‘Star City’ Review: Apple’s ‘For All Mankind’ Spinoff Puts a Darkly Compelling Spin on the Space Race
Rhys Ifans leads the 1970s-set alt-history sci-fi, following the cosmonauts, scientists and intelligence officials on the Soviet side of the quest for scientific advancement.
There is a moment in the premiere of Star City, Apple’s spinoff of its hit drama For All Mankind, when it feels like we’ve been launched into an early episode of that parent series — back before all the characters were living on Mars, when simply getting to the moon was an awesome challenge.
A spaceship takes off. Everything goes well, until it doesn’t. In a command center down on Earth, rows of engineers scramble to improvise a solution. Up in the stars, two brave souls white-knuckle their way around maneuvers that might doom them as easily as save them. It’s breathlessly tense and oddly moving and just plain fun, which is to say it’s classic For All Mankind.
And it feels all the more satisfying for coming from a show that isn’t just classic For All Mankind. Outside of a few such sequences, the new series plays more as paranoid Cold War thriller than hopeful sci-fi saga, and a pretty good one at that. That combination — throwback excitement plus icy intrigue — proves to be a winning one. While Star City hasn’t quite yet reached the heights of its predecessor, the five hours (of eight) sent to critics satisfy as both a companion series and one capable of standing all on its own.
To put it in logline-friendly terms: Star City recounts the events of the alt-history already laid out by For All Mankind, in which the U.S. lost the space race, from the perspective of the Soviets. Those who’ve seen the earlier series will certainly recognize some of its key characters and plot points (like the mission described above, which is referenced in the second episode of FAM). But to the benefit of both longtime fans and total newcomers, it turns out to be much more than just an Easter egg-laden effort to retell the same exact story, only this time in British accents we’re meant to pretend are the Russian language.
As the story opens in 1969, a cosmonaut is becoming the first ever man to walk on the moon — not that his wife is aware of this when she’s hauled from her bed by the KGB in the dead of night to watch his landing. It’s an achievement towering enough to earn the program’s as-yet-unnamed Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans) a special commendation — not that anyone else knows it, since the ceremony is performed in secret and the medal immediately returned to the government, ostensibly to protect him from American interests.
This is the tenor of things on this side of the Iron Curtain — captured, in the usual onscreen shorthand for “Soviet Russia,” through a gray and grainy ’70s-style filter. Everything is shrouded in secrecy or glossed over via bureaucratic jargon. Everyone suspects they’re being monitored, and even heroes of the state are fearful of being hauled off for no reason at all.
They are right to be. Star City is as much about the KGB’s surveillance department as it is the country’s advances into space. Across the base from the Chief Designer’s team of cosmonauts and engineers, in the visually nondescript but reputationally feared Building 12, KGB official Lyudmilla (Anna Maxwell Martin) oversees teams of young women listening to hours of recordings captured by the bugs embedded on seemingly every apartment on the base, logging every detail about their targets from their toilet habits to their musical tastes to their sex partners.
Star City’s diffuse focus can feel like a lot to take in, especially in early chapters when it’s not yet clear how or how much these various concerns might intersect. And while some of the characters, like the ruthless Lyudmilla or the kindly engineer Sergei (Josef Davies, a dead ringer for his FAM counterpart Piotr Adamczyk), are exactly who they appear to be on first impression, many of the others are initially hard to get a read on for being so (understandably) guarded.
Like Lyudmilla’s protégé Irina (Agnes O’Casey), whose background and goals seem enigmatic even if For All Mankind has already revealed where she’ll end up eventually. Or Anastasia (Alice Englert), a green cosmonaut whose blandly patriotic answers to interview questions like why she joined the program (“For the glory of the Soviet Union”) thrill the top brass but reveal precious little of the woman underneath, to the frustration of colleagues like experienced cosmonaut Valya (Adam Nagaitis) or the Chief Designer.
But just as Irina cannot help but start feeling close to Valya and his dissatisfied wife Tanya (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), as she listens in on the most intimate moments of their marriage day in and day out, I too found myself getting more invested in these characters the longer I spent observing them. Star City‘s storylines deliver an engaging mix of juicy personal drama, like the tangle of friendships ensnaring Tanya, Valya, Anastasia and fellow cosmonaut Sasha (Adam Nagaitis), and tense intrigue, as Irina pushes deeper into her investigation of a suspected mole on base. When these elements combine, they tend to do so with explosive, devastating results.
Star City never allows us to forget for long the paranoia that suffuses this world as pervasively as air. From time to time, audio of characters’ conversations will switch over to the slightly muddy recorded versions Irina and her colleagues are listening to in Building 12, or cut out entirely where it’s been erased for self-serving reasons. In such a distrustful environment, everything that should be pure or holy or human is crushed under the weight of a state only interested in its own self-perpetuation.
So we watch as Chief Designer is forced to sneak his most ambitious plans under the noses of bureaucrats who care only about one-upping NASA. Anastasia spirals into despair as she’s forced to contort herself into an exemplar of Soviet womanhood for an adoring public and an unforgiving publicity apparatus. Irina crosses ethical and legal lines as she evolves from an underling naïve enough to hope the truth might matter (“We do not arrest the innocent, comrade. Our power depends on it,” she’s informed when she tries to clear the name of someone unjustly accused) to one hardened enough to talk herself into torturing a prisoner.
If For All Mankind’s early seasons laid out an optimistic fantasy of what space travel could be, scientific advancement and social progress sweeping ahead hand in hand, Star City posits a much darker vision, and arguably one much more in keeping with our own current national mood. It makes for a bleak time — but some very compelling drama.
