Star City (2026): The Wolves - S01E08 - RECAP

Last night episode is one I was really looking forward and oh boy did it surpase my expectations, it had a few minor details and the ending felt a bit wtf, even on real life people dont understand is better to be free and alive than dead or locked up, even if that means you got to get separated from love ones because at least alife and free you can somehow get back to them, if you locked up or dead there is nothing you can do about it, this is exactly what happen to Sasha. The episode opens on the Venera 7 spacecraft interior wrecked from the depressurization fire, despair radiating off Sasha and Lakshmi as they float through the wreckage. There is this sceen where Sasha snaps and starts choking Valya in the zero gravity module, so it was not all peaceful trip, he was looking crazy since neither of them has anything to basically life for, both were better off death because they were basically sentence to die as traitors of the state, and Lakshmi has to pull them apart before he kills the guy. Valya gave them an apology after all, recognizing how screw up things are because of his actions, some of them very childish. The crew realizes their course is knocked off target, the atmosphere fouled and the equipment fried from the fire, very little to do and this is where only desperate solutions work, just like a few episodes ago when Anastasia was told to open a hole on her suit to release build up gasses.

• IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32140872/
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The best part of this finale is the quiet spy game playing out back on Earth, starting with Sergei visiting the Chief Designer, who is stuck under house arrest. His wife plays it cool, talking loudly about cooking recipes while Sergei leans over the table and traces the word ALIVE in the spilled flour, I have to mention that I appreciate how even though the series is in English, everything written remains in Russian, so there are always things you got to look up to get the small details. The Chief Designer looks overjoyed, but they realize going back to the Soviet Union could mean prison or worse since the government already declared them dead, so they come up with a desperate plan to change the landing coordinates to Finland, using Sergei to manipulate the part of the crew at the communication center so all this invermation can get to Salyut 1 where Anastasia would transmit to Venera 7. Anastasia sneaks the new Finnish coordinates to Sasha and Lakshmi during a radio blackout window, right under the noses of the distracted comrades and it shows she is a lot sharper than just a famous face for state propaganda. Lakshmi figures out the hidden message is new landing instructions, and that sets up a rough radio call where Sasha asks if they will ever see each other again. Anastasia tells him to stick to the plan and he promises he will be waiting on the other side, his voice cracking with how desperate he sounds. Having these two stuck thousands of miles apart gives the whole political mess actual weight, something to risk your life for and even with the KGB breathing down on everybody, forcing whispers and coded messages, the show never lets that swallow the human side of the story.

Even with all that tension, the episode find a way to put the drama in orbit, specailly with how the KGB interrogation played out. Irina pieces together a changed routine from Stepanov and his contact with Sergei and takes it straight to Colonel Raskova, and Sergei gets dragged out to the house in the middle of the night and thrown into a room where guards are viciously beating a man covered in blood, like what a blood hound she is that smell all that and put the pieces together to caught everyone with their pants down. Sergei breaks down crying and screams that the crew is heading to Finland once the beating turns into a threat to shoot the man in front of him, which feels like a cheap way around fighting a ruthless government. Once they throw him back in the truck he sees the real Chief Designer sitting there completely fine, so that bloody scene back at the house was staged just to trick him, it was probably some other guy getting all beat up and the episode just never bothers telling us who that other guy actually was, but there is nothing wrong with that, it becomes irrelevant. That whole scene does felt off to me, because after a full season of these brilliant scientists outsmarting the military state, having Sergei crack that fast makes him look naive, like the writers just needed a fast way to get the Finland plan out in the open, but at the same time this is an extreme situation, you already know when three guards get to you and then you enter a room with a man all bloody and beat up, his brain automatically without double checking tells you thats the Chief Designer. The Chief Designer still hugs him in the truck and says they sent human beings to Venus and back and nobody can take that away from them, a strong line. The blood and screaming make it clear just how far the Soviets will go to protect their image, and the terror on the face of Sergei as the officers drag him away keeps that whole raid feeling like a nightmare and actually scary.

This final chase felt like a mix of a classic Cold War thriller and a disaster movie, I couldnt believe this Russian guards were that bad when trying to shoot down Sasha and Lakshmi, there is also the Mig missing the shot when it shoot a missile to the space pod, also how the guards at the border didnt start shooting back? Russians where shooting with AK47 that could easily reach them. The jet fires a missile that explodes just outside the capsule and knocks it off course, forcing Sasha and Lakshmi to crash land two kilometers short of the Finnish border, their bodies weak from nine months in zero gravity, every step pure agony while Soviet guards slowly close in. Then the episode leaps into pure television fantasy when Anastasia uses the tiny emergency escape module on Salyut 1, it happens that without much calculation and all the drama that Chief Designer and Sergie went through to get Sasha to Finland, Anastasia did it without much thinking. Her fellow cosmonauts covering for her was probably the biggest underrated surprises, I was betting my right hand that they where going to tell on her and she would have to take the emergency pod by force, then she just touch the ground and very convinient a heavy truck was close from local farmers who at first were scary of what the pod was and who was inside. In the meantime Sahs and Lakshmi were running for ther border and Lakshmi takes a shot to the leg but still scramble into Finland and secures her freedom, while Sasha stops dead the moment he sees Anastasia driving toward him. Instead of running for the border and leaving her behind, he raises his hands and surrenders to the military, which I took as him refusing to be taken away from her again, turning what could have been a standard action escape into a deeply romantic and tragic surrender, I couldnt believe he did all that for nothing, and not only what he did but what Anastasia did for him, she did all that not for him to come back to the Soviet Union, now they both going to jail or getting executed.

How they close out this season leaves you wanting more, the ending is very quiet with Sasha and Anastasia getting arrested making you wonder where they will end up now, in a sense Anastasia is valid because she is a political figure for woman in the Soviet Union and Sasha the pilot that went to Venus, not necesarly the Soviet Union would put him back on a ship but he is the one with the expirience. We see Irina outside a home with her daughter, her standing within the KGB is very clear because after this she might go up in the ranks, she is listening to her daughter play the same piano song Tanya used to love. The camera then takes us to Paris, where Tanya has escaped and dyed her hair blonde, walking the streets soaking in her freedom, but that gets cut short when someone trails her through the crowd, it was that same woman who approach Anastasia in France pretending to be an American but in fact was with the KGB, Tanya is still being watched no matter how far she runs. It is a real open ending, the kind that does not try to wrap everything up neatly and it leaves the fates of Sasha, Anastasia, Sergei and the detained Chief Designer completely up in the air, right now I bet the mission to Venus is going to happen on next season and we might start getting that cross over characters within spin off. The people behind this show balance the scientific triumph of the space race against the crushing weight of the Soviet Union political machine and the whole thing hooks you hard, in my case mostly because of the political aspect and I would love the space missions to be as risky as on For All Mankind. The production stays top tier after all its an AppleTV production. That episode left me with nothing to complain about other than how convinient Anastasia using that exit pod and get to Sasha, like how Moscou didnt see that on their radar?, there were a couple of the narrative choices needed a leap of faith, because the performances is just top of the top. I am giving this first season a massive 9/10, yes because when I saw Chief Comander sitting there in the dark it was a HUGE WTF moment, completely blown away by how they managed to merge this love story with a full blown action series.

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Rating: 90/100

Originally posted through scrobble.life/tv.