Review of 'Star City' Season One, Episodes 3-8

I reviewed the first two episodes of Star City (on Apple TV) here on Vocal at the end of May. What follows is my review of the excellent rest of this new series.

Sadness and Joy  

I was nothing but happy about the third episode of Star City.

Not that the story was happy -- the Soviet Union was a tough, paranoid place to live, especially if you were a cosmonaut or otherwise connected to their space program.  The cosmonauts and their private lives were monitored, and the paranoia about the Americans trying to sabotage the Soviet program was by no means completely or even partially crazy.  A large part of the fun of this episode was figuring out who the U.S. collaborator was, and their identity was suitably surprising, as the cost to the Soviet space program of stopping this traitor was not.

But there was an underlying joy, for me at least, in seeing the Soviets work so hard to get ours species off this planet, albeit in their fascist way.  In our offscreen reality, no spacecraft with humans aboard has landed on the Moon since the final Apollo mission in the early 1970s.  In the alternate reality of For All Mankind and Star City, the Soviet Union has already landed on the Moon, and Korolev aka the Chief Engineer is already in the early stages of working on a trip to Venus.  Writing this now seems like science fiction.  And that's of course what For All Mankind and Star City are.  But they could easily have been reality.

For All Mankind excelled in exploring the lives of the human beings who made these voyages, and eventually came to live on Mars.  Star City looks like it might be beginning to do that for Venus. If you'd like know more about the human beings who have actually made it beyond this planet -- beginning with Yuri Gagarin, the first person to orbit this planet, a Soviet -- I highly recommend Deana Weibel's The Ultraview Effect, just published.

Venus in Blue Genes

The most exciting thing in Star City 1.4 -- at least, to me -- is Chief Designer Sergei Korolev moving ahead with his plans for a ship with cosmonauts to go to Venus.  This, of course, never happened in our reality, because the real Korolev had died by this time (the early 1970s), and the Soviets pretty much had lost interest in bigtime expeditions into the solar system.

In Star City the series, the Soviets are still gung ho about space, and Venus is a nice counterpoint to Mars as a focus in For All Mankind, after everyone got to the Moon.  But Korolev has to contend with not only the exquisitely difficult engineering, but the excruciatingly intrusive Soviet KGB, which are breathing down his neck, and everyone else in the successful space program, every minute of the night and day.

In the Soviet Union, everyone's under observation, anyone could be spying for the Americans, and anyone could be working for the KGB.  On the one hand, the Soviets are justified in their concern about the Americans stealing some of the ingredients that got the Soviets so far thus far, and could to lead to far greater accomplishments -- like Soviets on Venus -- in the very near future.  On the other hand, the KGB are always on the verge of doing serious damage to the Soviet space program, and as we just saw last week, their meddling -- which it turns out was justified -- already got one cosmonaut killed. 

Star City has done a good job at portraying this volatile pressure cooker, and at this point, it's every bit as much as a good espionage thriller, as it is a significant piece and counterpoint to the alternate history space travel saga being done so well by For All Mankind.

The Spy Who Went to Venus

It could have the first hour of a James Bond movie, made back in the 1970s.  Star City 1.5, that is. There wasn't any space flight until the very end, but what we got was a rather brilliant, tightly woven espionage story.  All on behalf of Korolev's, aka the Chief Designer's, secret Soviet mission to Venus.  A fine piece of Bondian science fiction.  Q would have been proud.

The KGB hunt for the Russian cosmonaut or worker in the Soviet space program who was giving crucial information to the Americans already caused the death of a cosmonaut in a previous episode.  The stakes are double life-and-death -- the KGB or Soviet police could kill the cosmonaut who was a spy, and of course he or she could perish in a space mission.  In case you haven't seen this episode, I won't tell you how this all played out, except to say again that we were treated to an excellent piece of espionage fiction. Although there were elements of this in For All Mankind, there was little that was as edge-of-your-seat exciting and ingeniously resolved as what happened in episode 1.5 of Star City.

There's also a bit of romance thrown in.   Sasha's letter to his wife, the first woman on the Moon, was touching.   On the one hand, men and women are thrown together for political reasons in this fascist, paranoid society.   On the other hand, we human beings can love and fall in love whatever the factors and forces that brought us together.  The humanity rising to the surface, and motivating people in this razor's edge story, is one of the highlights of this new series.

To get back to the alternate reality, if the portrayal of Korolev in Star City is even minimally accurate, I'm sorry the real man didn't live a lot longer.  If he had, I'd wager we would be a lot further out in space, with settlements on Mars and Venus, then we actually are today.

"You're A Monster"

We come again in Star City 1.6 to the paradoxical collision of fascism and space travel so brilliantly and harrowingly portrayed in this at once triumphant and tragic series.  Triumphant because in this alternate history, the Soviet Union has managed to send a spacecraft with three humans on its way to circle around Venus.  Something the fascist Communist regime has managed to do.  And yet, paradoxical, because ...

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 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.

Return Voyage

I always say that unless you see a character's head blown off, or dissolved in a vat of acid, he or she may still be alive.  I learned this watching 24.

It apparently happened again at the end of Star City 1.7.   In episode 1.6, we saw Colonel Raskova of the KGB ordering the murder of cosmonauts Sasha, Valya, and Lakshmi, by depriving them of their oxygen on their way to Venus -- after Sasha and Lakshmi disobeyed Raskova's order to do that to Valya --and Chief Engineer Korolev quit in fury and disgust as a result.  In episode 1.7, we learn that the Venera (the Soviet ship to Venus) is returning to Earth as per schedule.

Now, that does not necessarily mean that the three cosmonauts are alive.  For all we know, the Venera was designed to move through space to and from Venus and even send messages back to Earth automatically.  And I guess the KGB and their lackeys in Star City could explain the three cosmonauts dead on the ship as due to a malfunction. But from what we've already seen on Star City, the cosmonauts, like our astronauts in that period of time, were more than spam in the can, as our real astronauts used to say.  They had work to do, making sure the voyage was on track, and all the tech was operating as it should.  So chances are the fix we saw Sasha attempt to put in at the end of 1.6 indeed got working to save at least one of the three, and I hope even more.

As I've already said here in reviewing this series, the battle between science and paranoid fascism in Star City is an excellent metaphor for the battle the U.S. is going through right now, with RFK, Jr and his anti-vaccine policy in our Department of Health, and much more.   I'm very glad to see science perhaps gaining the upper hand in Star City, and I'm hopeful it's beginning to happen right here in America on this 250th anniversary of the creation of this nation.

Sacrifice and Relevance

Well, the season one finale of Star City -- episode 1.8 -- was one of the best finales of any season of any series I've ever seen.   It fired on so many cylinders -- ethical, personal, and sheer human accomplishment.  Here are some of them:

• Valya actually landing on Venus -- the end of his "one-way" trip (as he put it) to our neighbor planet between us and Mercury and the sun.  He did this because he had to be in the bathysphere, firing off Venerus, so Venerus could get back to Earth.  Also, because he knew the Soviets would hunt him down and kill him if he got back to Earth.

• Belikova, the first woman to land on the Moon, doing her best to stop the Soviet fascist monsters from killing Sasha and Lakshmi.  She knew those fascist soldiers would stop for a least a few seconds before they shot her down -- she was known to everyone in the Soviet Union -- and indeed they just took her into custody, without harming her.

• Sergei working with Chief Engineer Korolev to get Venerus back to Earth safely, which in this alternate history is Finland, not the Soviet Union, whose lunatics in power would kill their own people.

• Not completely a sacrifice,but nonetheless very admirable: Sasha not going with Lakshmi into Finland, but staying in the Soviet Union, so he could in some way be closer to his wife Belikova, whom he’s come to love.

I know I keep talking about the Nazi-like government that existed in the Soviet Union.  Korolev says none of that really matters, the important thing is "We sent human beings to Venus."   As usual, he has the best lines.  He sees the deepest truths.   But, for me at least, the fascism of the Soviet Union -- the murder of anyone who gets in the way of their agenda, even heroes who have risked their lives to go to Venus and back -- is also a deep truth, and very dangerous.  And its depiction in Star City, as I keep saying, is especially relevant -- fortunately for the series, unfortunately for us living in the United States and therefore the world at large.   I look forward to its continuing depiction in Star City, and its reduction in relevance to what is happening in the real reality unfolding in the United States.