Full spoilers follow for Star City Episodes 1 and 2, which are streaming on Apple TV now.
For All Mankind may have just wrapped up its fifth season, which was set in the 2010s, but Apple TV’s brand-new series Star City is winding back the clock on the alt-history universe. And this time, we’re going back to the beginning of the space race to watch it unfold from the Russian perspective. From the same lead creative team behind For All Mankind, Star City has already established an intriguing version of that era’s opening salvo in its first two episodes, “The Eyes” and “A Bear on a Chain,” that’s less about the challenges of space exploration — though there’s still some of that — and more about what it’s like when one’s dreams and ambitions come into conflict with the tightly principled strictures of Soviet society.
If you’re unfamiliar with the key difference between this TV universe and reality, that’s perfectly OK; Star City will tell you all about it. In the tense first scene, a young woman is shadily scuttled out of her apartment by Soviet agents with news — they won’t say what — about her husband. She’s led to the Roscosmos mission command center where she gets to watch her husband, Alexei Leonov, be the first man to step foot on the surface of the moon, issuing his state-approved landing speech in honor of the “the Marxist-Leninist way of life.” It’s effective in laying down the story from the get-go and dropping viewers smack-dab in the middle of its shrouded, paranoid atmosphere where anyone is always one bad move away from becoming the subject of a hushed political conspiracy.
It’s tempting to compare notes with Star City and the early (excellent) seasons of For All Mankind, but the new series takes care in being its very own thing in a closed system, apropos of its isolationist setting. It doesn’t alienate those who might pick this show up cold because of the appeal of a late-’60s Soviet-era thriller – you won’t find endless winks and nods to For All Mankind here – but it does add new contours to the top stories of the space race after watching them through the American side. Take the backstory behind Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert) becoming the first woman on the moon because the original choice was suspected of working with the Americans — For All Mankind showed her in newspapers and on a small TV for all of 15 seconds, and yet it inspired nearly the entire Season 1 arc of recruiting female pilots. (The first female President of the United States, Ellen Wilson, came from that pool!)
Expectedly, Star City does have a couple name drops For All Mankind watchers will be familiar with: specifically Irina Morozova (Agnes O’Casey), who starts as a kind-hearted (!) low-level intelligence operator listening to and filing reports on bugged rooms, and Sergei Nikulov (Josef Davies), who’s just another scientist in the mission command lineup but isn’t afraid to toss out nutty, yet effective, ideas. Those two will have plenty to do with the American space program in their later years, but here, they’re in the beginning of their careers. It’ll be fun watching to see how their bosses and mentors — the terrifyingly steadfast and always lurking Colonel Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin) and the space program’s ardently ambitious yet rulebound Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans), respectively — shape them into the people they’ll one day become.
One aspect of the show that can’t go without mention: The cast speaks English, not Russian. It’s hardly unprecedented — there was a great debate around this when Chernobyl came out in 2019 — and it’s really not that distracting hearing various accents from the UK while seeing Cyrilic smattered throughout the set. Plus, it’s understandable, since we as a society still have yet to conquer subtitles.
Star City gets through a lot in its first two episodes — going to the moon and all of the complications that come with it, a trip to Paris, a grisly interrogation, and lots more to situate Season 1’s trajectory — and it shows great potential, but I don’t think it’s been fully unlocked just yet. That’s perfectly fine; I hope I’ll look back to these early episodes and think something along the lines of You idiot, the vision was locked in from the very beginning! There have been spurts of greatness, but largely, these episodes have felt like methodical world- and character-building, making sure we’re sucked in by the ominous fog of subterfuge and made to constantly question what anyone’s underlying intentions really are. But based on the second episode’s closing escalation of security threats, Star City just might have the juice to be an exciting spy thriller that also happens to shoot people into space.
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