Star City Review: Apple TV’s Soviet space drama is ambitious, atmospheric, and unfinished

For All Mankind began with a deceptively simple question: what if the Soviet Union had put a man on the Moon before America? Its spin-off on Apple TV, Star City, takes that alternate-history premise behind the Iron Curtain. Set around the Soviet space programme in the late 1960s, it trades the optimism of technological achievement for a world shaped by surveillance, paranoia, political control and carefully managed lives.

The series follows cosmonauts, engineers, intelligence officers and their families as the Soviet Union tries to maintain its advantage in the space race. The Moon, Venus and the machinery of the programme provide the science-fiction framework, but Star City is far more interested in the people living inside that system than in the hardware itself.

The overall story is worth staying with, although the show takes some patience before it earns that investment. The opening is slow, spending considerable time introducing its characters and the different layers of the Soviet space programme. I found myself becoming properly invested around the second episode, when the personal relationships, surveillance story, and larger political tensions begin to connect. From there, Star City has enough going on to keep pulling you forward, even if it occasionally takes its foot off the accelerator.

The space race is really a story about what happens to people

Irina Morozova (Marina Aleksandrova) is where the series becomes genuinely compelling. She is a young KGB officer who begins the story with ambition and a certain faith in her ability to understand the system she works for without being consumed by it. Observant, capable, and increasingly skilled at her job, she also has an empathy that makes her different from the people around her. Listening to recordings of those under surveillance slowly draws her into lives she is supposed to be watching from a distance, making it harder to separate professional duty from personal feeling.

Her story works because the transformation happens gradually. Irina is not suddenly turned into a ruthless operative because the plot needs her to be. She keeps making small compromises, learns what information is worth and discovers how much influence comes from knowing things other people do not. Advancement comes with a price, and she is increasingly forced to decide which parts of herself are worth protecting.

Lyudmilla Raskova gives that conflict another dimension. Played by Anna Maxwell Martin, Raskova is the kind of person Irina could eventually become: someone who has survived inside the system long enough to stop expecting it to have a conscience. The parallel between them is one of the more interesting ideas in the series, although I wish Star City had spent more time showing us the person underneath Raskova’s formidable exterior. She can sometimes feel more like a representation of the Soviet machine than a fully developed character.

Irina’s transformation is also what keeps the show from becoming a straightforward story about oppression. Her story is only one version of what life inside the system can look like, and the people around her respond to its pressures in very different ways. The system does not simply tell these people what to do. It changes the choices available to them. The Chief Designer wants scientific discovery to exist beyond politics, only to repeatedly find that scientific achievement belongs to the state once it becomes useful. Sasha (Nikolai Efremov) is caught between duty, survival, and love, while Anastasia (Vera Glagoleva) shows how even a personal relationship can become an act of rebellion when the state controls where people can go and whom they can trust.

Tanya (Yulia Peresild) wants something much simpler, which is the freedom to live an ordinary life. Valya is pushed towards increasingly desperate decisions because the system leaves her with fewer and fewer legitimate ways out. Sergei becomes another reminder that intelligence and loyalty do not necessarily protect anyone once those in power decide they need something from you.

The characters do not all respond to that pressure in the same way, and the show is strongest when it lets those differences play out naturally. Some compromise, some resist, some manipulate, and some try to run. Irina is particularly interesting because she is still somewhere in between. Her involvement in Tanya’s escape and the final piano scene suggests that, despite everything she has learned, she has not completely given up on the person she was. For all of them, private choices carry consequences far beyond the people making them, which is where Star City finds much of its emotional weight.

Star City makes space feel dangerous again

Star City also makes a smart choice with its science fiction. It does not spend much time trying to make the Soviet space programme look glamorous. The spacecraft are cramped and mechanical, missions depend on engineering and communication, and technical problems have consequences that can extend far beyond the people sitting inside a capsule.

The Venera mission is particularly effective because Venus is treated as genuinely hostile rather than as another spectacular backdrop. Communication failures, navigation problems and the physical limitations of the spacecraft create much of the tension. A period of silence from a spacecraft can be more unsettling than a large visual-effects sequence because the show understands what that silence could mean.

The visual effects generally fit the same philosophy. They are convincing without constantly drawing attention to themselves, while the surrounding Soviet infrastructure makes the world feel functional rather than decorative. Spacecraft, control rooms and engineering facilities all feel like parts of the same functioning programme.

The approach also helps the political story. A technical decision can become a political problem almost instantly, while a mission that goes wrong can threaten careers, relationships and lives on Earth. Space is never completely separate from the machinery of power surrounding it.

The world of Star City does most of the talking

Visually, Star City has a very clear identity. The muted, grainy cinematography, Brutalist architecture, grey interiors, snow, and low-key lighting create a world that feels cold and physically restrictive. Characters are frequently boxed into rooms, corridors, and institutional spaces, which reinforces the sense that privacy is almost impossible.

The production design is one of the show’s strongest achievements. Soviet apartments, offices, training facilities and spacecraft feel as though they belong to the same functioning world. Small details do much of the work: surveillance equipment, official portraits, restricted music and carefully controlled public appearances tell us how this society operates without requiring long explanations.

The problem is that the visual consistency eventually becomes repetitive. Eight episodes of grey interiors and low-key lighting can begin to flatten the experience, particularly when the story needs moments of freedom or escape to feel visually different from the world the characters are trying to escape. The restraint suits the subject, but a little more contrast would have made those emotional shifts land harder.

Sound is more successful. Machinery, footsteps, doors, radio communications, and the muffled noise of people moving through institutional spaces give the show a tactile quality. Conversations often sound as though they are actually happening inside the rooms rather than being cleanly separated from their surroundings.

The spacecraft sequences benefit from the same approach. Mechanical noises and equipment sounds create a sense of physical danger without needing the score to constantly tell us when something is important. The background music, unfortunately, is less memorable. Given how much emotional and political weight the story is carrying, a stronger musical identity could have made some of the bigger moments land with more force.

It takes its time, finds its pull, and occasionally lets it go

The biggest frustration with Star City is that it does not always trust the momentum it has built. The opening needs time to establish the world, and the story only really starts pulling you in around the second episode. Once the different character threads begin connecting, there is plenty to keep watching, particularly as Irina’s story and the Venera mission become more closely intertwined.

Some of the middle episodes still feel longer than they need to be. The central characters are interesting enough to carry those stretches, but the show occasionally spends too much time circling a storyline instead of moving it forward. It eventually finds its way back to the larger conflict, and the later episodes have considerably more urgency.

The finale should have been the point where all of that accumulated tension came together. Instead, it leaves Star City in an awkward place, with the emotional story reaching its destination while the larger story still feels as though it has somewhere else to go.

In Star City, information is its own kind of power

Surveillance works best in Star City when it becomes part of everyday life rather than simply a tool of the KGB. Conversations can be overheard, relationships can become evidence and even small acts of independence can attract attention. Irina gives us a direct view of how the system operates, but its reach extends much further. Careers, marriages and friendships can all become vulnerable once private information can be turned into leverage.

Political control rarely arrives through a dramatic order from above. More often, the possibility of being watched is enough to make people censor themselves. A recorded conversation, a questionable relationship, or a decision outside the expected line can suddenly acquire a different meaning.

Some of the show’s best suspense comes from watching characters calculate what they can safely say, rather than waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

Raskova’s investigation gives the season a larger question about loyalty and betrayal, although the political machinery around it is less developed than the characters caught inside it. Several officials feel more like extensions of the state than people with competing interests of their own. The result is a political storyline that is compelling in concept, but not always as layered as the personal stories carrying it.

The finale lands emotionally, but leaves too much unresolved

The finale brings Sasha and Anastasia’s story to an emotional crossroads. After Valya’s sacrifice and the attempt to get the Venera crew to safety, Sasha chooses to stay with Anastasia rather than leave. His decision carries weight because neither option offers an easy escape from the life they have been given.

Raskova’s investigation into the suspected traitor, however, never receives the same resolution. Questions remain about what she reports, what happens to the people implicated and what the Soviet state ultimately decides to make of the truth surrounding the Venus mission. A second season could explore those threads, but the first season still needs to give viewers a sense of where its central political conflict has landed.

After so much of the season has been invested in the space mission and political investigation, the sudden narrowing of the finale towards Sasha and Anastasia makes the episode feel uneven. Their relationship has been developed carefully enough for the emotional payoff to work, yet the larger story is left hanging just as it should be coming together. One more episode could have allowed the consequences of the mission, the investigation, and the characters’ choices to actually meet.

Star City is worth watching because its strongest ideas reach beyond the space race itself. The missions, machinery, and political intrigue ultimately serve a more interesting story about ambition, loyalty, fear, and love inside a system that controls people’s choices. Much of that works, even if the finale needed one more chapter to give the season the ending it had earned. It’s not quite a blemish on the streamer’s stellar track record brimming with accolades. It just missed out on the golden touch by a sliver.