Review: Star City, "Awl in a Sack" | Season 1, Episode 6
"This is what they do."
If last week's "Bite Your Elbow" was the climax of this season of Star City, "Awl in a Sack" is the beginning of the season's falling action in the old-school sense: falling not in the sense of "diminishing" but "following." Valya, Tanya, Lyudmilla, and Irina all hit their own points of no return last episode. This week, the seemingly-inevitable consequences of their actions begin to cascade down on them and everyone in their vicinity.
Of course, the unspoken truth of any good story after this sort of turn—after characters have set themselves firmly on a given path through actions they can never take back—is that little about what happens after the climax is actually, literally inevitable. Even in the darkest, grimmest moments of their life, a strong, well-considered character will almost always still have meaningful choices to make.
And, as this season approaches its ending, Star City is absolutely brimming with that sort of well-considered character. I wouldn't call "Awl in a Sack" quite as strong an outing as "Bite Your Elbow," if only because it lacks the same everything-coming-together feeling that made that episode so special. Still, it's one of the tensest and most thematically consistent hours of TV I've seen in a while. Impressively, that tension flows from its thematic ground, which is to say how it treats inevitability: as a comforting lie we tell ourselves or a vicious untruth we tell those our actions hurt. On Star City, you can tell who has power in any given situation by looking for the person who deflects responsibility for their own actions onto the person they mean to control.
The Star City character most susceptible to this power-mad line of thinking is, of course, Lyudmilla. She got her current position by killing dozens of Nazis in World War II, so it's not a surprise that she'd see herself as a force of nature. In the season's first two thirds, we've seen the way she views herself as the living will of the Soviet state. She'll seize control at a moment's notice from anyone in her vicinity, then claim they're on the same side, that she's just protecting the project they both hold dear.
