Summary
Star City really comes into its own in “Awl in a Sack”, delivering effectively claustrophobic tension on the way to a surprising major cliffhanger.
In many ways, it feels like “Awl in a Sack” is the episode that Star City has been building up to throughout Season 1. It’s where all of the various character arcs and subplots all nicely dovetail into a string of sustained, claustrophobic tension, building to a major cliffhanger for good measure. Episode 6 is easily the new high-water mark for this show, and it may well end up being the standout hour of the entire season. If it doesn’t, then we’re in for a treat.
As it turns out, you can’t even escape Soviet Russia in space. After being exposed as the mole, Valya thought he’d cracked it by finessing his inclusion in the Chief Designer’s mission to Venus, but no such luck. Lyudmilla is adamant about not letting him get away unscathed, and she’s willing to do just about anything to make sure he’s held to account. If there’s collateral damage, then so be it. Nobody, not the Chief Designer, not the space program, and not totally innocent bystanders, is bigger than the state.
Lyudmilla’s problems begin with Tanya. Despite Irina’s fervent efforts to ensure that she was protected from the potential blowback of Valya’s exposure, Tanya couldn’t resist tipping Valya off that she knew he was a traitor. Irina finds the safehouse she prepared empty, Tanya in the wind, and Lyudmilla seething that she collaborated with a traitor. What seemed like a master plan from Irina now stands to implicate her in a treason plot.
Finding Tanya means finding Valya’s handler, to whom she turned for help. And it isn’t like there’s any real love lost between the two. In fact, Ekaterina takes pretty visible pleasure in breaking the news that Valya wasn’t really a traitor at all; he was trying to protect Tanya. Everything he did was for her. And instead of giving him the benefit of the doubt, she turned on him, and believed all the lies she was sold. It’s a bitter pill to swallow.
While this is compelling, Episode 6 marks the first time that it has been the least compelling aspect of Star City. Here in “Awl in a Sack”, the Venus mission takes on ultimate priority, since Lyudmilla is trying to stay one step ahead of the First Deputy and needs to be seen to bring Valya to justice for her own sake. When she’s alerted to an unsanctioned rocket launch and informed by the Chief Designer that Valya is among the crew, she takes control of the operation to try to find a way to hold Valya to account, even while he’s in space.
For this, they turn to Lakshmi. She’s a totally unwitting participant in the plan, but by having her liaise with her husband while aboard, in their native language, they can secretly instruct her to perform a system reset without Sasha or Valya being tipped off about what’s happening. This, in turn, allows Valya to be isolated in one of the ship’s modules, so Lyudmilla can interrogate him. Sasha, who doesn’t like what he’s hearing, disconnects the microphones so the cosmonauts can speak privately, while Lyudmilla insists on depressurising the module, suffocating Valya to death.
As predicted, Sasha isn’t best pleased to learn that his friend was responsible for a tragedy that he has blamed himself for ever since. But he’s nonetheless unwilling to allow that same friend to be ignobly executed on his watch, so he and Lakshmi work to save him, even while Lyudmilla frantically instructs the control room to depressurise the entire craft. It’s a riveting race to see who can get the upper hand, but it ends up being Lyudmilla who gets her own way. Holding a technician at gunpoint, she forces the whole craft to be depressurised, and in Sasha’s attempts to fix it, he causes an explosion that seemingly kills everyone aboard.
This creates all kinds of problems. The Chief Designer is arrested for going against Lyudmilla’s orders; Irina is still on the hook for helping Tanya; the mission is a write-off, and Anastasia probably isn’t going to take Sasha’s fate especially well. It’s such a bold swing for a show to take so early in its first season that I can’t help but respect it. The remaining few episodes are suddenly a much more enticing proposition.
