‘Constellation’s Mind-Bending Episode 6 Twist, Explained

Since the first three episodes of Apple TV+‘s psychological space thriller Constellation premiered in February, viewers have been racking their brains each week trying to sort out what exactly happened when astronaut Jo Ericsson (Noomi Rapace) returned to Earth and found pieces of her own world unrecognizable.

The series has steadily teased two alternate realties — one in which a non-Swedish speaking Alice calls Jo “Mummy” and Henry Caldera is a scientist; the other in which Alice speaks Swedish and uses “Mamma,” and Bud Caldera wrote a book and joined the convention circuit.

Don’t get us wrong, the show is still confusing as heck. But Episode 6, “Paul Is Dead,” helps connect the dots (and the universes) more clearly than ever before by showing a world contrary to the reality we thought we knew — one in which Jo died on the International Space Station and Paul survived.

“There are some people who can get it straight away from the trailer. There are other people you talk to and they’re saying, ‘Well, I got into Episode 6, and I just suddenly thought, oh my god, that’s it,'” creator, executive producer, and writer Peter Harness explained at the 2024 Winter Television Critics Association press tour. “I think there are things that people can get from the beginning if they’re into this kind of thing, but I always try and provide enough unexpected turns or do those steps in an unexpected way… Even if you think that you know what this story is, I like to take a kind of slightly more scenic route to it.”

In Episode 3, Henry Caldera essentially explains Constellation to “Mummy” Alice during their quantum physics chat. “The same thing could be in two different states at the same time. You could have a particle, for instance, the exact same particle. There’s a world in which that particle is black and there’s a world in which that particle is white. And there’s a kind of point of liminal space in between those worlds where the particle is black and white at the same time. And they don’t seem to want to decide which state they’ll be until someone looks at them,” he says. Based on that explanation and talk of the Cold Atomic Laboratory (CAL), viewers were able to infer that there are two different states — or universes — where Jo exists, and after the accident in space, she returned to the wrong one. After teasing an alternate reality in which Paul is alive, Alice is the daughter Jo remembers, and Bud Caldera is working on a cruise ship, Episode 6 lets viewers experience what the Jo we’ve come to know presumably left behind.

Constellation Episode 6 Recap: Paul Is Dead…Or Is He?

“Paul Is Dead” goes back to the beginning of Constellation‘s story on the International Space Station pre-collision. Paul is fiddling with the CAL on a call with Henry while Jo and Swedish-speaking “Mamma” Alice are video chatting. The alarm Jo swears she heard during her testimony sounds, but instead of Paul getting hurt by debris, Jo smashes her head against a glass window and sustains a fatally injury. Outside the ISS, the orange suited cosmonaut floats past the in her orange suit just as she did in Episode 1.

On Earth, Magnus’ class is interrupted with news that Jo died onboard. He tells “Mamma” Alice and the two hop on a plane to retrieve her body alongside Paul’s wife Erica and daughter Wendy. This time, Alice is the one seeking comfort from her stuffed rabbit.

In space, Paul goes to the ares where he last saw the now-missing CAL and asks, “Where the hell have you gone?” He stays behind with Jo’s body to carry out damage control, and his fellow astronauts head back to Earth. He asks them to tell Henry Caldera that he lost the CAL, but it’s clear they have no idea to which experiment he’s referring.

Similar to Jo’s experience with Paul’s body, Paul thinks he hears Jo breathing as he’s working on the ISS. Jo’s head covering floats off, which spooks him even more, so he records her and plays back the audio to test his theory. The exhales check out, despite the improbability, and in one of many points of liminal space that allow crossovers between the two universes, he also hears Jo’s voice saying, “The third. The third. This is the third. You need to hurry up.”

Back home, Alice is taking news of Jo’s death hard and hiding from Magnus in a familiar looking wardrobe at the end of a dark hallway. As she kicks her foot against the side of the cabinet, she peers through the cracks in the door and sees Jo walking towards her with a flashlight — the same scene we saw from Jo’s point of view earlier in the season. Their worlds collide, but only for an instant. By the time Alice throws open the wardrobe door and screams “MAMMA!” no one is there.

Haunted by Jo and what he fears are hallucinations, Paul — still onboard the ISS — radios station to ask about the protocols for dealing with a dead body. He expresses concern that Jo is so badly lacerated that when they leave zero gravity they’ll have severe blood loss in the capsule. He gets the green light to leave the body behind and takes her to a far part of the ISS. As he holds her hand, he says, “You gotta stop breathing. Stop breathing, Jo.” (The same words Jo heard him say when she was alone with his dead body.) He apologizes for leaving her behind, and as he grabs her hand she GASPS awake for a moment, showing us the other side of the encounter Jo had with Paul’s severed hand.

Shortly after Magnus and Alice learn Paul is leaving Jo up in space, Paul returns safely to Earth and reunites with his family. It’s quickly clear he swapped universes, too, because he mistakes his wife Erica’s name for Frida. Paul catches another liminal space glimpse of Jo when he visits her memorial to place a flower and sees her doing the same for him. He also sees himself — not Jo — in a memorial photo, then quickly shuts down his colleagues when they ask if he’s had his psych eval.

“Mamma” Alice, distraught that Jo isn’t coming home, walks into the warehouse and throws her bunny down in a puddle, which is what “Mummy” Alice saw and mistakenly thought Wendy did. Inside the building, Paul is testifying about the CAL, but when he’s shown a video of himself (or rather, the other universe Paul) onboard the ISS, it shows him and the team admiring a small lettuce garden instead of the machine. He’s told the CAL project was abandoned 12 years ago, and Fredric presses him on the decision to leave Jo’s body in space.

Between visions of Jo, the guilt he feels over leaving her behind, and the confusion over the CAL, Paul is having a difficult time readjusting to life on Earth so he seeks out Commander Caldera only learn there is no machine and Henry hasn’t been involved with NASA since the disastrous Apollo 18 mission.

Magnus isn’t doing much better without Jo. He talks to the same therapist we watched her meet earlier in the season, and at home — which has the red car Jo remembered in the driveway — he prepares for her wake. Paul and his family attend, but not before Paul breaks down outside, telling his wife, “I lost ISS for the whole world, I’m the guy that took that away…I committed sacrilege…I made an excuse because I was a coward in that moment. I just left her up there because I was scared. She could still be alive.” He says there are so many things wrong he can barely catch his breath, and when Alice arrives at the wake she and Paul catch a glimpse of “Mummy” Alice and Jo in the living room that rattles them.

After Alice screams “Mamma!” in front of all the guests, Magnus clears the house and the two head to the family cabin for some time away. They walk inside and see the painting of a changeling — not an angel — hanging on the wall. Though Magnus assures Alice they’ll never see her mother again, the episode ends with Jo and “Mummy” Alice pulling up to the cabin.

While Alice tries to figure out if her mother’s still alive or not, Paul’s family fears he’s missing. Turns out he’s outside Bud Caldera’s apartment in Los Angeles. He knocks on the door and recognizes Bud as Henry, the man who trained him at NASA. Bud swears they’ve never met and cautions him to leave, but Paul lets himself inside and presses him for answers. When Paul sees Bud’s walls covered in Apollo 18 newspaper clippings, he tells Bud there was an accident onboard but he heroically fixed it and everyone returned home safely. Bud insists he’s lying and swears a sudden loss of pressure led to the death of two men. Paul begs for answers and Bud tells him to take his pills. Their argument escalates and the episode ends with Bud shooting Paul.

So…What The Heck Is Happening On Constellation?

With two intense episodes remaining in the season, it’s clear that Constellation still has a ton of twists and jaw-dropping reveals ahead, but Episode 6 helped us get a much clearer grasp on the alternate universes.

From what we’ve gathered six episodes deep, “Mummy” Alice — the Alice Jo meets after she lands — exists in a universe where Paul died of cardiac arrest in the ISS. This Alice doesn’t speak Swedish and wasn’t video chatting with Jo in space when she showed her the CAL. In fact, the Jo who lands back on Earth isn’t this Alice’s real mom, which is why Jo doesn’t recognize her smell or know the family had a blue car, or remember that she was cheating on Magnus. It seems “Mummy” Alice’s real mummy not only switched universes, but is dead. In this universe, Henry Caldera also became a respected scientist after the success of Apollo 18 and is working on the CAL, while Irene Lysenko is a Russian space chief with a great deal of authority.

So where is Jo’s real daughter? “Mamma” Alice is stuck in a universe where everyone thinks her mom died and Paul is alive, but he appears to have switched universes as well. This is the Alice who was screaming “Mamma” outside the cabin in Episode 1, the Alice who got a glimpse of the CAL in space, and the Alice who speaks Swedish. In this universe, it seems Apollo 18 was a massive failure, which resulted in Bud Caldera — a disgraced astronaut — writing a book, battling conspiracy theorists, and working the convention circuit. And Irene is…the corpse cosmonaut Henry was hooking up with for a split second? Maybe?! OK we’re still confused. (Complimentary.) HELP?!

New episode of Constellation premiere Wednesdays on Apple TV+.