Summary
Star City shifts its focus a little bit with a time-skip and some evolving dynamics, but the tension developed over the last few episodes continues to yield rich rewards.
After (presumably) killing off three major characters in highly dramatic circumstances, it was obvious that Episode 7 of Star City was going to have some explaining to do. “Plow Deep” provides that explanation early doors in a bit of narration from Lyudmilla framed as an intelligence briefing. It’s a clever bit of writing designed to communicate a few things. It’s a year since the previous episode, for instance, and thanks to what has been written off as a training accident, restrictions have been placed on Star City. Its remit is now near-earth activity, namely, surveilling Western military installations under the cover of scientific research using a space station named Salyut-1.
You might be surprised to hear that Salyut-1 is under the direct supervision of the Chief Designer. But the current Chief Designer is Radimir Petrovsky. The original has been shuffled off into an idyllic retirement, albeit under house arrest, and the internal regime change is causing all kinds of problems, particularly for Lyudmilla.
The chief political problem of this episode is a design flaw of the Salyut-1, which compels it to drop its film canisters from orbit. When one is recovered on American soil, George Bush claims that the station is being used for spying on the United States. Petrovsky blames Lyudmilla for this, in a roundabout way, and wants her to make an example of Burkov, whom he believes is deliberately withholding solutions out of loyalty to the previous Chief Designer.
Berkov isn’t keen on Petrovsky, and certainly not on the mundane use of Star City for terrestrial espionage and not exploration of the great unknown, but the failure to innovate on the Salyut isn’t insubordination — it’s a lack of inspiration from the top down. Lyudmilla takes his job, but she also takes his point. It might strike as a little ridiculous that the Chief Designer is the only person in the Soviet Union smart enough to devise a solution to this problem, but it’s less that and more what he represents — and, more to the point, what Petrovsky does not.
So, Lyudmilla goes to the Chief Designer, and when her light threats to his wellbeing don’t land, appeals to his sense of patriotism. When that doesn’t work, she frames Petrovsky as an existential threat to Star City, which does the job. After a single glancing look at the designs, the Chief Designer comes up with a starting point for a potential solution. But that seems to be the limit of what he’s willing to offer.
Lyudmilla’s lack of enthusiasm where Petrovsky is concerned is very much mutual. On his part, he turns to Irina, whose career has been deliberately stymied by Lyudmilla, in the hopes of trying to recruit her to help him oust Lyudmilla from Star City. Reluctantly, Irina agrees and visits Lyudmilla at home with the intention of planting a bug in her apartment. She decides against it, though, swayed at least in part by learning that Lyudmilla lost a son, Dima, in the war. She confesses to her real mission, and Lyudmilla clearly sees an opportunity to use Irina as an inside agent against Petrovsky.
Elsewhere in Star City Episode 7, things aren’t going especially well for Anastasia, who’s spending her days looking after her drunk dad and working the farm while a propaganda film about her great spacefaring triumph is peddled across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union. But given the sullied public reputation of Salyut-1, Anastasia begins to look like a potential solution.
Tarasov, who must have the worst haircut in all of Russia, visits Anastasia at home to ask her to be Salyut-1’s mission commander. He frames it as a goodwill gesture, just reward for Anastasia’s devoted national service, but she’s too smart for that and tells him so. It’s actually a way to counteract the narrative of Salyut-1 being a surveillance platform. I’m not entirely sure how Anastasia being aboard would accomplish this politically, but there’s a really great shot of the rocket taking off and a cool-looking docking sequence as Anastasia and her crew arrive at and board the station, so I’m not going to complain too much.
Plus, with Anastasia in position, we get the big twist of “Plow Deep”. Sergei, who has spent most of the episode being overworked, sulking, and furiously doing calculations, patches into the Salyut-1 with a theory. He wants Anastasia to run a test on the security monitor to confirm a strange anomaly he found in his data. He tells her to set the station’s UHF receiver to a particular frequency and relay the signal she picks up to him. He excitedly realises that it’s compressed data.
Initially, nobody realises why this is a big deal. But as he explains to Anastasia, there is only one other spacecraft capable of transmitting using his algorithm — the Venera 7. And, if his assumptions are correct, it should be landing back on Earth right… about… now.
