Pushing the Envelope

Sometime around 1977, NASA began refitting Mission Control Room 2 at Johnson Space Center for the shift from Apollo and Skylab missions to the new Shuttle program, and, being an idealistic youngster, I wrote to the agency’s press office asking for a component as a souvenir. I was in elementary school, entirely invested in space, and a pretty hardcore reader on the topic as a 10-year-old. What came back, to my shock, was a government-issue manila envelope an inch thick, packed with color press images from Apollo, Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz missions. Up on my wall went 8 x 10 color prints of crews, craft, glare-filled vistas from the lunar surface, and the odd launch shot.

The Apollo and Skylab images I already knew from books and TV. Apollo-Soyuz was the discovery: an American docking module mated to a Soviet spacecraft, two programs that had spent two decades trying to bury each other now sharing oxygen. That envelope (and exposure to Cyrillic as a pre-teen) led, by a long route, to a year of college Russian and the study of Russian economic history. It is not a straight line from there to reviewing an Apple TV series fifty years later. But it is a line.

Star City is the first spinoff of For All Mankind, and the best decision it makes is refusing to resemble its parent. FAM began with one of the stronger counterfactual premises in recent television—the Soviets land on the Moon first, the space race never ends—and then spent its later seasons dissolving into soap. The alt-history engine kept turning underneath, but the show increasingly ran on affairs, estrangements, and tearful reconciliations, melodrama expanding to fill each decade-long time jump. I quit after Season 3 (but did appreciate the homage to Bob Newhart).

Star City exists in the same universe as FAM—no pun intended—and shares multiple characters, here shown early in their careers. More importantly, it looks at a parallel storyline through a far grimier lens. The plot centers mainly on goings-on inside the closed city that gives the show its name and depicts the Soviet side of the space race as what it plausibly was: a security state with a space program attached. We have side trips to Paris, Moscow, the central Soviet launch facility at Baikonur, unspecified dachas, and, of course, space, but a lot of the action happens within the suffocating, musty, bugged confines of this company town outside Moscow.

The show's mood board is legible: Chernobyl's institutional dread, slow-motion betrayal (and interiors) via Alfredson's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a tiny drop of Constellation's psychological queasiness, all backed by very good casting. Adam Nagaitis arrives directly from Chernobyl (and AMC's creepy af S1 of The Terror), David Dencik from Tinker Tailor, each carrying their own paranoia vibe. Anna Maxwell Martin, recently most visible in the BBC comedy Motherland, works for the actual Motherland, ruthlessly surveilling the engineers and crew, arranging the beatings, and she is colder and better than I have ever seen her. Alice Englert is quietly excellent throughout as a reluctant national hero, as is Rhys Ifans as the Korolevian Chief Designer, the Soviets' von Braun. Props also for including Priya Kansara as an Indian scientist brought into the program, a nod to the Soviet-Indian space research connections that actually existed at the time.

The casting also plays to the showrunners' choice of linguistic landscape (much to Reddit's frustration). As in Chernobyl, the players in Star City aren't speaking Russian, but using their own home dialects from Britain and Ireland. This came about after consulting with Craig Mazin, Chernobyl's creator, who told them, "This is the only way to do it. Do it this way. Trust me." The delivery works, and gives a sense of the characters' diverse geographic and class backgrounds by dialect proxy. It also avoids the terrible moose-and-squirrel accent that's haunted many a Western action or political thriller.

The structural choice that separates the two shows is what each focuses on. FAM followed The Right Stuff mythologization—hard-to-tame hero pilots, misunderstood engineers and maverick bureaucrats. In Star City, the system is the center. Everyone's watched, listened to, sold out by the state. The patriotism is only a front to avoid being the one on the wrong end of a barrel. If anything matters, it's the higher calling of the mission, whether that mission is reaching frontiers unknown, or exterminating perceived enemies of Marxism-Leninism.

Showing some story depth, the show briefly gestures at the Soviet program's stranger intellectual inheritance. At one point the Chief Designer invokes Nikolai Fyodorov—the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher whose Common Task proposed, in earnest, the technological resurrection of every human who ever died, with space colonization as the necessary real estate. Fyodorov's ideas ran through rocketry pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky into the bloodstream of the actual Soviet program (the train station in the real Star City is named for him); my friend Fred Scharmen's excellent book Space Forces traces the lineage well. Cosmism here is not an easter egg but a live plot driver, and the kind of detail that suggests the writers did the reading.

[Spoilers ahead]

Where the show strained belief a little was the hardware. Star City's program runs on a launch cadence that makes the historical Soviet effort look leisurely, flying stripped-down buckets using borrowed structures with what appears to be no safety culture at all. The centerpiece is a secret crewed Venus mission in 1970, two of whose crew survive the transit in what amounts to a metal can—analog gauges, bare bulkheads, no visible provision for the ordinary problems of keeping humans alive and unbruised. Of course, the real Soviet program, not particularly bothered with setting its crews down gently, killed a number of cosmonauts in various mishaps put down to poor engineering or rushed launches, a storyline not unfamiliar to Americans.

Star City sounds like it will return, and the finale is unmistakably built for a second season, even with its slightly over-the-top conclusion. Everything else was pared to what the mission required—eight episodes, one timeframe, nothing aboard that wasn't necessary. Given what the creators made, this is probably all they could wring from Apple. FAM promised an alternative future for six seasons. Star City showed a different, darker way to get there.

Presumably, sharing the same universe, future cosmonauts from Star City will meet their American counterparts in an alt-Apollo-Soyuz docking above the Earth. Somewhere, thirteen years ahead of this timeline, an envelope is in the mail.