Star City Turns Soviet Space Dreams Into KGB Suspense

Apple’s Star City, a Cold War–tinged spinoff of For All Mankind, drops viewers into 1969 with a moon milestone, then quickly replaces celebration with fear. Under the gray haze of Soviet secrecy, KGB surveillance—bugged apartments, endless recordings, and inti

There’s a moment in the premiere of Star City when it feels like the show has quietly launched us back into early For All Mankind—before the characters were living on Mars, when simply getting to the moon was an awesome challenge.

A spaceship takes off. Everything goes well, until it doesn’t. Down on Earth, a command center turns into a scramble of engineers trying to improvise a solution. Up among the stars. two brave souls white-knuckle their way through maneuvers that might doom them as easily as save them. It’s breathlessly tense. oddly moving. and genuinely fun—right in the pocket of what classic For All Mankind used to do so well.

Star City earns that satisfaction by not just repeating the past. Outside of a few sequences like that. it plays less like hopeful sci-fi saga and more like a paranoid Cold War thriller. The result is a compelling mix: throwback space-race excitement wrapped in icy intrigue. The five hours (of eight) sent to critics leave the impression of a series that can be both a companion to its parent show and something that stands on its own.

The shape of the story is familiar to anyone who’s already lived through For All Mankind’s alt-history. Star City recounts the events of that universe—where the U.S. lost the space race—from the perspective of the Soviets. Key characters and plot points from the earlier series are recognizable. including the mission described above. which is referenced in the second episode of For All Mankind. But for longtime fans and total newcomers alike. the show isn’t content to serve the same story with different accents. It uses the same foundation to ask a different kind of question: what does a victory look like when surveillance never stops?.

As the series opens in 1969, a cosmonaut is about to become the first ever man to walk on the moon. His wife doesn’t know what’s happening when she’s hauled from her bed by the KGB in the dead of night to watch his landing. The achievement is big enough to earn the program’s as-yet-unnamed Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans) a special commendation. The trouble is that the ceremony is performed in secret. and the medal is immediately returned to the government. ostensibly to protect him from American interests.

This is the tone on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain—captured through a gray and grainy ’70s-style filter. Secrecy becomes the default setting. So does bureaucratic jargon. Heroes of the state aren’t celebrated so much as quietly watched, and they fear being hauled off for no reason at all.

And that fear isn’t just atmosphere. Star City makes it clear that KGB surveillance isn’t a side plot—it’s woven into the machinery of space advancement itself. Across the base from the Chief Designer’s team of cosmonauts and engineers sits Building 12, visually nondescript but reputationally feared. There. KGB official Lyudmilla (Anna Maxwell Martin) oversees teams of young women tasked with listening to hours of recordings gathered from bugs embedded on seemingly every apartment on the base. They log details about their targets that reach far beyond politics—down to toilet habits, musical tastes, and sex partners.

In early chapters. Star City’s focus can feel diffuse. especially before it’s obvious how the show’s multiple threads will intersect. Some characters are easier to read at first—Lyudmilla. for example. or the kindly engineer Sergei (Josef Davies). who resembles his For All Mankind counterpart Piotr Adamczyk. Others remain guarded in ways that can frustrate, then gradually pull you in.

Irina (Agnes O’Casey), Lyudmilla’s protégé, is one of those figures. Even though For All Mankind has already revealed where she’ll end up eventually. her background and goals still sit in shadow early on. Anastasia (Alice Englert) is another. She’s a green cosmonaut who gives blandly patriotic answers to interview questions like why she joined the program—“For the glory of the Soviet Union.” The top brass thrills to the performance. but the response reveals little about the woman underneath. Her colleagues grow frustrated, including experienced cosmonaut Valya (Adam Nagaitis) and the Chief Designer.

What changes is time spent inside these lives. Irina starts to feel close to Valya and his dissatisfied wife, Tanya (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), as she listens in on the most intimate moments of their marriage day in and day out. The same surveillance that controls her also reshapes her relationships.

Then the show pushes toward the collision point: personal drama braided with institutional dread. Star City threads juicy interpersonal stakes—friendships that tangle Tanya. Valya. Anastasia and Sasha (Adam Nagaitis)—into tense intrigue. as Irina presses deeper into her investigation of a suspected mole on base. When those elements converge, the series tends to detonate, turning private cracks into public danger.

Paranoia is never allowed to drift away in this world; it suffuses everything like air. At times. audio of characters’ conversations switches over to slightly muddy recorded versions that Irina and her colleagues are listening to in Building 12. Other times, it cuts away entirely where the recordings have been erased for self-serving reasons. In that kind of environment. anything that should feel pure or human gets crushed by a state intent on perpetuating itself.

So the story becomes a chain of pressure: the Chief Designer is forced to sneak his most ambitious plans past bureaucrats who care only about one-upping NASA. Anastasia is driven deeper into despair as she’s forced to contort into an exemplar of Soviet womanhood for an adoring public and an unforgiving publicity apparatus. Irina’s arc becomes sharper and darker as she crosses ethical and legal lines—moving from a naïve hope that truth might matter. to someone hardened enough to talk herself into torturing a prisoner.

If For All Mankind’s early seasons built an optimistic fantasy—scientific advancement and social progress moving together—Star City chooses a bleaker vision. It’s a dispiriting frame for a story about discovery, but it also makes for some of the most compelling drama the spinoff has to offer.

Airdate: Friday, May 29 (Apple).
Cast includes Rhys Ifans, Anna Maxwell Martin, Agnes O’Casey, Alice Englert, Solly McLeod, Adam Nagaitis, Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, Josef Davies, and Priya Kansara.
Creators are Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert, and Ronald D. Moore.

Star City review Apple For All Mankind spinoff Cold War thriller KGB surveillance Soviet space race 1969 Rhys Ifans Anna Maxwell Martin Agnes O’Casey