Star City Goes Where
No Sci-fi Series Has Gone Before

By Kilian Melloy

Star City is the newest offering from the people who brought you For All Mankind, and though the two shows are set in the same alternate history and show some of the same events, the stories they tell couldn’t be more different.

For All Mankind  is a sort of latter-day Men Into Space , a hard sci-fi drama about the travails and triumphs of human exploration and the fallibility of all-too-corruptible individuals and institutions. The show posits that in 1969 the Russians won the space race to the Moon, but that bruise to America’s national pride spurred investments and advancements in space travel that would, by the year 2012, lead not just to a colony on Mars but emergent Martian nationalism. For All Mankind concludes its fifth season on May 29, the same night Star City premieres its first two episodes.

Set in the real-life Star City, a massive facility for training astronauts and pursuing technological solutions, the show is set under seemingly perpetual cloud cover. The cinematography is swaddled in darkness and colors are muted. This is the Soviet Union at the height (or nadir) of its malevolent power: People are disposable and the Party is all. Embodying this brutal philosophy is the head of Star City’s security, Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin), a KGB officer so ruthless that when an overly eager eavesdropped assigned to transcribing the tapes made from bugging a cosmonaut’s apartment leaps to an erroneous conclusion resulting in the arrest and interrogation of a cosmonaut, Raskova would prefer to sweep the blunder under an iron rug, along with any resulting corpses, rather than admit the truth and make reparations.

The person who brings the mistake to Raskova’s attention, by contrast, has a compassionate streak that risks setting her against the lethal monolith of the state. This young woman is brilliant and resourceful, given to covertly erasing portions of tape rather than put more innocent lives at risk. Her name: Irina Morozova (Agnes O’Casey) — the very same Irina who, decades later in For All Mankind, will orchestrate the implication of a major character on that show in a plot to steal NASA secrets. (An older version of another youthful Star City character, engineer Sergei Nikulov [Josef Davies], also features on For All Mankind.) Raskova may not approve of Irina’s humanistic core, but she knows talent and smarts when she sees it and loses no time in recruiting the young woman to help her root out a mole that has provided the Americans with schematics for a planned Soviet moon base.

The Chief Designer at Star City (called only by his job title and played by Rhys Ifans) is in constant conflict with Raskova; he dreams of conquering not just the moon, but Venus as well, and sets about with illicit preparations for a hair-raising crewed mission to that inhospitable planet, even though he’s sure to face dire consequences if he’s caught out. One source of tension between Ifans’ star-gazing Chief Designer and Raskova is how one of his “eagles” (the falsely accused cosmonaut) has been yanked from a planned moon mission and replaced with the less qualified Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert), familiar to For All Mankind fans as the first woman to set foot on the moon. In case the ferocity of the Soviet union’s totalitarian grip hasn’t sunk in, viewers are treated to the plot twist of Belikova being punished for departing from her scripted comments on the lunar surface with threats to remove her from her own life and replace her with a lookalike. Belikova is also forced into a marriage with cosmonaut Sasha Polivanov (Solly McLeod) because, after all, a woman’s place is at her husband’s side… especially when the woman is a national hero.

For All Mankind stands in the sunlight of American optimism at a time when ours truly was an exceptional nation standing for freedom; Star City is its shadow opposite, mired in paranoia and propelled by merciless ambitions to control and dominate. The writing is more earth-focused than cosmologically aspirational, but Star City meets the same high standards for realism and gripping storytelling. Will it be too bitter and psychologically abrasive for its audience? Time will tell, but those who brave its oppressive mood will find a wealth of rewards.

Star City streams on Apple TV+ with its first two episodes.