Noomi Rapace plays Jo Ericsson, one of five astronauts on the International Space Station. When an object — the skeletal corpse of a female Russian cosmonaut — collides with the station, the resultant explosion and loss of air pressure kills the Commander, Paul Lancaster, forcing the remaining astronauts to abandon ship. Except there isn’t enough room in the surviving Soyuz capsule, meaning one has to stay behind to fix the other capsule (with what air remains). Jo decides to be that person. It’s at this point, while alone on the station, that shit gets weird, as Jo, stuck with the buckled-down corpse of her Commander and friend, begins to see things that can’t possibly be there.

That precis — not my best work — fails to mention several key characters. There’s Jo’s husband  Magnus, played sympathetically by James D’Arcy, who is worried about his wife and yet… as we come to learn… their marriage was on the rocks before she left for space. And there’s Jo and Magnus’s daughter, ten-year-old Alice (if there was a drinking game for every time someone calls out — cries out — “Alice!!!!”, you would die, your liver soaked in alcohol), whose melancholy and fear is played beautifully by twins Davina and Rosie Coleman. And then there’s Henry Caldera, played by the always extraordinary Jonathan Banks, a NASA scientist obsessed with his experiment, the CAL, that Commander Lancaster was activating just as the ISS was struck. Banks owns the role, the portrait of a sour, angry man who has put his career before everything and everyone.

The first three episodes are terrific. They look beautiful, especially the flashforward scenes in the frozen climes of northern Sweden where Jo has brought Alice to an isolated cabin. Those moments have a distinctive folk horror vibe, an atmosphere of dread and ancient secrets. The stuff on ISS is genuinely tense as Jo struggles to maintain her sanity while fixing the damaged capsule. About the mid-way mark, the show loses its way a bit. It’s partly because, by this point, we’ve figured out what’s going on, but the characters haven’t, so we’re waiting for them to catch up. That’s not to say those episodes are poor. Jonathan Banks, in particular, comes into his own in those middle episodes, while the tension between Jo and Magnus is well realised. It’s just not as propulsive, as spooky, as dramatic.

It picks up in the final two episodes, where the relationship between mother and daughter, Alice and Jo, shines through, reaching an emotional climax. There are some annoying loose threads, annoying because there won’t be a second season, but overall, I enjoyed Constellation. It takes a classic trope and does something genuinely interesting with it.