Star City
Some thoughts about the TV show Star City, a spinoff from the alternate-history-of-the-Space-Race show For All Mankind.
Includes major spoilers for all of For All Mankind so far (through the end of s5), and for the first two eps of Star City.
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Irina Vasilievna Morozova is a Soviet character who first appeared in For All Mankind s4e1. She’s been a more or less ruthless presence on the show on and off since then. And I knew that Star City was going to be set in the same alternate USSR portrayed in FAM, in the 1960s.
So as Kam and I watched Irina’s actions in the last few episodes of FAM s5, I guessed that a young version of her was probably going to be a prominent character in Star City. (This was not a big leap; probably lots of people figured it out long before I did.)
But then we watched the first two eps of Star City, and it became clear that on that show, young Irina still has some human decency. She smiles at least once during those two eps. She’s ordered to kill someone, and she refuses.
And we realized that that seems to imply that Star City is going to be (at least partly) the story of how Irina went from that ambitious-but-somewhat-idealistic young person to a ruthless-bordering-on-evil older person.
And we’re not sure that we want to watch that story.
Especially when it’s a spinoff of a series that’s always been about can-do space engineering and the triumph of the indomitable human spirit against all odds.
I mean, there’s plenty wrong with old-fashioned science fiction models of can-do space engineering and triumph of the human spirit, and FAM does explore some of what’s wrong with those things. And plenty of awful things have happened on FAM, both at the individual level and at the organizational and societal levels. But I feel like by the end of most seasons, FAM has involved some kind of triumph, something that we can feel at least a little good about.
But if Star City is going to be primarily about a character’s descent into cynicism and awfulness, we’re not really sure we want to spend time on it.
That said, there are other main characters on the show, and I’m intrigued by some of them. (For example, I didn’t realize until I looked him up later that young genius Nikulov on Star City is (presumably) the same character as Margo’s sort-of-friend Sergei Orestovich Nikulov on FAM, and the name “Nikulov” also appeared on the computer screen on MARS-94 in the fast-forward-to-2020 scenelet at the very end of s5 of FAM.)
But overall, Star City is a lot grimmer and a lot darker than FAM. (…Literally darker! Most of Star City seems to me to be filmed through some kind of a grayish filter—daytime skies tend to be washed-out white, interior scenes are too-dimly lit, no bright saturated colors allowed.)
I think that it’s really just an entirely different kind of show than FAM—it’s more like a Cold War spy thriller than like a science fiction adventure show. (Rhys Ifans as Sergei Korolev, the Chief Designer, even looks a little (to me) like Gary Oldman as George Smiley in the 2011 Tinker Tailor.) And one of the showrunners has been quoted as saying that one of their main storylines was inspired by the tradition of Soviet tragic romance. So I shouldn’t expect it to be in the same genre as FAM.
But that means that the sources of viewer pleasure for this show are very different than the ones for FAM, and I’m not sure that they match what I want to watch.
…I wrote most of this post a few weeks ago, after seeing only the first two eps of Star City. I’ve now seen the next three, and am still feeling largely the same way about it. I only have three eps to go before the end of the season, but I may give up without watching them.
(On a side note, I don’t love Star City’s choice to have all of the Soviet characters speaking English (with British accents). I assume that it would be prohibitive to have most of the dialogue in most of the episodes written and spoken in Russian (with subtitles), but it keeps pushing me out of the story. I know that “translating” to English is a perfectly ordinary/standard thing for TV shows and movies to do; but given five seasons of FAM, where all of the Russian dialogue really is in Russian (with subtitles), I find it jarring for the spinoff to handle the language issue differently. I keep wondering what language the Russian characters will speak if there’s ever a crossover between the shows. 🙂)