Star City: Season 1

3

I was fine with For All Mankind for about a season. And then not as much. So, it was not high on my list to watch this spin-off. Essentially the through-the-looking-glass flip side of For All Mankind. Or whatever you call it when they show what was going on in the USSR while the U.S. was trying to get to the moon over on that other series. In this alternative history, where the Soviet Union gets to the moon before we do. As if! Despite the shuffling of the historical deck, it seems that Star City was and is an actual thing on Earth-1. News to me. It turns out that our imagined version of what went on there — and taking a lot of dramatic license in this alt. universe — is way more fascinating than the application of the same to a U.S. version. But in a completely different way, because we are familiar with U.S. history and where the show’s creators chose to make changes, while almost all of Star City is a mixture of conjecture and creative noodling. In other words, this needs to be way less tethered to reality than the For All Mankind. And that, in a lot of ways, gives it the freedom to be a more interesting show.

That said, I think the biggest thing holding this series back is the uncertainty of its fate. I obviously don’t know the ins and outs of the Apple TV+ programming team, but there are constant vibes throughout the series that tell me that the creators went in unsure if they’d get a second season. Some tentativeness in the storytelling and character development that lead me to believe they thought they had to get out a whole story in season one just in case there is no season two. But building just enough care and plotting to get you to a satisfactory conclusion. With that, there is a ton of yada yada shit going on here. Gaps in the narrative where they build tension and stakes and then they’re just suddenly solved after a big build-up with little to no explanation of how they got from point A to point B. For example, there is a whole thing where they need to smuggle a human crew out of Star City to get to what the top brass thinks is an unmanned mission to Venus. We get to a point at the walled gates where the guards might unmask the deception, but the astronauts avoid detection and then are just suddenly on the ship in space in the next scene. No understanding of how they snuck these humans and all the life-sustaining equipment and food and medical supplies and all the other things a crew would need to sustain them on a nine-month trip to Venus onto a rocket without being detected. No struggle to literally get them up the gangplank to the rocket or house them before the launch. It just skips all that and gives us a shrug. This is but one critical plot point where the creators seemed to just hit fast forward to cram a lot of time and action into a single season that might otherwise be given attention and minutiae in a multi-season series.

We also have to assume here that all the characters are speaking Russian. But with one Australian exception, everyone in the cast is British. So they are all speaking British-accented English as Russians. Which is generally fine — I think we’ve come to understand that anyone speaking a language that is not actually English (including in the fantasy genre where they’re speaking elvish or whatever) that people are just going to have British accents of some sort. It’s weird, but I guess is fine. The problem here is that there is an actual spy or undercover agent or whatever embedded in Star City who also has an English accent. We’re never told she’s explicitly American, but the characters in the show are convinced she is. So, is she, with her Brit accent, supposed to be speaking Russian to the Russians? Or is she speaking English with the wrong accent to the Russians she’s trying to recruit? Anyway, it’s just something that this whole British-accent-subbed-for-foreign-language thing makes a little murky. But, hey, this is just me. One last complaint before I get to the good stuff. There is a big action scene at the conclusion of the season where a character literally has to come down from deep space to intercept an action being done down on Earth. So they literally pull a u-turn and manage to re-enter the atmosphere, steer a super-imprecise capsule to within a mile of the action, exit the capsule and make their way to the action right at the very minute they need to intercept said action and everything aligns perfectly for the big moment. As if they’re navigating the streets in a car and need to get across town in time to meet up with their friends in time for the opening credits of a movie. It’s fun, but pretty absurd and completely unrealistic.

With all that, the series looks cool. It has a very Soviet-era color palette and is good at building the paranoia and pressure all of these people must have lived under at the time. I’m not sure if it’s a narrative choice or budget constraint, but the whole show feels very insular and claustrophobic. No soaring, echoey brutalist buildings filled with angry bureaucrats. Honestly, there’s very little in the way of hierarchy at all. Which is how you generally think of these old Soviet programs. Instead, we have a pretty limited cast, often in small rooms and shadowy basements or drab apartments. There is an occasional larger gathering in Moscow, but in general Star City itself is managed by the heartless KGB lead, Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin), and the Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans), who leads the Soviet space program, which is the primary reason Star City exists. Both are clearly altruistic and take their jobs very seriously, but their goals are often at odds. Creating tension and leading to this feeling within the show that somehow everything depends on the these two making decisions for the betterment of the USSR with very little input from the big guys in the Kremlin. Which I can’t imagine is actually how things would work, but in this show shrinks the considerations and the drama of the whole thing considerably. Which, again, I think would have functioned differently had the creators known how much time and space (no pun intended) they had to tell this story. For me, it works, because I’m terrible with names and telling a bunch of white, British people apart. So, if they involved all sorts of Kremlin and party officials and whatnot in the narrative, I surely would have gotten turned-around. But, keeping the crux of the story between these two and a group of astronauts, scientists and a few office workers, it made for a much easier to follow show.

Unlike its parent series, the acting here is really decent. It may be a matter of its similar vibe, but there are echoes of Chernobyl here. Performances that manage to build urgency and tension without yelling and slamming things or relying on hyperbolic speeches or tantrums. This may be a matter of a new crew of writers, or perhaps it’s just the nature of the show. But mostly it is the people who are delivering the lines and their ability to not have to fulfill some sort of expectation of the Americans in the original series. They need not be stereotypes or whatever is going on with Joel Kinnaman’s character, who is constantly throwing himself around in a very American way (despite the actor himself most definitely not being American). This script and these actors are way more controlled and subtle in creating drama. Maybe it’s because just living life in Russia was tense in itself. You’re not going to go all blustery and macho stupid into a situation because under-the-radar is the way to survive. Whatever it was really like in that country at that time, both the writers and the actors portray it in a realistic and interesting way that feels authentic and entertaining at the same time. No craziness needed. I just found the whole endeavor, across the board, to be very professionally done and expertly constructed, with a good balance between larger sci-fi action and interpersonal drama. A series that could have definitely felt drab, slow or convoluted, they managed to inject intrigue and danger without resorting to doing it just for doing it sake. I’m not certain if there will be a second season of this series, but they’ve clearly built the scaffolding for a second story should it come to it. And I’ll be there.