Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Signal’ On Netflix, About A Missing Astronaut And Her Family Looking Into A Discovery That Might Change The World

It’s always amazing when two shows with similar settings and plots come out around the same time. In the case of The Signal, the German series is about a female astronaut who ran into a mysterious phenomenon while on the International Space Station. Yes, that sounds similar to Apple’s series Constellation. But the nature of the mystery on The Signal is completely different.

THE SIGNAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In a suburban neighborhood, a man lies awake in bed. He envisions his wife reaching out to him, saying “I love you.” Right as he’s about to grab her hand, he wakes up.

The Gist: After Sven (Florian David Fitz) wakes up, he looks at his old candy-bar phone and notices that the alarm he set never went off. He scrambles to wake up his daughter Charlie (Yuna Bennett), and makes sure she brings her cochlear implant, so they can drive to a watch party; Paula (Peri Baumeister), Sven’s wife and Charlie’s mother, is about to touch down from her three months up on the International Space Station.

As they watch on screen as the capsule hurtles towards the ground, Charlie notices that the parachutes haven’t been deployed. Inside the capsule, Paula is completely distracted; her capsule-mate, Hadi Hiraj (Hadi Khanjanpour), has to scream at her to get her to finally deploy the manual chutes after the automatic ones failed. Once they touch down in Chile, both are completely distracted, and Charlie thinks her mother is acting strange.

Before she’s due to fly back to Germany, Paula calls Sven and says cryptic things like a reference to the game Fox and Hare, then signs off 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 get updates from the airline. During their night’s stay at the hotel, he expresses his frustration to a woman at the balcony next door; the next day, when he’s called in by investigators, he finds out that the person he talked to was a cop. They play him a cockpit recording where it seems that Paula has infiltrated the cockpit, and wonder if he had any indication of odd behavior before the flight; Hadi’s wife is asked the same thing.

This is after the families find out that wreckage was found in the Atlantic, and that it’s assumed there are no survivors. He tries to keep the news away from Charlie, but once they get home, she tunes into the news and insists her dad tell her if her mom is dead.

We also go back three months to when Paula and Hadi board the ISS to deploy the experiments paid for by a billionaire named Benisha Mudhi (Sheeba Chaddha); the experiment is to essentially stop death, and regenerate cells once they die. Paula has set up a way to communicate with Charlie using an old radio on the ISS that uses frequencies abandoned by the Soviets years prior. But when someone who is not Sven or Charlie comes through 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 only a few weeks after Apple TV+’s space-based mystery series Constellation, but the plots are definitely similar.

Our Take: Like with Constellation, The Signal is more a mystery and psychological thriller than it is a science fiction story. The experiment that Paula and Hadi has a huge mysterious element to it, as does just what Mudhi, who funded it, is looking to do with the results. She has her assistant give Charlie a figurine, and it has a note in it that says “Death is just the beginning.” What does that mean? Is the experiment really trying to stop death or is Mudhi going to be doing something more nefarious with the gathered information?

But what’s really at the heart of this story is just what the signal Paula received is all about, and what made it so profound that Paula may or may not have commandeered and crashed a plane after she came back to Earth.

Fitz, who stars as Sven, also co-wrote the series, and he and his writers deftly set up the dual timeline that will inform the plot. It’s teased out well, with the first hour setting up both the mission Paula went on and the aftermath of her return; as we see both play out simultaneously, we’re well aware that there is a three-month difference between the two. Sometimes jumbled timelines like this aren’t executed well, but there is more than enough separation between the two timelines that it’s pretty clear to the viewer.

Of course, that also means that we might be finding out about what Paula discovered at the same time Sven and Charlie are figuring it out. That sense of discombobulation feels purposeful, and we’re all for trying to figure things out, even when we’re presented with Paula’s side of the story, something that her husband and daughter don’t have.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Paula receives the signal that changes everything.

Sleeper Star: Yuna Bennett is fantastic as Charlie, who wants to be an astronaut and a scientist like her mother and is fascinated with the history of space travel. She may find out more about what happened with her mother than Sven will.

Most Pilot-y Line: Jake Mitchell (Seumas F. Sargent), the American commander on the ISS, tells Paula that having her aboard “is better than being a fucking taxi driver for a bunch of space tourist billionaires, I’ll tell you that.” Then when he offers no offense to the billionaire that sent Paula to the ISS, he says, “I’m sure she’s just… great.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Signal does a good job of splitting its story into two storylines that are well-defined, bringing the viewer along on the show’s central mystery in a way that keeps them interested without jerking them around.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.