Review: Star City, "Dark Forest" | Season 1, Episode 4
"I wasn't aware we were on different sides."
As if to spite me personally, Star City has followed up last week's "Bad Dancer," which I reviewed by noting that the show seemed kind of uninterested in the narrative modes that usually make up a paranoid thriller, with "Dark Forest," an episode that is, by any possible definition, a paranoid thriller. There's a fraught investigation by a junior intelligence operative, cover-ups on cover-ups, evidence left in flames in a gloomy warehouse, and even a scene of our protagonist realizing how little she actually knows about the people she's been surveilling. It's a swing from the tone the show has been working in, and a mostly successful one.
All that said, I still stand by the thesis of my "Bad Dancer" review. Even when Star City is trying to be a more by-the-book spy thriller, it's still one that's thinking about its genre metatextually, about what a constant—and frequently justified—sense of paranoia does to the human psyche. "Dark Forest," across characters, plots, and levels of power, uses its genre elements to consider the way suppressing dissent atomizes people. A state that enforces a paranoid mindset is anathema to human relationships at every level from the society-wide and the interpersonal.
Of course, a paranoid mindset doesn't come from nowhere. "Dark Forest" is, by and large, an episode about the continuing fallout from last episode's Luna 17 disaster, a catastrophe that led to the death of a cosmonaut. As they dissect the modified device that an American asset placed on board the spacecraft, the Chief Designer and Lyudmilla argue about whose fault the accident really was. The Chief Designer is furious once he realizes that the device—a tiny springlike coil planted in a standard piece of equipment—was only a radio transmitter. The Americans were eavesdropping, yes, but no Soviet lives were in danger from it. Lyudmilla, on the other hand, maintains that ordering a full reboot of Luna 17's systems was necessary in case the hidden device was, in fact, meant to sabotage the mission. She was doing the best she could with the information she had at the time.
