Constellation Episode 5, titled "Five Miles Out, the Sound Is Clearest," picks up right where we left off last time, after Jo pushed Magnus down. It appears he didn't die after all. The weight of everything going on sends Jo into a bit of a panic as she loads Alice into the car and tells her that they're going on a little adventure. Jo swings by the office and attempts to download some files but finds that she doesn't have access. However, she is able to play her FaceTime call without Alice before the events out on the ISS, and she seems to pay special attention to the part where she says they're doing something very fiddly at the CAL. After listening to the recording, Jo steals the CAL device and hits the road.
After the intro, we find Henry awakened from his sleep by Bud, who appears to be accessing him through his consciousness as if he's figured out how to leverage quantum entanglement to his advantage. Henry hears a knock at the door while taking a bath, and we see him open up to no one. However, Bud can be seen observing Henry through the mirror behind him.
Next, Irene gives Henry a call and discusses the recent Nobel Prize. She reads from the newspaper, which talks about particles existing in an entangled state and says that what happens to one of the particles determines what happens to the other, even if they're far apart. Henry then has a sort of vision into Bud's world where he sees a photo of Bud as well as his book.
We then see Jo on board a ferry where she gives Ilya a call to ask him about his medication. Ilya then randomly says, "Do you know the ISS is full of cracks? It's like an old China teacup," which seems incredibly random, but surely there's a reason for this. Jo shares what she found out about being given her lithium pills as opposed to the vitamins everyone else got. She theorizes she was given these pills because of what she saw in space and asks Ilya to have his pills tested and report back.
Next, we find Bud leaving voicemails with various family members, and Henry washing up in the work bathroom where he can hear Bud talking. Henry writes "Leave me alone" on the steamed-up mirror, which Bud can see on his end as well. Jo and Alice stop for a bite to eat, and Jo asks Alice what she's afraid of. Alice says it's the Valya, which is a person that tricks her into not playing and is the reason she's been hiding so much. Jo asks what she is, and Alice says, "I don't know, she's a dream," so Jo asks her to draw the Valya. Before making a phone call to the Skagerrak Observatory that sent her the tapes in the last episode, after a pretty odd and unwelcoming phone call, Jo Googles them and finds an interview with Irene where she claims Skagerrak was using staged recordings to attempt to bribe NASA astronauts.
In the interview, Irene calls them cranks and criminals. Jo then heads outside and calls Magnus and Frederic, who try to persuade her to return home for treatment, which she seems to be entertaining, but then Alice comes outside with a drawing of the Valya, which looks identical to the cosmonaut Jo had seen up in space. After seeing this drawing, Jo ends the call.
Next, we see Ilya having his pills tested and learning that they're just vitamin D and B with no traces of lithium. He then attempts to have some records pulled but is told they're no longer available. Irene then finds Ilya and asks why he was pulling those records, and he says, "Why do you ask?" Irene then moves on and says Jo is missing after assaulting her husband and that she should contact Irene if she wants help. Jo then arrives at the Skagerrak Observatory where she meets Wallie and Laurenz and says she'd like to know more about what they recorded. Jo explains what happened up on the ISS, and Wallie says she knows because Laurenz heard it all on one of their ghost tapes.
Wallie explains that they'd been listening to the recording since the 1940s, and after a bit more backstory, Alice spots Henry in a photo, and Laurenz says that he came by in 1982 to get the Apollo 18 tapes. Jo recounts that there was an accident on Apollo 18 and that Henry was the only survivor, but that he was a drunk and a failure unlike how he is today. They head out to the boat to listen to the tapes, and Alice pockets a phone on the way. On their walk to the boat, Wallie tells a story from 1984 about six cosmonauts who witnessed what they described as angels on multiple occasions.
Laurenz says this was reported in the newspapers, and that he believes them. Wallie says people see things up there, and when they get back home, they seem to go crazy. On the boat, Wallie explains that the noise they're picking up and the recording must be coded, and they found that you must go to a liminal place like out on the water to be able to hear. She then plays a recording of the transcript she'd sent to Jo in the last episode and says that this woman may be the corpse that Jo saw. She then plays a recording of Paul, which she alludes to meaning he didn't actually die up there, and then says 500 people have gone to space past the kmen line, and many came back as addicts or crazy people.
Wallie just says something about space is wrong. She does point out that it's odd that they have a recording of Irene's spaceship burning up, but then her returning home safely and the recording of Paul seemingly being fine but then Jo returning in his place. As they make it back to land, Alice gets into the phone with the code she saw back in the house and places a call to Magnus. She tells them they're headed out to the cabin and that she wants to stay with Jo to take care of her.
Wallie gives Jo a bag of ghost tapes to take with her, and she and Alice head for the cabin. In the most interesting scene of the episode, Henry tells Frederic he wants to go with him since Jo has the CAL device, and when Frederic pushes back, we see Bud take over Henry's body and wet himself as he lets out a rather maniacal laugh. Henry then seems to take back over and says, "I'm coming with you, I just need to change." Back with Jo and Alice, Jo says, "You've got to know how to put things in a box and leave it." Alice begins an exercise of placing her beads into boxes as metaphors for everything Jo's been dealing with. Jo runs through her list of what needs to be put away, which includes the non-existent trash bag in space, Paul's death, everything Jo's been seeing since she got home, the ghost tapes, the pills, and most importantly her family.
Jo asks Alice who the Valya is, and Alice says it's a woman floating around Earth, a dead cosmonaut, which further proves that this is Irene who just said in a past episode that she just wants to float around the Earth. Alice tells Jo that the Valya speaks but it's not clear and sounds like mumbling. Jo says she wishes the tape from 1967 were clear so Alice pulls it from the bag and begins playing it for a moment and says, "Mommy, that's the Valya." Jo grabs the tape player and finds that as she moves it closer to the CAL, it becomes crystal clear, and Alice confirms that Irene's voice is the voice of this Valya thing that has been haunting her.
Next, we find Henry back in the bathroom where he calls out to Bud, who makes its appearance in the mirrors. Henry says, "You've stopped taking your pills." Henry talks about his Cold Atomic Lab experiment and that he thinks it made everything worse. He then asks if Jo exists in Bud's reality, but Bud just says he's coming for Henry and is going to mess things up. Henry says he doesn't even know if Bud is really there, to which Bud says, "Well, I made you pee your pants," and then he disappears.
Back with Jo and Alice, we seem to have caught up to the opening scene of the show where Jo is explaining what the tape says as they drive towards the cabin. However, Jo comes to a crossroad she doesn't recognize and makes the interesting decision to ignore Alice's directions and instead drives out over the frozen lake. They arrive at the cabin, and Jo hears the other Alice calling out to her. Once inside, Jo plays back her own ghost tape the Skagerrak gave her, and this one consists of her and Alice having a conversation in Swedish, countering the recording Jo found at work which had their conversation in English. After hearing the recording, Alice comes out of her room and says that wasn't her because she doesn't speak Swedish. Then the episode ends with the other Alice hiking through the snow and calling out to Jo.
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