Summary
The Signal is an ambitious thriller with some intriguing ideas, but its reach exceeds its grasp, and a disappointing conclusion wastes solid earlier work.
The Signal is a German miniseries that, like a lot of movies and TV shows with cosmic aspirations, imagines the vastness of space as a terrifying and unknowable frontier – and also a useful backboard for explorations of very human relationships and issues. Season 1 runs only four hour-long episodes, but in that time it asks a lot of very astute and intriguing questions about everything from mental health to first contact with an alien species. It’s in providing the answers where the Netflix series struggles.
Any good story about space needs a tether to Earth, and in the case of The Signal this is to be found in the tight family unit of astronaut Paula (Peri Baumeister), her husband Sven (Florian David Fitz), and their hearing-impaired daughter Charlie (Yuna Bennett). The latter is so precocious and quietly brilliant that it sometimes seems made-for-TV, like she’s there solely to connect certain cryptic clues together, but the family overall are believable and their relationships provide the bleaker, more high-concept elements with a contour of human emotion and connection.
Paula has just completed a mission on the International Space Station funded by Indian billionaire Benisha Mudhi (Sheeba Chaddha), who runs the private space research company Visions. The Signal starts with Paula and another astronaut, Hadi (Hadi Khanjanpour), returning home, but it becomes clear quickly that something is amiss. Paula is reluctant to deploy the parachutes that’ll bring the shuttle safely to the ground. That night, she calls Sven and makes several vague comments she doesn’t explain. The next day, the flight carrying Paula and Hadi back to German goes missing, and all its occupants are presumed dead.
These early portions work really well, in large part because they’re couched in the perspective of Sven and Charlie, whose eagerness to be reunited with Paula was palpable enough that the loss feels legitimately stinging. The scene of the passengers’ families eagerly awaiting the return of their loved ones, only for a terrible new reality to dawn on them, reminded me of a similarly well-done sequence in Episode 5 of The New Look, where French prisoners liberated from Nazi work camps staggered home to their families.
While we’re doing Apple TV+ comparisons, the most obvious for The Signal is Constellation, another enigmatic and conspiratorial thriller about a female astronaut returning home after a sojourn on the ISS to discover all is very much not as it should be. This show takes a different angle, though, and the warmth of Sven and Charlie’s relationship in Paula’s absence, not to mention the nastier streak that emerges in Sven’s personality when things get trying, provide more effective dramatic firmament.
By the time it’s revealed – towards the end of the first episode, so pump the brakes on any accusations of spoilers here – that Paula had seemingly made first contact with an extraterrestrial race while aboard the ISS, The Signal has raised so many potential questions that it borders on overwhelming. Secrets are revealed, both of the familial and galactic variety, and the show settles into a fifty-fifty split between present-day sequences of Sven and Charlie trying to piece things together and flashbacks to Paula aboard the station.
This is where things start to waver. Most of these questions don’t have satisfactory answers, and the scant runtime shows its weaknesses by stripping peripheral characters of depth and making their motivations hazy. Most damningly, a distressingly large amount of dramatic tension is pinned on the extremely played-out “Is she just crazy?” cliché, seen so often in thrillers and horrors over the years that its overuse here is profoundly disappointing. “Is she imagining it because she’s nuts?” isn’t too many steps removed from “It was all a dream” as far as potential twists go.
The Signal has good questions but struggles with the answers
The rushed, slightly unsatisfactory ending is a definite disappointment, then, especially given how much The Signal gets right in the meantime. Its characters are relatable and their dynamic is compelling, and the scenes set aboard the ISS do a great job with what one assumes were limited resources to capture a sense of dizzying scale. There are more than enough mysteries to carry a curious viewer through the four episodes.
The question is how they’ll feel after they get there when the secrets are revealed and The Signal has shown its hand. That’s harder to say, and mileage may vary, but it feels like a limp and perfunctory conclusion to a story with far more potential than it manages to meet.
What did you think of The Signal Season 1? Comment below.
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