Constellation – Season 1 Episode 5 Recap & Review

Five Miles Out, the Sound is Clearest

Constellation Episode 5 picks back up from the moment when Jo pushed Magnus and he hit his head. In a panic, Jo calls an ambulance and then drives off with Alice. She tells her they’re just going for a drive. They stop at her office where Jo listens to the recording of her phone call with Alice on board the ISS. She then takes the CAL core and puts it in the car.

Elsewhere, Henry hears a knock on his hotel room door but no one is there. From a mirror, Bud watches him. Later, Irena calls Henry and discussed a part of quantum theory. She says that what happens to one particle determines what happens to its counterpart even if they are far away. Henry’s vision suddenly begins to tilt.

Jo, who is driving into a ferry, calls her astronaut colleague Ilya. She tells Ilya about the lithium pills. She asks him to analyse his own pills as well. At the ESA, Henry is livid to find the CAL gone. He calls Irena for help.

Bud calls his daughters and asks her about Thanksgiving plans. Henry goes to the washroom and lets the hot water run. On the steam on the mirror, he writes “Leave me alone”. Bud sees the message on the mirror in his own bathroom.

While eating at a restaurant, Jo asks Alice why she hides in cupboards. Alice says she’s scared of something called The Valya. A person, or a dream, that stops Alice from playing and makes her hide instead. Jo agrees to draw the source of her own worry if Alice draws her.

She then makes a call to the person who sent her the tapes from Skagerrak, saying she’s on the way. But the man says his sister sent her the tapes and claims that she’s crazy. Jo looks Skagerrak up on the internet and learns that the siblings in charge were prosecuted for blackmailing astronauts with fake tape recordings.

Jo calls Magnus, who is with Frederic. She’s about to tell them she was wrong when Alice shows her the drawing — the Valya is none other than an astronaut in an orange suit. Jo asks Frederic about the medication but his answers are not satisfactory. She tells Magnus they’ll be back soon and puts the phone down.

At Star City in Russia, Ilya analyses his medication. He looks for the medical records of the tablets but they are missing. Irena arrives and tells Ilya that Jo is missing.

Jo drives up to the Skagerrak observatory with Alice. A woman comes out to meet them and welcomes them inside. The woman says her brother, Laurentz, heard Jo on his ghost tapes. The siblings’ father has left them recording devices through which they heard sounds from space. They started in the mid-90s and even met Henry, who wanted the tapes from his Apollo 18 mission. Meanwhile, Frederic convinces Magnus to not get the police involved.

The woman leads Jo and the others out into a boat. She describes a USSR mission when six astronauts saw ‘angels’. The woman then describes a mysterious sound heard on the tapes. It sounds like static but she and her brother managed to decode it.

Meanwhile, Alice steals the woman’s phone and manages to unlock it. But there’s no signal. The woman plays a tape and tells Jo to discern the sound of the woman asking for help. This was the tape from the day Irena went up to space. The woman then says they heard Paul Lancaster on the day of the incident and were surprised that it was Jo who came back instead.

Alice freaks out when she plays the static sound and they head back to land. The woman gives Jo the tapes before they get in their car. Alice manages to secretly call Magnus and tell them they’re going to the family cabin.

Henry insists on coming with Frederic to get Jo. While they argue, Henry ends up wetting his pants despite trying to control himself. This must be an effect of his counterpart, Bud. Henry laughs it off.

Alice helps her mother talk her thoughts out. Alice then describes the Valya as a dead astronaut floating around the Earth. She murmurs sometimes. They play the old tape again and this time they can hear the words clearly. The woman, whose voice Alice says is the same as the Valya’s, says the world is the wrong way round.

Henry tries to speak with Bud while looking into a mirror. Bud threatens Henry that he’s coming to get him.

Jo and Alice get closer to their cabin when they’re suddenly faced with two roads. She decides to drive across a frozen lake and they finally reach the cabin. Jo’s getting Alice out of the car when she thinks she hears Alice’s voice from the house. But she dismisses it.

Warm and settled in the cabin, Jo listens to the phone call between her and Alice on the tape. Alice overhears and says that wasn’t her voice. She doesn’t speak Swedish and she doesn’t call Jo Mamma.

Elsewhere, another Alice wrapped up in furs trudges through the snow and screams out for Jo, calling her Mamma at the end of Constellation Episode 5.

The Episode Review

Constellation Episode 5 has Jo basically go on the run with Jo, increasing the stakes higher than before. She knows that something is very wrong and heads to Skagerrak, looking for answers. What she does get is more questions. It’s interesting to see her grapple with the mysteries all while knowing what the answer is. Alice finds herself scared and Jo gets more and more confused but we, the viewers, get a better understanding of these parallel universes.

The tapes make it clear that the walls are thin and sounds from one universe bleed into the other. Irena and Henry’s conversation also makes it clear that the two versions of the same person can have an effect on each other. Still, there’s plenty of mystery to go around as Alice’s odd dreams are still unexplained and we have no idea what Henry is actually after. Hopefully, future episodes will have the same gripping nature.