[And there will be spoilers ahead.]
It looks, at the end of episode, that this paranoid government is very likely killing these three cosmonauts in mid-flight. We'll see next if week if that's what happens. But even if it doesn't, the point is made. On the one hand, we have geniuses like Korolev, the Chief Engineer, who got us humans to the Moon before the United States, and now in a momentous world-changing accomplishment is sending three humans to Venus. On the other hand, we have KGB Colonel Lyudmilla Raskova ordering the three cosmonauts' death as their ship makes its way from Earth to our sister planet. Korolev speaks plain, transcendent truth, when Raskova puts him under arrest, after he refuses to follow her insane order. He tells her, "you're a monster".
For all we know, in our offscreen reality, this could be why the Soviet attempt to beat the US to the Moon failed so grandly in the 1960s. But we in the US were no angels then either. Nearly 4 million people died on both sides of the US war against Vietnam, at the same time the US was preparing to land on the Moon and successfully retrieve six Apollo crewed spaceships there. The Vietnam War was undeclared, a blatant violation of our Constitution. Maybe one of the reasons we humans have not gone further into space is too many countries have monsters in too much power. (Our current President and Federal government are defying the Constitution in multiple ways every day.) Maybe, until we rid ourselves of this human perversion, or learn to curb by it by not giving these monsters such power, we'll never really get very out into the huge cosmos.
I'm an optimist, as you know, so I still fervently hope that we do. In the meantime, watching Star City is as much a soul-searing, crushing experience as it is an inspiration for what our better selves can do.
See also Star City 1.1-1.2: Fascism and Space ... 1.3: Sadness and Joy ... 1.4: Venus in Blue Genes ... 1.5: The Spy Who Went to Venus
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