Are you ready for a spin-off of a counterfactual drama series? Or is the current air of unreality surrounding actual reality enough for you? If you find yourself in the market for the former, congratulations for your psychological and spiritual robustness – and welcome to Star City.
This is the counterpoint and companion piece to For All Mankind, the creation of Ronald D. Moore, Ben Nedivi, and Matt Wolpert. That series posed the question: what if the Russians had been the first people to land on the moon? And what if the space race never ended? It was set in the US, with the alternate history seen through American eyes. Now Moore and his collaborators return with a timeline set behind the Iron Curtain.
A Soviet Perspective on the Space Race
We join the denizens of Star City – a Soviet equivalent of Cape Canaveral – as they celebrate the moment that, in For All Mankind, galvanised the US into a massive catch-up mission. Their man Alexei Leonov walks on the moon and beams a speech back to Earth about the tremendous benefits of “the Marxist-Leninist way of life”.
Here, we see the words being closely followed by the woman who wrote the speech for him: the terrifying Lyudmilla (Anna Maxwell Martin), a colonel in the Great Patriotic War – the Eastern Front in World War II, with rumours in Star City that she killed more than a hundred Germans – and now head of KGB surveillance.
After the mission’s success, the chief designer (Rhys Ifans) tries again to get President Brezhnev interested in his plans to fly to Mars and Venus. But the State is firmly against diversifying efforts when there are still American faces to be ground in terrestrial mud. Back to working on the next lunar mission he goes, but even there his plans are semi-scuppered. One of the cosmonauts – Yana (Niamh Algar) – due to take part in the coming launch is deemed to have transgressed against the State. She is replaced – after several increasingly harrowing scenes of interrogation – by a far less qualified but more loyal party member, Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert).
Paranoia and Tension in Every Scene
New girl Irina (Agnes O’Casey) is one of the myriad typists arranged in row upon immaculate row in a vast hall, spending their days transcribing the KGB’s many covert home recordings of the cosmonauts and engineers. She discovers that Yana has been wrongfully accused and goes to Lyudmilla with her findings. This goes about as well as you would expect for Yana, but – at least in the short term – a little bit better for Irina. Her aptitude impresses the colonel, who adopts her as a potential assistant as work begins to find the Russian mole who has leaked plans for a future moon base to the Americans.
Star City has none of the glossy blandness that For All Mankind had at the beginning, before it found its feet, and none of the soapiness that has occasionally beset it since. By relocating to the USSR, the stakes are immediately higher and inescapable. The fear and tension of living that vaunted Marxist-Leninist life are palpable in every scene. Everyone, after all, is trapped. The only differences are in degree and awareness of that fact. Every word must be considered, the possible ramifications of every decision carefully calibrated. And that is only to minimise risk, never banish it altogether.
Wolpert and his team layer the daily compromises, doubts, stresses, accidental indiscretions – like catching sight of the cover of a top secret file on a superior’s desk – and insecurities endlessly, one on top of the other. Then, just when you think you cannot bear even this much anxiety, they begin to weave them into bigger, more nightmarish events still. More and more mines are laid. For instance, Anastasia goes off-script during her speech back to Earth, acknowledging Yana’s contribution to the mission. The chief designer shares with a colleague his plans to misappropriate lunar funds for his research into other interplanetary trips. Potentially fatal missteps abound.
A Fascinating Exploration of Human Nature
As much as it will offer space history fans a deep dive into the “what if?” possibilities surrounding the intoxicating fundamental premise, it offers a broader audience something equally fascinating: how human nature warps in the absence of trust, how people survive intolerable stress, and what they will do to be free. Especially as we get to know the characters as individuals – for there are few who remain ciphers in this delicate, detailed show for long. All mankind is here.
Star City is on Apple TV.
