Review: Star City, "Bite Your Elbow" | Season 1, Episode 5

When "Bite Your Elbow"—the crux point of Star City's first season—opens, Irina is staring at her own reflection with an expression of utter dread. She's still in Tanya's bathroom, right where we left her at the end of "Dark Forest." The bottle of perfume that the American radio transmitter fits into is still tucked in the medicine cabinet. Her eyes look half-dead. If this really is what she was looking for when she befriended Tanya, she's anything but glad to have been proven right.

The kettle whistles, and she comes back to herself. In the kitchen, sweating, near tears, she asks Tanya once more about the woman she'd seen Valya with in Moscow. Was there any chance she could have been a foreigner? When Tanya starts to get suspicious, Irina pivots, insisting that Valya absolutely was cheating and that Tanya thus has to leave him. "If I were you," she says, "I'd leave without a word. That way, the guilt will eat him alive." When that doesn't work, Irina tells the truth: Valya will soon be arrested, and Tanya with him. He's betrayed his country. Even as Irina digs the bug out of the wallpaper, Tanya's in denial. She calls Irina delusional. Only once Irina admits the worst truth of them all—that she has been spying on Tanya for months, that she knows every secret Tanya has dared to speak aloud in her own home—does reality sink in. Whatever the two of them had, it is over forever. To save the life of her only friend, Irina had to destroy their friendship.

And all this over a radio antenna smaller than the nail of a pinky finger.