Just watched the first two episodes of Star City on Apple TV. I think it's a powerful, exciting, politically potent narrative so far, and looks to be a worthy successor to For All Mankind.
Let's talk a little about the politics first. The Soviet Union in the 1960s was one of the two most powerful countries in the world. Unlike the United States, it was a fascist state. Though it had been allied with the world's two leading democracies in World War II -- the U.S and Great Britain -- the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin had more in common with Nazi Germany, and indeed had been Germany's ally when the two nations carved up Poland. And though Stalin had died by the time Khrushchev and his successors took over, the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s was still a fascist, deeply undemocratic state. It was that brutal state which beat the US to space with Sputnik, and got the first human being into orbit in space with Yuri Gagarin in our reality.
[And there will be spoilers ahead ...]
In the alternate history that began with For All Mankind, the Soviet Union goes on to also beat us to the Moon, and that set in motion a competition to get out into space from our world, Earth, whose human inhabitants would reach Mars and beyond in the decades that followed. Star City tells us the Soviet side of that story. It's a tale, very likely based on the way the Soviet Union really was, in which lives are expendable. The Soviet woman chosen to be first female on the Moon is thought to be in cahoots with the West. Turns out she isn't, but she's killed anyway. As KGB Colonel Lyudmilla Raskova (played by Anna Maxwell Martin) explains, we don't make mistakes.
Women, in general, play a major role so far in Star City, at this point, more so than in the equivalent first season of For All Mankind. Anastasia Belikova (played by Alice Englert) becomes the first woman on the Moon, but she's no slave to political pressure, and tows the line only after Raskova and a higher-up operative threaten to replace her with a look-alike. Irina Morozova, who has continued to play a semi-major role in For All Mankind, is a major character as her younger self (played by Agnes O'Casey) in Star City. We see her progress from being unable to kill a prisoner when commanded by Raskova, to throwing scalding water in the face of a prisoner to get him to talk, and thereby saving his life -- at least, temporarily.
The most important male character, so far, is the Chief Designer or Chief Soviet Engineer (played by Rhys Ifans) -- we don't know his name. He's the brains behind the Soviet space program, and is likely based on Sergei Korolev, the real-life genius who suffered a heart attack in 1962 and died under somewhat mysterious circumstances in our reality in 1966. The alternate history series begins in 1969. (I've always thought maybe the CIA had something to do with Korolev's death. See also David S. Michaels and Daniel Brenton's novel Red Moon for another, related take on the Soviet space program in the 1960s.) But whatever the real story of Sergei Korolev, I don't get why the Chief Designer in Star City, as of the first two episodes, is deprived of his name.
To return to the dramatization of fascism that is the salient backbone of Star City so far, the timing couldn't be better in terms of what's really happening in Russia and the United States these days. In Russia, after a brief taste of freedom that barely lasted a decade after the Soviet Union fell apart, Putin has done and is doing his best to re-establish a Soviet-like state, which is what his war on Ukraine is all about. In the U.S., the reelection has Trump has brought this country into an escalating embrace of lies over truth, and governmental prosecution if you object to the lies, which are the hallmarks of fascism.
For that reason, in addition to its excellent narrative, it's good and important to see Star City exploring the fascistic dynamic, and I'll be reviewing every episode.
