The alternate television history of space and the 20th century continues. Created by Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert, and Ronald D. Moore as a spin-off from their ongoing For All Mankind, Star City takes us beyond the Iron Curtain and into the Soviet space program, which like in real life is based at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center outside Moscow. This is a place of secrets, a place where you do what you’re told. But there is also promise. As we begin, the Russians have beaten the Americans to the moon, and despite the lack of autonomy for women in Soviet society, the space program does include roles for women as cosmonauts. Still, no matter who you are, you must answer to state control. Star City features Rhys Ifans, Anna Maxwell Martin, Agnes O’Casey, Alice Englert, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, and Sooly McLeod.
STAR CITY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: “Open the door!” It’s the middle of the night and someone is knocking on a frightened woman’s door. “Get dressed,” she is told. “You’re coming with us.”
The Gist: Is this the end of her? The way she reacts, this woman fully expects to be thrown into a gulag and forgotten about forever. Instead, she emerges from a cold bank of hallways to find a control room and the Chief Designer (Ifans), who points out her cosmonaut husband in a flickering image on a screen as he sets foot on the moon. It’s a celebration of Soviet technology over American ambition, and the “eagles” of the Chief Designer’s cosmonaut stable are hailed as national heroes.
So why does the Designer feel hemmed in by state power? Why do his stern party monitors reject his grand plans for missions to Venus and space bases, in order to stay focused on moon landings? Star City starts to build its paranoiac backbone immediately. While the space program is exciting, its cosmonauts are also secretly surveilled, their every conversation and even intimate moment transcribed by listeners like Irina Morozova (O’Casey) and submitted to the commissar, nickname “The Night Witch,” Colonel Lyudmilla Raskova (Martin). The state maintains rigid control over every thought and action.
This we discover even as Star City reveals the wonder of space. Thrust into a spacewalk position on a lunar mission, inexperienced cosmonaut Anastasia Belikova (Englert) navigates technical issues while boldly rejecting Raskova’s attempts at control. Other cosmonauts, like Valya Mironov (Adam Nagaitis), worry about their role in the marketing of the Soviet project. And character crossover with the earliest moments of For All Mankind suggest what we will see in this new series are all the state decisions and justifications in the corridors of power that in any timeline, real or otherwise, have always been levers against the glory of advanced technology and space travel. The people we meet will just have to navigate.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? With Star City just beginning, inside drab Soviet office blocks and surrounded by analog technology, it’s interesting to compare the series with its parent program. Because in its current fifth season – there will also be a sixth and final run in 2027 – For All Mankind is building cities on Mars.
The look, feel, and you-are-being-watched vibe of Star City also reminded us of Ponies, a period spy thriller-comedy, set in late-1970s Moscow, with a pair of terrific performances by Emilia Clarke and Haley Lu Richardson at its center.
Our Take: Elsewhere in the media world, haters and complainers are already lining up to gripe about the accents and casting in Christoper Nolan’s The Odyssey. Which isn’t our problem, beyond saying they should probably zip it. But from a thousand-foot perspective – or maybe with the view out the porthole window of a Soviet spacecraft – the accents in Star City do stand out as somewhat curious. The series production design here is really meticulous, as it builds its Soviet world. The shots of vast grey Soviet housing blocks and brutalist office environments – “This building is a maze” – really lend themselves to its core sense of individual loneliness and general paranoia. All the paperwork generated by the political commissars and space program is in Russian with Cyrillic characters. And yet basically everyone speaks with some version of a British or Irish accent. We will admit it occasionally took us out of the oppressive feel Star City is powerfully building.
But as Star City moves forward, we think we’ll be less bothered, because we’re already learning about these characters on a personal, even cerebral level. As much as we felt the claustrophobia-turned-to-elation of a cosmonaut’s first experience in space, we were also taken inside Irina Morozova’s thought process – inside her big chunky 1960s headphones, as she surveils her fellow Russians. Everybody around the space program knows what they’re not allowed to say, and yet a lot of them feel tempted to say it. Which is a tension we can believe in as the series continues to unfold its detailed alternate reality.
Performance Worth Watching: Star City features quality casting all the way through, but in the early going, we are impressed with Anna Maxwell Martin, whose dragon lady act as Colonel Raskova might contain more wrinkles than you expect.
Sex and Skin: Some. It seems the isolated, secretive Soviet space program inspires cabin fever among its cosmonauts.
Parting Shot: We discover an unexpected part of her personal life, once Irina Morozova returns home after a long, eventful, and occasionally frightening workday in service to the Soviet state.
Sleeper Star: No spoilers, but we were happy to see Niamh Algar, one of our favorite actors, pop up in Star City.
Most Pilot-y Line: The “One small step” speech from actual history sounds a little different when run through the Star City reality simulator. “I take this step for my country, my people, and for the Marxist-Leninist way of life, knowing that today is one small step on a journey that will someday take us all to the stars.”
Our Call: STREAM IT! In our real lives, space stuff just keeps getting crazier. So why not escape to an alternate timeline past, and a Soviet space program with its own problems, as Star City expands its For All Mankind footprint. One small step indeed.
