There’s a moment early in Prime Video’s new sci-fi series Night Sky that wrecked me. Irene and Franklin York – played by Oscar winners Sissy Spacek and JK Simmons – are sitting at their dining room table quietly talking about fear and death. An ageing couple discussing the end is intrinsically sad, but what’s more staggering is how, after 40 years or so of marriage, the Yorks live for each other. When Irene asks Franklin what he’d do if she died, he answers nakedly: “I’d die, too.”
The Yorks’ friends are passing away, or they live in care homes. Irene took a bad fall and now gets around mostly by wheelchair. In place of a social life, Irene and Franklin keep a secret as extravagant as it is romantic. Under the small shed behind their modest house in their one-traffic-light Illinois town lies a portal to a vast and deserted planet. The couple like to sit on their intergalactic viewing deck and stare out at the alien landscape through a window connecting our world to another. They can see a dry, craggy plain with snow-capped mountains. A cotton candy sky that swirls like the Milky Way bathes the Yorks’ faces in a fuzzy spectral glow, and they talk all evening. Crucially, they have never breached the barrier.
