In the fifth episode of Constellation, the story resumes with a tense moment, as Jo impulsively pushes Magnus, causing him to strike his head. Panicked, Jo rushes to call an ambulance but quickly decides to flee the scene with Alice in tow. She tells Alice they're simply going for a casual drive, trying to mask the underlying urgency.
Their journey pauses at Jo's office, where she listens intently to the recorded phone conversation she had with Alice while on the ISS. The memory stirs emotions within her, and she makes a decisive move, retrieving the CAL core and concealing it in the car.
Meanwhile, Henry is startled by a mysterious knock on his hotel room door, only to find no one there. From a mirror, Bud watches him with a calculating gaze. Later, Irena's call brings a discussion about quantum theory, explaining how the fate of one particle is intimately linked to its distant counterpart. Suddenly, Henry's vision starts to tilt, a disturbing sign of something amiss.
As Jo drives towards a ferry, she reaches out to her astronaut colleague, Ilya. She confides in him about the lithium pills and asks him to analyze his own supply. At the ESA, Henry's anger boils over when he discovers the missing CAL. Desperate, he turns to Irena for help.
Bud, on the other hand, reaches out to his daughters, inquiring about their Thanksgiving plans, a seemingly innocuous conversation that masks deeper intentions. Henry, seeking solace, retreats to the bathroom, allowing the hot water to steam up the mirror. On the condensation, he writes a plea: "Leave me alone." Unbeknownst to him, Bud spies the message on his own bathroom mirror, a chilling reminder of their interconnected fates.
Over a meal at a restaurant, Jo gently probes Alice about her habit of hiding in cupboards. Alice confesses her fear of something called The Valya, a mysterious entity - perhaps a person or a nightmarish figment - that prevents her from playing and drives her to hide. Jo offers a compromise, agreeing to draw her own source of worry if Alice will do the same.
Later, Jo makes a crucial phone call to the person who sent her the tapes from Skagerrak. She announces her intentions to travel there, but the man's response shocks her. He claims his sister sent the tapes and accuses her of being unstable. Determined to uncover the truth, Jo turns to the internet, learning that the siblings involved were prosecuted for blackmailing astronauts with bogus tape recordings. The revelation deepens the mystery surrounding her own involvement, and she resolves to pursue the truth no matter the cost.
Jo reaches out to Magnus, who's accompanied by Frederic, her heart heavy with a confession she's ready to make. But before the words can escape her lips, Alice pulls out a startling drawing, revealing that the mysterious Valya is, in fact, an astronaut clad in an orange suit. Frustrated, Jo probes Frederic about the medication, only to find his responses lacking. She assures Magnus they'll return soon and hangs up, leaving a sense of unease hanging in the air.
Meanwhile, at the Star City in Russia, Ilya pores over his medication, searching for clues. He searches for the medical records of the tablets, but they seem to have vanished into thin air. Suddenly, Irena rushes in, her face etched with worry, informing Ilya that Jo has gone missing.
With Alice at her side, Jo makes her way to the Skagerrak observatory. A woman emerges to greet them, welcoming them inside with warmth. She shares a startling tale, revealing that her brother, Laurentz, captured Jo's voice on his ghost tapes. The siblings' father had left them recording devices, and through these, they heard eerie sounds emanating from the vastness of space. Their journey began in the mid-90s, and they even crossed paths with Henry, who was eager to obtain the tapes from his Apollo 18 mission.
Elsewhere, Frederic persuades Magnus to refrain from involving the police, hoping to keep the situation under wraps.
The woman escorts Jo and Alice onto a boat, her voice filled with intrigue as she recounts a USSR mission where six astronauts encountered 'angels' among the stars. She then delves into a mysterious sound captured on the tapes, a haunting mix of static that she and her brother managed to decode.
Meanwhile, Alice's curious fingers sneak towards the woman's phone, successfully unlocking it. But to her disappointment, there's no signal. The woman plays a tape, asking Jo to discern the faint cries of a woman pleading for help. It turns out to be the recording from the day Irena embarked on her journey into space. The revelation deepens the mystery, as the woman reveals they also heard Paul Lancaster's voice on the day of the incident, leaving them bewildered when it was Jo who returned instead.
As the static sound rang out, Alice's heart raced, and she urgently turned back to land. Before stepping into their car, the mysterious woman pressed a set of tapes into Jo's hands. With a deft move, Alice managed to sneak a call to Magnus, whispering that they were heading to the secluded family cabin.
Henry stubbornly insisted on accompanying Frederic in retrieving Jo, but as they argued, his bladder betrayed him. Despite his frantic attempts to contain it, he ended up wetting his pants. He blamed it on his doppelganger, Bud, and tried to laugh it off, but the embarrassment was evident.
Alice gently guided her mother through her thoughts, painting a vivid picture of Valya - a lifeless astronaut floating aimlessly around Earth, occasionally murmuring. They replayed the ancient tape, and this time, the words emerged clearly from the static. The woman's voice, Alice noted, was identical to Valya's, and her words were chilling - she claimed the world was upside down.
Henry, attempting to communicate with Bud, stared into a mirror. Bud's voice boomed through the reflection, threatening that he was coming for Henry.
As Jo and Alice drew nearer to their cabin, they faced a fork in the road. Alice made a split-second decision, choosing to traverse a frozen lake. After a tense journey, they finally arrived at the cabin. As Jo helped Alice out of the car, she thought she heard Alice's voice echoing from the house, but she quickly dismissed it as a figment of her imagination.
Inside the cozy cabin, Jo listened to the taped phone conversation between her and Alice. Alice, eavesdropping, gasped in disbelief, insisting that the voice wasn't hers. She didn't speak Swedish, and she never called Jo "Mamma."
Elsewhere, another Alice, bundled in furs, trudged through the snow, her screams echoing across the frozen landscape. At the end of her desperate cry, she called out for Jo, her voice breaking as she uttered the word "Mamma," leaving a haunting echo in the air, concluding the fifth episode of Constellation.
