It’s always surprising when two shows with similar settings and plots come out at the same time. In the case of The signal, the German series is about a female astronaut who encountered a mysterious phenomenon while on the International Space Station. Yes, that sounds similar to the Apple series. Constellation. But the nature of the mystery in The signal It’s completely different.
THE SIGNAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Initial shot: In a suburban neighborhood, a man lies awake in bed. He imagines his wife walking up to him and saying, “I love you.” Just as he is about to grab her hand, he wakes up.
The essence: After Sven (Florian David Fitz) wakes up, he looks at his old chocolate phone and realizes that the alarm he set never went off. He rushes to wake up her daughter Charlie (Yuna Bennett) and makes sure she brings her cochlear implant so they can drive to a viewing party; Paula (Peri Baumeister), Sven’s wife and Charlie’s mother, is about to land after three months on the International Space Station.
As they watch on the screen as the capsule plummets towards the ground, Charlie realizes that the parachutes have not deployed. Inside the capsule, Paula is completely distracted; her capsule mate, Hadi Hiraj (Hadi Khanjanpour), has to yell at her to finally deploy the manual parachutes after the automatic ones fail. Once they land in Chile, they are both completely distracted and Charlie thinks her mother is acting strange.
Before flying back to Germany, Paula calls Sven and says cryptic things like a reference to the game Fox and Hare, then says goodbye with “see you on the other side.”
The next day, Sven and Charlie go to the airport to greet Paula. When the plane is reported missing, the families of all the passengers are sequestered in a hotel to receive updates from the airline. During his overnight stay at the hotel, he expresses his frustration to a woman on the balcony next door; The next day, when investigators call him, he discovers that the person he spoke to was a police officer. They play a recording of the cabin where it appears that Paula has infiltrated the cabin and wonder if she had any signs of strange behavior before the flight; Hadi’s wife is asked the same thing.
This is after the families discover that remains were found in the Atlantic and there are assumed to be no survivors. She tries to keep the news away from Charlie, but once they get home, she tunes in to the news and insists that her father tell her if her mother is dead.
We also go back three months, when Paula and Hadi board the ISS to deploy experiments paid for by a billionaire named Benisha Mudhi (Sheeba Chaddha); The experiment essentially involves stopping death and regenerating cells once they die. Paula has created a way to communicate with Charlie using an old ISS radio that uses frequencies abandoned by the Soviets years before. But when someone other than Sven or Charlie shows up on that frequency looking for help, everything changes.
What shows will it remind you of? Of course it’s a coincidence that The signal came out just weeks after the Apple TV+ space mystery series Constellation, but the plots are definitely similar.
Our opinion: as with Constellation, The signal It is more of a mystery and psychological thriller than a science fiction story. Paula and Hadi’s experiment has a huge element of mystery, as does what Mudhi, who funded it, seeks to do with the results. He asks his assistant to give Charlie a figure that has a note that says “Death is just the beginning.” What does that mean? Is the experiment really trying to stop death or is Mudhi going to do something more nefarious with the information gathered?
But what’s really at the center of this story is what the signal Paula received was about, and what made it so profound that Paula may or may not have commandeered and crashed a plane after her return to Earth.
Fitz, who plays Sven, also co-wrote the series, and he and his writers cleverly established the dual timeline that will inform the plot. It is well explained, with the first hour setting up both the mission that Paula carried out and the consequences of her return; As we see both developing simultaneously, we are well aware that there is a three month difference between the two. Sometimes confusing timelines like this aren’t executed well, but there’s more than enough separation between the two timelines that it’s pretty clear to the viewer.
Of course, that also means we could be finding out what Paula discovered at the same time Sven and Charlie are finding out. That sense of confusion seems purposeful, and we’re all in favor of trying to figure things out, even when we’re presented with Paula’s side of the story, something her husband and daughter don’t have.
Sex and skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Paula receives the signal that changes everything.
Sleeping star: Yuna Bennett is fantastic as Charlie, who wants to be an astronaut and scientist like her mother and is fascinated with the history of space travel. It’s possible that she finds out more about what happened to her mother than Sven does.
Most pilot line: Jake Mitchell (Seumas F. Sargent), the American commander on the ISS, tells Paula that having her on board “is better than being a fucking taxi driver for a group of billionaire space tourists, I tell you.” Then, when he doesn’t offend the billionaire who sent Paula to the ISS, he says, “I’m sure she’s just… great.”
Our call: TRANSMIT IT. The signal does a good job of piding its story into two plot lines that are well defined, leading the viewer into the central mystery of the show in a way that keeps them interested without annoying them.
Joel Keller@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but make no mistake: he’s a couch potato. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.comFast Company and other places.
