Review: Star City, "Bad Dancer" | Season 1, Episode 3

In the lead-up to Star City's release, one phrase I saw over and over in reviews and marketing, up to and including Apple TV's own PR description of the show, was paranoid thriller. It's an easy way to describe the appeal of the show without overemphasizing its ties to For All Mankind, absolutely. And over its last few episodes, Star City has absolutely dabbled in both paranoid spy stories and thriller-paced sequences. But is the compound phrase really accurate to what the show's doing with its espionage elements? I'm not so sure.

On Star City, for one thing, spying isn't always defined by chasing anything in particular. Just as often, it's about passively perceiving, observing without being observed, waiting for the crucial hidden information you need to come to you. Valya and Tanya watch the walls of their apartment for hidden microphones; Irina listens to tape recordings of their private conversations; Lyudmilla reads Irina's reports; the Chief Designer looks to Lyudmilla's face to see if she's too distracted with her other spy work to catch onto the way he's circumventing Star City's security apparatus. These scenes of canny observation are often tense, sure, but—and I think this is crucial to Star City's appeal—the show sees spying as far more than an engine for character anxiety. More often, especially when Irina and the cosmonauts are involved, listening in on someone else's life or being listened to in turn breeds melancholy and dissatisfaction with one's life. Spycraft unwittingly draws people toward those whose lives they envy even as it reminds its subjects of the freedoms they lack. Your own life never feels quite so contingent as when you're hearing another person live theirs through a hidden microphone.

Irina, the primary point-of-view character of "Bad Dancer," feels this heavily. She begins the episode at her desk in the windowless warrens of Star City, listening, as always, to Tanya and Valya's apartment. Tanya's just come home with a new record, a black-market one pressed from X-ray film that can only be listened to a couple of times before it's entirely unplayable. She dances around the apartment while Irina types, then pulls her hands back from the keyboard, listening to Tanya's contraband song for a moment. When Valya clatters into the apartment looking for his stopwatch, he screams at Tanya, telling her to turn off the music. "You're gonna get us into trouble," he barks. They get into a screaming match, Valya leaves, and Tanya turns once again turns on her record, now audibly distorted.