******ROCKET-SIZED SPOILERS!******

Debuting in November of 2019, “For All Mankind” was created by veteran TV writer/executive producer Ronald D. Moore, best known for the critically-acclaimed reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” (2003-2009), along with coproducers/writers Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert. The series was hung on a deceptively simple premise; what if the Soviets had beaten the Americans to the moon in 1969? With the writers’ imagination, that premise was realized as an alternate timeline where the Space Race became increasingly ambitious, with lunar bases and a foundling Martian colony–all before the 21st century.

The new spinoff “Star City” acts a sidequel to “For All Mankind,” chronicling the same alternate timeline, but from the Soviet Union’s perspective, with a few easter eggs and paralleling events from the early seasons of its sister show. The first two episodes, “The Eyes” and “A Bear on a Chain,” dropped the same day as the 5th season finale of “For All Mankind,” and these are the episodes I’m taking a look at in this column. “The Eyes” was written by Wolpert & Nedivi, and directed by Nick Murphy. “A Bear on a Chain” was also directed by Murphy, from a script by Andrew Chambliss.

S1E1: “The Eyes”

Note: The Chief Designer character is based loosely on real-life “Chief Designer” Sergei Korolev (1907-1966), who was the man most responsible for development of the Soviet space program, including Sputnik (“Companion”), the R-7 rocket, and the Voskod (“Sunrise”) spacecraft, which carried real-life cosmonaut Alexei Leonov to perform the first tethered spacewalk in Earth orbit. Until his death, Korolev went only by the designation of “Chief Designer” for alleged ‘security reasons.’ The outspoken Korolev often fell out of favor with the Soviet regime due to his candor, and spent years in Soviet gulags, where he endured beatings, lost some teeth, and suffered the first of several heart attacks. After his return to Moscow in the late 1930s, he was grudgingly invited into the Soviet rocket program by his influential old friend and mentor, Andrei Tupolev. Korolev’s biography is vast, but suffice to say his fictional counterpart retains some of his traits.

Note: Anna Maxwell Martin delivers a doozy of a performance, and she drips with evil in the first two episodes. Next to Lyudmilla Raskova, Emperor Palpatine is a cozy kitten. I look forward to seeing more shadings (and perhaps vulnerabilities) of this character.

Note: One caveat viewers are forced to accept upfront is the use of primarily British actors as Russians to avoid a fully-subtitled series. It’s the same old device used by “Doctor Zhivago” (1965), “The Hunt for Red October” (1990), “K-19: The Widowmaker” (2002), “Chernobyl” (2019) and countless other movies and TV shows. It’s ironic that a sidequel series based in the Soviet Union would use British actors, while the American-centric “For All Mankind” more often uses Russian-born actors.

Note: The image of office workers busily transcribing tapes from bulky, 1960s-era reel-to-reel tapes reminds me of the office secretaries seen in AMC’s brilliant “Mad Men” (2007-2015). Irina (Agnes O’Casey) is the innocent being introduced to this dark shadow world of Star City.

Note: It’s interesting these faceless KGB transcribers often made the editorial choices as to what material from the bugs and tapes they would transcribe; which gave them surprisingly more power than one might expect from anonymous, underpaid office workers. These women were often direct pipelines of the sensitive information their agency gathered.

Note: The scene of Irina being given a gun and ordered to shoot Yana marks the beginning of her loss of innocence–despite not being able to finish the job. Lyudmilla uses this as a gauge of how far her potential protégé will go.

Note: The insufferable resentment (and sexism) showed to Anastasia by her colleague Valya is difficult to watch, and I’ve little doubt much of it is based on truth. I remember reading news accounts of the first woman spacewalker, Svetlana Savitskaya (b. 1948) being given an apron when she boarded the Russian Salyut space station where she took her historic spacewalk in 1984.

Note: It’s never explicitly stated that Valya is aware of his wife’s shenanigans with his cosmonaut colleague Sasha, but it feels as if there is definite suspicion, if not outright accusation–at least not yet.

Note: A genuine nail-biter of a scene, as a CO² poisoned Anastasia is forced to spacewalk with tether lines from the command module to the side hatch of the lunar lander, since the conjoined vehicles seemingly lack a pressurized connecting tunnel between them, as did the combined Apollo command/lunar module configuration.

Note: We already saw the older Sergei Nikulov (Piotr Aleksander Adamczyk) in season 3 of “For All Mankind,” where he was part of a Soviet delegation to the United States for the upcoming Apollo/Soyuz mission (a real-life 1975 mission that takes place in the 1980s for the timeline of “For All Mankind”). That’s when Nikulov began his dangerous affair with NASA flight director Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), which led to his execution by the KGB.

Note: The brief serenity of Anastasia’s moonwalk is quickly shattered when she makes the dangerous decision to go off-script. In this universe, the landing of Anastasia on the moon directly leads to American astronaut Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) getting assigned to a three-person lunar habitat mission with her colleagues Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) and Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman). Ed would later betray Danielle in season 4.

S1.E2: “A Bear on a Chain”

Note: This is arguably the most bizarre scene of the episode, though it feels authentically Soviet in its absurdity.

Note: Sasha taking his state-arranged fiancée Anastasia to the secret Parisian club where she meets her false American contact implies that either Sasha helped to set her up, or that they were being closely monitored the entire time. Either or both could be true.

Note: The interrogation scene feels like virtual dental surgery (minus anesthetic) and is one of the reasons I wonder how long this series can last under the tense current climate in the United States and other countries. This is a very bad time for alternate-universe dystopias.

Note: While the subject of Anastasia’s sexuality never explicitly arises in these first two episodes (and this point might be moot by the third episode), I wonder if Anastasia is a closeted lesbian; not because she’s forced into a loveless marriage with oversexed cosmonaut Sasha, but because I suspect Anastasia might be a surrogate for the late Dr. Sally Ride (1951-2012), the first US woman astronaut. During her NASA career, Ride was married to fellow astronaut Steve Hawley from 1982-1987. Ride lived her life in the closet until her death, when it was revealed she and her partner Tam O’Shaughnessy were together for 27 years. If Anastasia were gay, it’d carry extra weight for social commentary, since homosexuality is still (unbelievably) a crime in Russia.

Note: Chief Designer immediately sparks to fellow out-of-the-box engineer Sergei Nikulov, whose future career will follow an unorthodox trajectory. Nikulov’s name was easter-egged in the Cyrillic readout aboard the derelict Mars ’94 rocket during the final shots of the “For All Mankind” season 5 finale (“This Land is Our Land”).

Summing It Up

Coming right off the renewed optimism and hope of the “For All Mankind” season 5 finale, the first two episodes of “Star City” feel like going from a hug to a gut punch. While some events and characters are familiar to “For All Mankind” fans (the Soviet lunar landings, the younger Sergei Nikulov) the tone is very different. The cinematography of “Star City” has a tighter aspect ratio, as well as a cold, dark, grainy texture that practically screams discomfort and misery. While the story of “Star City” takes place in alternate Soviet Union of the late 1960s/early 1970s, the look and tone of the series is a virtual one-for-one with HBO’s real-life nuclear horror story, “Chernobyl.”

Like “Chernobyl” (and “Doctor Zhivago,” “The Hunt for Red October,” et al), “Star City” casts British actors as Russians to avoid subtitling the entire series. The characters are very well-acted by the series’ ensemble cast. Rhys Ifans as “Chief Designer” is based loosely on real-life Soviet Chief Designer Sergei Korolev (1907-1966). Other standouts include the grimly sadistic KGB officer Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin); overwhelmed cosmonaut Anastasia Belikova (Alice Englert), who’s thrust into a position she didn’t deserve, but comes to earn; Valya Markelov (Adam Nagaitis) is Anastasia’s bitter partner for the lunar landing mission; Tanya Markelova (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) is Valya’s unfaithful wife; Sasha Polivanov (Solly McLeod) is the playboy cosmonaut who’s having an affair with Tanya before being coerced into a sham marriage with Anastasia for appearance’s sake. Rounding out the ensemble is the younger version of Sergei Nikulov (Josef Davies), a legacy character from “For All Mankind.” These new characters are certainly gripping, at least as much as the ensemble of “For All Mankind” was in their first season.

My concern for “Star City” is whether such a bitter, hard-hitting, downright uncomfortable series will have the kind of staying power “For All Mankind” enjoyed over its projected six season run. What kept “For All Mankind” afloat was the inherent optimism of its more ambitious spacefaring timeline, which saw greater racial harmony, a woman US president, a thriving lunar exploration program, and other suggestions that this timeline–regardless of its issues–was a better place. While these Soviets won their race to the moon, we see no indication the Soviet regime in “Star City” is any better for it (we also know that this version of the Soviet Union will last well into its alternate 21st century). Granted, it’s very early in the show, but the evidence comes from what we’ve already seen of this regime in “For All Mankind.”

I wish Apple TV delayed the two-episode debut of “Star City” a week or so after the finale of “For All Mankind,” so that viewers could better process this very different series, but here it is. While I’m certainly intrigued by the new characters, the talented cast and the overall quality, I’m just not sure how it’ll fare during a time of such political misery in the United States, as democracy struggles to survive. “Star City” is an objectively good show, though perhaps rolled out at the wrong time. We’ll see…

Where to Watch

Both “Star City” and “For All Mankind” are available to stream exclusively on Apple TV.