Review: Star City, "A Bear on a Chain" | Season 1, Episode 2

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Star City, like so many modern ensemble genres, doesn't have a single clear protagonist. But if you forced me to pick a single main character from the series at this point, it would, no question, be Anastasia Belikova, the first woman on the Moon and the first person on Star City to fully capture my attention.

Anastasia, as we're reminded constantly, is not a traditional cosmonaut. Her colleagues—Valya, Sasha, the late Yana—are outgoing, gregarious, true comrades who will razz each other as they fearlessly jump out of a plane. Anastasia, meanwhile, is plagued by a sense of anxiety and inferiority. We learned in Star City's pilot that she's in the program, in part, because her father is a high-ranking party official, and that nepotism is clearly tied to her frequent incompetence and hesitation. She's the last person to jump during parachute training; she crashes the lunar lander in the simulator. Even when she's just practicing her big first-woman-on-the-Moon speech, she stumbles over her words, looking pained.

But my God, does she ever love being in space. She looks at peace in a way she never does on Earth when she's staring out her visor at the empty ridges and craters of the Moon. She describes her time standing on the lunar surface as "the best moment of my life" while begging the Chief Designer to let her go up again. In moments of heightened stress, she looks at her feet and sees her spacesuit-clad shadow. The mere fact she's on Earth rather than up above is so painful to her that a gentle Sasha, trying to calm her down before a press engagement, tells her, “my grandfather used to say that when God wants to curse you, he makes you happy.”

Space is so important to her that she'll do virtually anything to get to go back. When her landing capsule crashes down hundreds of kilometers off-course in the Siberian taiga, she hides from a prowling bear as it tries to attack her, only to be interrogated by vicious beasts of a different nature once the USSR locates her. Lyudmilla and a party lackey named Tarasov drag Anastasia into a truck where a woman who looks exactly like her is waiting; that woman, says Lyudmilla, will be the new Anastasia Belikova if our Anastasia doesn't get in line. Anastasia breaks down. She reaffirms her faith in the USSR and apologizes profusely for mentioning Yana in her speech on the Moon. She even agrees to go on a tour—to a series of Soviet capitals and then, in a highly controlled visit, to Paris—to promote her achievement despite her debilitating social anxiety.

But there's one final hitch: the USSR can't have its national hero be a single woman. If she ever wants to fly again, she'll have to marry Sasha.