In the wake of five seasons of “For All Mankind“‘s alt-history time-jumping—currently, we’re in an alternate 2012 where we’ve colonized Mars, and a still-alive John Lennon teamed up with Jay-Z to produced “The Grey Album”—it’s easy to forget the show started as a simple 1960s period piece, with a twist: What if the Russians got to the moon first? Now, showrunners Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert have decided to jump back to that (comparatively) simpler era in spinoff “Star City,” detailing how those early legs in the alternate space race looked from behind the Iron Curtain.
But where “Mankind” is airy and optimistic despite mankind’s many struggles (how American of it), “Star City” keeps its focus bleak, dour, and oppressive, and subsequently has some trouble achieving liftoff.
The title refers to the nickname given to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, and much of “Star City”‘s drama centers around the cosmonauts and their loved ones working to beat the Americans to the stars. Like its parent show, the first episodes overlap a lot of the first season’s events, including witnessing, once again, the first woman to set foot on the moon, Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert).
We see a harsher, more militant version of the kind of gender-equity handwringing we saw among the Americans in that first season of “For All Mankind”; both nations considered the optics of putting a woman in space, but in 1960s Russia, fealty to the Party takes precedence over qualifications. (Suffice to say, Ana’s predecessor falls victim to some faulty intel about her being an American spy.)
This emphasis on surveillance and authoritarian control seeps into a lot of “Star City”‘s drama, playing more like a “Chernobyl“-esque chamber play about how Soviet focus on image and obedience can sometimes override good judgment. This is most seen in the push and pull between Rhys Ifans‘ unnamed, enigmatic Chief Designer (though, as “Mankind” posits, he is likely famed Soviet engineer Sergei Korolev, who in our history died in 1966) and KGB head Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin), an imperious Rosa Klebb type who keeps a tight leash on all around her. Both performers play to their strengths—Ifans with his paternal warmth, Martin with stone-faced intensity—but feel more like abstractions of the show’s broader ideas than genuine people.
That kind of layering, such as it is, belongs to more of the street-level characters of the show, some of whom are younger versions of “For All Mankind” characters we see in subsequent seasons. While Josef Davies’ Sergei Nikulov is a handy precursor to the engineer we see on the main show, a great deal of focus belongs to Agnes O’Casey‘s Irina Morozova, an important KGB fixer on “Mankind” who we see was a simple junior agent in the 1960s.
She spends her time listening to the tapes of bugged conversations of various people of interest—like cosmonaut Valya Markelov (Adam Nagaitis), his housebound wife Tanya (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), and Valya’s slightly rogueish mission-mate Sasha (Solly McLeod)—and, in a manner reminiscent of “The Lives of Others,” becoming invested in their seedy interpersonal dramas. Affairs, arranged marriages (the State forces Sasha to marry Ana because, well, “you cannot be an exemplar of the Soviet Union as a single woman), and smuggled contraband all become potential fodder for ruination.
It’s an intriguing dark mirror of “Mankind”‘s optimism, even as “Star City” can’t quite wring enough complexity or characterization from its stifled atmosphere. The notion of a nation reaching for the stars even as it keeps its people under its jackboots is an intriguing one—space exploration as pure saber-rattling, rather than a grander humanist goal.
But it also has the effect of flattening its characters so we don’t get a lot of dynamism from them: Our cast, largely comprised of British actors leaning into their native accents (despite “Mankind” letting them speak Russian and have Russian accents), mostly squirm under the thumb of the politburo in one way or another, leaving little room for many individuals to stand out. The muted, grainy cinematography doesn’t help, devastatingly gorgeous though it may be; the visual effects, as with its sister series, remain excellent, and the few space disasters we witness are even more riveting when we know how much the whole program is held together by duct tape and party loyalty.
Even so, the muddy mood of “Star City” makes for a rougher watch than the gee-whiz humanism of “For All Mankind,” compounded by the fact that we’ve literally lived through these events before in the shadow of another show. Granted, the five episodes provided to critics build to a satisfying escalation as the Party descends on Star City just as disillusioned characters begin planning their escape (right down to a clandestine launch to Venus under the Party’s very nose, the kind of ramshackle problem-solving under pressure that these shows excel in).
But the road there can be a bit of a slog, not helped by the hour-long runtimes and the restrictions of the Star City setting. To say nothing of the innate humourlessness of our Soviet characters; folks like Sasha and Tanya do their best to liven up their grim lives of socialist service, but most everyone else spends their time grimacing in brutalist buildings.
More than its individual characters, “Star City” is a story of a nation-state at war with itself, committed to throwing its people in the physical and emotional grinder for the sake of cynical political gamesmanship. Those happy few trying to cobble something inspirational out of the concrete are the show’s bright spots, and one hopes they’ll help it build toward something as dynamic as its predecessor by season’s close.
First five episodes screened for review. New episodes air Fridays on Apple TV.