hello”, spoken in a young girl’s voice. In addition, seems like the source of that message is traveling towards Earth and Paula has discovered the date and place of landing. Paula wants to share the message with the world, but there are other interests standing in the way of such a revelation.
Paula makes it back to Earth, barely. After leaving cryptic messages to her husband and daughter, she boards a plane home and the plane goes missing. Paula’s daughter begins receiving messages from her missing mother on a Soviet-era radio they’d used to communicate while Paula was on the ISS. Paula’s husband and daughter then strike out on an adventure to discover if Paula is actually dead, what the coded messages mean, etc.
The ending is “cute”, I say that because it’s pretty clearly a partial rip-off from a Star Trek movie. It kind of works, but again, it’s not at all original, and the message that wraps up the fourth episode is nice but very, very weak.
Though I enjoyed this series while watching it, and it was a pretty easy watch, not too convoluted, perhaps a little repetitive and slow, could have been a better 2-hour movie, I have to admit that, when chatting with my brother Bob about it, both he and I were hard pressed to remember many details beyond the deaf daughter, the missing plane, the rich woman…. we couldn’t even remember the ending without prodding one another. A forgettable experience. A lot of what I’ve described above needed a quick synopsis search on my part before writing up this episode.
On the other hand, we’ve got a series called Constellation. I’ve already mentioned that the two series shared a very realistic set for the International Space Station. Hang on, going to see if I can find any information about those sets….(constellation set and the signal location set) well, I can’t find anything in a quick search, though I’m not the only person who comments on that seemingly shared set piece. Or on the other details they share, the husbands in both series are school teachers. Both of the women have daughters. Both of the daughters are that kind of “children who are up in dates and floor you with them flat” kids who are too smart for their ages and remarkably sassy with their dads. Both involve conspiracy theories and hidden illuminati-like power struggles.
However, Constellation is by far the better of the two series. It’s double in length, eight episodes, but that’s because the story it’s trying to tell us is double, maybe even quadruple in complexity and depth. Let me try to give a summary.
The astronaut, Jo, who works for the European Space Agency, is doing whatever job she has on the ISS. Another astronaut is at the same time performing some mysterious experiment with a machine that is related to quantum physics, I think. Something hits the space station exactly at the same time as the experiment begins, all hell breaks loose, people die and the Space Station has to be evacuated at once.
But wait, there isn’t enough room in the escape pod for everyone, so Jo has to stay behind and replace the batteries in the other space pod in order to return to Earth. Did someone forget to plug in the charger? Anyway, she does make it back to Earth and is reunited with her school-teacher husband and her sassy, too smart for her britches daughter.
Or does she actually make it back to Earth? Is that her husband, is that really her daughter? Then, who is the other daughter that she finds hiding in a chifforobe in a strangely similar mountain cabin as the one she’s left her daughter sleeping in? Why is her car blue, wasn’t it red? Did she really have an affair with the head of the European Space Agency? What secrets does the head of Roscosmos want to keep from her? Why is everyone who’s ever been to space required to take those little yellow and orange pills and why is the composition of Jo’s pills different from everyone else’s?
The series keeps the mystery going for a couple of episodes then begins to help us realize what Jo herself begins to realize, begins to let us in on the secret early, which sometimes leaves you having to resort to personal little memory tricks to remember which Jo is Jo and which daughter is the daughter and which astronaut-turned-evil-scientist-alcoholic-deadbeat is which. That will begin right around episode four.
There’s an elegant mixture of genres in Constellation, for me they were sci-fi (there’s a bit of physics that kind of goes over your head but somehow gets explained), ghost movies and even scary movies. The image of the chifforobe that shows up on the space station where it doesn’t belong, or at the end of the hall in that building, or in the cabin or in the other cabin, well, that image is straight out of horror-film imagery. Plus, there’s plenty of ghost sighting, at least on Jo’s part.
What made the series satisfying to me was the ending. I won’t say what happens, but I will say that not only are all the mysteries fairly well-explained, the consequences of those mysteries were perfectly chosen. The writers could have taken the cheap route, finding a way to solve the enigma that Jo must live, give us that 1952 Television Code obligatory happy ending, but they go for the route of acceptance.
There’s a video that’s recently gone kind of viral, a pianist is sitting in front of an orchestra that is playing the introduction to the piece that she was supposed to perform. This performance was not hers, she was a last-minute substitute for another pianist. She had been told the piece she was expected to play, she practiced it for a couple of days, but when she hears the orchestra play the introduction, she realizes that she has studied the wrong piece.
You can see first her expression of surprise, then almost anguish, she puts her face in her hands, the orchestra director waves his baton at the musicians while he encourages the pianist, “you can do this”. Maybe, but she knew that she hadn’t played that piece that was expected for several months. The moments that pass are uncomfortable to watch, but then you see her face compose itself, you see her fingers poised over the keyboard, she performs that piece.
In an interview after the incident, this pianist explained how she managed to compose herself. She called it acceptance. She simply said that once she accepted the reality of the situation she was in, all angst and preoccupation was lifted from her soul. She now simply had to face the reality and do something about it, which was to tell her fingers and her brain to perform that piece that she hadn’t played in so long. Acceptance frees you to action.
Which is how Constellation so elegantly ended. Whatever the conspiracies, the mysteries, the convoluted consequences, it is the acceptance at the end that lifted the series to a height that The Signal just couldn’t reach.
Both are series to see. The Signal is kind of pop-corn binge material. Constellation is more of a mind-bending, let’s think and talk about this (and help each other remember who is who and where is where). They were both enjoyable in their own ways, despite the differences and similarities.
Thanks for listening.
Cheers!
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