It’s time to watch the alternate history space race saga from another angle. The first For All Mankind spinoff Star City has now premiered with its first two episodes on Apple TV, and the series is already living up to its official billing as a “propulsive paranoid thriller.” Warning: Spoilers for Star City Episodes 1 (“The Eyes”) and 2 (“A Bear on a Chain”) ahead!
Set in the U.S.S.R. in the ’60s, the series comes right out of the gate with a display of the crippling fear that pervades all of Soviet society. A petrified cosmonaut’s wife is suddenly dragged from her home by a soldier without warning, sobbing over what could possibly warrant this abduction until she’s shown the reason: Her husband has just landed on the moon, effectively beating the United States in this leg of the space race. The Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans) responsible for making this mission a success is given a pin for his achievement, but the ceremony is attended by absolutely no one, and the item is quickly confiscated from him, supposedly for his own safety.
His anonymity is critical to all of Star City, and he seemingly tolerates feeling like a “glorified errand boy” because of his ambitions to take the next space mission to Venus. However, his hopes are dashed when he learns from spy chief Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin) that his lunar base plans have been stolen by the Americans.
We then get a glimpse inside the machine that makes everyone so edgy. Irina Morozova (Agnes O’Casey) is a new member of the intelligence core and is assigned to spy on cosmonaut Valya Markelova (Adam Nagaitis) and his wife, Tanya (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), in hopes of finding the leaker. Irina’s colleague has been monitoring the feisty female cosmonaut assigned to the moon, Yana (Niamh Algar), and claims that she overheard her mentioning a meeting with her brother, who’s dead and shares a name with a journalist. From that, she deduces she’s the spy who’s been sending information to the U.S. After hours of denials and torture, Yana eventually confesses.
The Chief Designer doesn’t believe in her guilt and is remarkably devastated by the fate he knows will befall her.
Rhys Ifans tells TV Insider that the reason it hits his character so hard is, “He was incarcerated for many, many, many years. At that time, any other citizen would possibly have had a family. He doesn’t have a family. He doesn’t have children. So these cosmonauts, there’s baggage. He sees them as his surrogate kids, in a sense, and he asks a lot of them, and of course, each and every one of them is willing…. To lose any of them is devastating. It’s losing a family member.”
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Still, the Chief Designer dutifully informs her replacement, Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert), that she’s taking Yana’s place in the lunar mission. Does being second choice bother her?
Alice Englert guesses, “I think initially, her courage, which I think is immense, comes from a place of fear and desperation. I think she is someone who was starved of love and affirmation as a child in a culture that was starving people of affirmation and love and individuality in many ways as well…. I think that her shift and awakening takes her into a new experience of what it is to be brave, which is to have choice. At the beginning of the story, when you first meet her, I don’t think she’s even thinking about making decisions. She’s thinking about doing what she’s told.”
Valya verbally punishes Belikova for taking Yana’s spot, though it is not her fault. Does he blame her for Yana’s ouster? Adam Nagaitis doesn’t think so. Instead, he reasons that Valya’s mindset is, “We have no time for sentiment. I have no time here to deal with your incapacity or incompetence. I don’t care about your story. Politics does not come on this spaceship once we’re on board. This isn’t a game. This is life or death.”
Valya and Beikova manage to lift off without incident and are off to the moon. Soon, she endears herself to Valya — and the rest of Star City — by pulling off a dangerous spacewalk to save the mission, one that nearly costs her her life.
While monitoring the Markelovas, Irina discovers that Tanya is having a passionate affair with Valya’s fellow cosmonaut, Sasha Polivanov (Solly McLeod).
“He’s up for a good time,” Ruby Ashbourne Serkis estimates of Tanya’s attraction to her husband’s best friend and colleague. “She needs a bit of spice in her life. He’s mischievous. He’s up for it. I think with them, it was never going to be more than just a fling…. And I think with him as well, she very much wears the pants with the whole thing, and it’s only where she has control. And it’s about her pleasure, and he understands that, and he’s kind of after the same thing.”
Solly McLeod says Sasha’s initial “boyishness” is just a ruse, however: “His immaturity and his bravado comes from insecurity, and it’s a facade. It’s his way of coping with the oppression and everything they live under, and his way of self-sabotaging to… avoid having to go up into this abyss of death that is space [where] there’s no safety,” the actor surmises.
After listening to Yana’s torture tapes, Irina becomes obsessed and simply has to tell Raskova that Sasha has indicated Yana’s innocence. While Raskova is dismayed that Irina hasn’t noted Tanya’s affair with Sasha in her report, she still invites Irina to join her in “fix”ing the situation with Yana. Raskova then takes Irina to Yana’s jail cell and agrees to free her … before putting a gun in Irina’s hand and asking her to pull the trigger. When she can’t, Raskova does the deed herself.
“We do not arrest the innocent, comrade. Our power depends on it,” Raskova tells Irina to justify this horror. Of the chillingly brutal character’s mindset here, Anna Maxwell Martin says, “She is a cog in the KGB, and that’s her job, and so she’s going to deliver on her job because if she doesn’t, she’s toast as well. So it’s a dog-eat-dog environment, isn’t it? So, no, I don’t think she hesitates.”
However, Irina is truly shocked, according to actress Agnes O’Casey. “When we meet Irina, she doesn’t really understand the inner workings [of the KGB]. She’s hell bent on clearing the honest name because she thinks that’s the right thing to do, morally,” she tells us. “When she goes to the prison and sees Yana there, she really believes that they’re going to free her.” The injustice and cruelty of this system is laid bare right then and there, however.
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This show of soulless force makes what Belikova does next all the more dangerous: During her now-infamous moonwalk, which was seen on For All Mankind as well, she goes off script and pays tribute to Yana and others, which is when Star City immediately mutes her. That’s the part of the speech we didn’t see before, it seems.
According to Star City‘s cocreator Matt Wolpert, this exact moment was the initial animus for the spinoff.
“People in For All Mankind see just a broadcast of her smiling on the moon. And so being able to shift the perspective in Star City and tell the story of her, what it took for her to get there, but also, the toll it took on her when she came back home, that’s really what Star City is all about, is the incredible pressure that these cosmonauts and engineers lived under, and yet they still did these amazing things,” he explained. “They’re still making their lives better and making progress for everyone, but under incredibly trying circumstances. And so, really, that idea of getting the glimpse behind her story was one of the origin points of the series.”
The second episode picks up immediately after, as Valya and Belikova head home. He thinks her status as the first woman on the moon will protect her, but she argues Yuri Gagarin is proof there is no protection for anyone, even them. After dragging the service module for far too long upon reentry, they land hundreds of kilometers from their expected touchdown and are greeted by a giant Siberian bear. They’re eventually rescued by soldiers, but then Belikova faces even bigger monsters: Raskova and Maxim Tarasov (David Dencik). The two introduce her to a look-alike who is willing and able to serve as her replacement if she doesn’t comply going forward — including marrying a person of their choice while being paraded around the world as a symbol of Soviet dominance.
“That’s a power play,” Martin says of the scene. “Everything about how they operate and everything about living up is just a power play. It’s how you get what you want. I mean, how do you make the threat real? How do you manifest threat? So you go and find a look-alike.”
The Chief Designer is the one to inform Sasha that it’s he who will marry Belikova; it’s his only shot at ever being assigned a mission. Soon, Sasha joins Belikova on a celebratory trip to Paris — and Irina tags along to keep watch on Belikova, who cannot be trusted, per Raskova. Eventually, Belikova proves herself loyal when she declines an offer to work for the Americans and says “I do” to Sasha in a very modest ceremony, reciting her scripted vows word for word this time.
In Paris, Raskova suddenly whisks Irina away to Germany, noting her history with speaking the language, for another mission: interrogating a German man who has intel about the design leak. She instructs her to translate her words, verbatim, and Irina does so.
“You realize Lyudmilla can speak German. She could have done that whole thing the whole time,” Miller says of the scene. “The whole thing is setting up Irina to go, ‘I will control you. I will control the narrative. You will do what I say.’”
Ultimately, though, Irina impresses Raskova by brutally torturing the man into confessing what he knows. But does this signify a turn to the dark side inhabited by the likes of Raskova?
“She’s doing it to protect him,” O’Casey explains of Irina’s viciousness in the moment. “She thinks she’s saving his life. She’s seen Lyudmilla shoot someone in the head. She’s telling her that’s what she’s gonna do, and she genuinely is hating every single second of doing that. She’s crying because she’s in hell.”
Elsewhere, the Chief Designer learns that he is being required to speed up his lunar base launch thanks to the leak and must abandon his plans for Venus. Instead of doing so, though, he recruits a standout engineer, Sergei (Josef Davies), to join him in the effort to restore old rockets for the mission.
This as-yet-unexplored Venus plot is also mission critical for what Star City is trying to achieve, per executive producer Ben Nedivi, especially since it’s partly based on the real-life covert mission that happened.
“He’s a visionary. For him, it’s about exploration, adventure, and I think, for the Soviet government, it’s about power and politics. Him doing this mission secretly to a planet that we haven’t visited with humans, I think, really, really speaks to the power of a show like this, and the ability to say, ‘If I’m going to do something like this, I know I’m going to have to do it secretly.’ So it felt like the perfect melding of reality and fiction in terms of what this show is trying to accomplish,” he says.
The fact that this is based in reality was something that truly struck Ifans upon taking the role. “The whole Venus stream in the storyline was one of the things that blew my mind. Because when I read that, I thought, ‘Oh, come on, Venus so soon?!’ And no, when you look at the history, they were on board to go there,” the actor says. “Men and women like him through history have a mischief and a recklessness to them… even if they don’t have the technology to achieve it, they know that ultimately it is achievable.”
The two-part premiere ends with Raskova putting the entire surveillance core on high alert to monitor absolutely everyone as if their lives depend on it … because they do, just not for the reasons she might mean.
Star City, Fridays, Apple TV
