Review: Star City, "The Wolves" | Season 1, Episode 8

Hey free subscribers—as it finishes its first season, a preview of Lily's review of the Star City finale. As always, if you've been watching along and want to join the conversation, become a paid subscriber.

You can't accuse Star City of lacking ambition. In its first season, it's not once been content to stay in the shadows of For All Mankind — in fact, it's been so successful at forging its own identity that I occasionally forget that it's a spin-off at all. Instead of emulating its predecessor's (often very good!) soapy astronaut stories, Star City has tried to investigate the premises beneath the whole Space Race. Over years, millions of miles, and dozens of individual lives, Star City asks: what does a grand contest between superpowers (both, Star City makes clear, complicit in plentiful abuses of power) actually cost? What does it gain its competitors, and are those rewards worth their price? Where does beauty seep in despite it all?

That's a hefty mandate for eight hours of television. And while Star City has thus far done a good job of balancing the many plots that build its themes, its finale doesn't have much room to sprawl, particularly given the show's intentional pacing. It has to carefully choose which elements of its many plots to focus on in "The Wolves." The choices it makes are not terrible, exactly, but they are sometimes quite odd, highlighting the more FAM-like show Star City began as at the expense of the more grounded spy thriller it became.

I realize that the last sentence makes it sound like this review is going to be centered around how much I dislike the show's choice to pull its punches and let Venera survive. Truthfully, though, the way the show handles the Venera plotline isn't nearly as mawkish as I feared. The ship survived, yes, but in some ways that's actually worse for the cosmonauts on board. For one thing, that means they have to deal with the emotional anguish of Valya sacrificing himself to save Lakshmi and Sasha's lives. (I found the reasoning behind Valya's sacrifice contrived — surely they could have found a way to reel the bathysphere back in? — but Adam Nagaitis sells it with his performance.) For another, Sasha and Lakshmi then have to spend four claustrophobic months coming back from Venus knowing full well that what they're heading toward is most likely the same fate they avoided in the explosion: they'll be tried and executed as Valya's collaborators once they set foot on Soviet soil. In mingling the awe the cosmonauts feel at being the first humans to see another planet up close with the looming dread of their fates once they get back to land, the show is echoing some of its strongest earlier moments—Anastasia's trip to the moon, primarily—while pushing its themes forward.