Summary
Star City‘s premiere gets back to a lot of what worked about the early seasons of For All Mankind, only with a more paranoid vibe to suit the setting.
With For All Mankind due to end, and having already jumped the shark a little bit in the minds of long-time fans, Apple TV was smart to produce a spin-off that played up to the strengths of the earlier seasons. It might take an effort to remember now, but that show, one of the streamer’s earliest originals, was a compelling alt-history story about the Soviet Union winning the Space Race. And so it is with Star City, which presents the same story, with a few familiar faces, from the Russian point of view.
In the two-part premiere, a lot of time and focus is devoted to the intelligence and engineering pillars of the former Soviet Union, including the KGB’s surveillance department in the titular Star City, which is headed by Lyudmilla Raskova and tasked with maintaining the Soviet Union’s positive global perception, even if that means ruthless cracking down on personal freedoms and, often, the truth; the Chief Designer’s efforts to steer the Soviet Space Program; and the travails of Anastasia Belikova, who becomes, quite by chance, the first woman to walk on the moon.
Anastasia’s a big part of Star City in Episodes 1 and 2. She’s perceived as an obedient and devoted Soviet woman, if not necessarily a great pilot, but it’s tellingly enough that her being accustomed to doing as she’s told makes her an ideal candidate for a space mission when it transpires that the much more qualified candidate, Yana Akhmatova, had a brother who wrote for an underground magazine. Anastasia isn’t believed in by the Chief Engineer, who has to train her at pace, or her colleagues who have to fly with her, but her adherence to party doctrine is enough to get her to the moon.
When she’s there, though, she goes off the rails, and instead of reading a pre-prepared statement provided by Lyudmilla, she instead makes a more feminist statement that namechecks Yana directly, breaching protocol. There’s something about the freedom of being on the moon, away from the rigorous authoritarianism of the Soviet state, that just compels people to freestyle speeches, I guess. It means Anastasia’s return is met with hostility and the threat of being replaced by a lookalike, but she seems apologetic enough to keep going.
This means a highly publicised tour of the Soviet Union so that its general spacefaring superiority is clear to the world. But according to the KGB, you can’t be a proper Soviet woman without also being married, so Anastasia is wedded off to a fellow cosmonaut named Sasha, who doesn’t love the union either. This is the way things are, though, so they both just have to get on with it, but the taste of lunar freedom that Anastasia got is never far from her mind. Sasha seems a pretty good egg, though, and the way their relationship evolves through Star City Season 1, Episode 2 is an engaging – platonic, for now – throughline.
Anastasia’s yearning for the freedom that space provides is obviously her driving motivation, which makes it all the more problematic that, as a symbol of Soviet superiority and – this in a bit of a whisper – a potential PR nightmare if she’s allowed back to space, she won’t be going on any more missions. Perhaps this degree of control might drive her towards the woman who approaches her with the prospect of being a double agent for the U.S.? You can never quite tell.
One of the more compelling threads in the Star City premiere is tracing the genesis of intelligence all the way through to the decisions that are made on account of it, and for that purpose, we have Irina, a small fry in Lyudmilla’s intelligence network whose job is snooping on and transcribing the conversations of certain people of interest. It’s through Irina that we learn of Sasha’s affair with Tanya, and it’s also through Irina that Lyudmilla learns that Yana, despite having a potentially dissident brother, wasn’t a radical after all. Her brother died when she was one, and she had no ties to the Americans.
You’d think that this mistake would lead to a lot of apologies and redoes, but no such luck in Soviet Russia. Even though Yana is innocent, Lyudmilla instructs Irina to execute her, and when she can’t, Lyudmilla does so herself. Yana’s innocence is only relevant in the sense that it would prove Soviet incompetence. And there’s no such thing as Soviet incompetence, at least officially.
Despite not having an itchy trigger finger, Lyudmilla still perceives Irina to be smart and useful, so she sends her to Paris to keep an eye on Anastasia following her tour with Sasha, and then takes her with her to Berlin, where a prisoner is being interrogated by the KGB on charges of delivering secret documents to the Americans. With the Soviets ahead in the Space Race, the U.S. is snooping around at their plans for Lunar Bases and suchlike, so keeping everything tight-lipped is of paramount concern. The prisoner was instructed to deliver something to Star City, but refused, so he didn’t have any idea what he was supposed to smuggle. Irina doesn’t execute him, but she doesn’t exactly strike a sympathetic figure either. Some people will do just about anything for the sake of their careers.
As for the Chief Designer, he spends most of the Star City premiere trying to sneakily work on his own mission to send cosmonauts to Venus, while also trying to make sure that the General Secretary doesn’t get a whole bunch of people killed by accelerating the lunar missions so that the Americans don’t get there first. His primary ally is Sergei Nikulov, another rule-breaker who clearly believes in the mission, but the mission may get both of them killed. Still, this is a paranoid conspiracy thriller. Isn’t potentially being killed the point?
