Review: Star City, "Plow Deep" | Season 1, Episode 7

"Plow Deep" is one of the more frustrating types of TV episodes to review: one that's perfectly serviceable right up until it ends in a polarizing twist that permanently changes the show's tone. It's so tempting to review the turn at the end of the episode in place of the rest of it, and adding to that temptation in this particular case is the fact that I hated this twist.

But I am going to be strong and talk about the rest of "Plow Deep" first. Its first fifty minutes may not be quite as enthralling as the absolute heater the show was on between "Dark Forest" and "Awl in a Sack," but they are still doing something interesting and worthy of discussion. Like For All Mankind's first season, Star City's freshman outing has a massive tragedy at its three-quarters mark: the seeming death of Valya, Lakshmi, and Sasha in the Venera explosion. And just as Shane's death on FAM let the show consider how life in the space program would continue after a very human tragedy, Star City uses the first half of "Plow Deep" to look at how the Soviet state persists and reinscribes itself on people mourning a great disaster.

The State, we see here, is tenacious. Just like in "Awl in a Sack," one of its survival strategies is surgically removing its own agency from situations that are, by any measure, its fault. When Tarasov visits a grieving Anastasia on her father's farm to get her on board a mission to Salyut-1, the new Soviet space station/spy satellite, he carefully refers to Sasha's death as a "training accident," then smiles when he notices Anastasia staring at Sasha's photo on her wall. "I guess the saying is true: love comes when you least expect it," he says, slithering out of responsibility for the forced marriage he himself helped arrange. Even alone in a room with Anastasia, he—the embodiment of the State—is unwilling to accept that the ways in which Anastasia's life has been irrevocably changed are in any way the State's fault.