Name: Star City
Rating: 80

I have been griding some series that I had in backlog, today I just realize that thursday nights now are packed because Silo just dropped plus Star City, Cape Fear and Sugar, so much content dont have enough time to post about all of it so Im been picky. Star City confirm as a For All Man Kind spin off has been on another level, its almost like they learn from the first series and episode four opens on a new scene set in intelligence reports from 1963 through 1965, an American spy with a British accent tracking Tanya because she is tied to a dissident group called Zeta smuggling banned Western music out of the country inside instrument cases. Turns out the Americans used Tanya and her music smuggling to get to Valya, it was basically by accident and turn him into an asset, which changes how I look at his betrayal, well just a bit. The best part is when the spy finally approaches Valya at a bus stop to recruit him, but the camera stays behind the bus and the engine noise silence their whole conversation. You do not hear the threats she makes but you feel the weight of it, Valya realizing he is trapped and has to protect his wife. Episode four leans way more into the espionage side of the story than the space stuff since Valya is not just a traitor here, he is a desperate man caught in a terrible position. The season is only halfway through so I need to pick up the pace, they already like two or three episodes ahead me.

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32140872/
Platform: APPLETV

Rottentomatoes Rating

[Source](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/star-city/umc.cmc.2l8p785osmtmiyk64bh6tfde1)

The detective stuff this episode is fantastic, Colonel Raskova pulls Irina off surveillance duty and puts her in charge of tracking down that modified transmitter they found on the sip but its not the entire thing that matters but a small spring and suddenly she is out in the field carrying a gun for the first time, seems like they all train to carry a gun though. Irina goes down to the manufacturing plant and talks to the boss, and it turns out the strange coil inside the transmitter is made of a metal the Soviet Union does not even have, this confirms the device is not from them. There is this scene where they kept the invoices records, we talking the 60s so its all on paper, and somebody sets the files on fire and takes a shot at Irina that blows out a window right next to her face and instead of running after whoever did it she stops to put the fire out, but seems it was too late as there some papers more than half way burn. The real highlight comes later when Irina picks up her daughter from Tanya, asks to use the toilet and starts poking around the bathroom cabinet just as she did previous episode. She finds a perfume bottle from France, notices the spray mechanism is missing its spring and realizes the transmitter piece fits right inside it, it all clicks in and makes perfect sensce, that lead points straight back at Valya. You can watch her put it together and just like that Valya goes from grieving husband to traitor. It is such a satisfying way to discover who is working for the Americans and now Irina holds information that could destroy an entire family and she has to weigh her own ambition against her conscience.

[Source](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/star-city/umc.cmc.2l8p785osmtmiyk64bh6tfde1)

While the spy stuff is fantastic, the story loose a bit of ground and felt a bit off when we shift to the new Indian scientist Lakshmi Chadha arriving at the facility, because her whole introduction feels way too convenient and also little context about her or why is she so important but they do provide such missing context latter on. She gets stuck with a bad workspace, missing equipment and coworkers who barely look at her, and then her husband Manu complains about flies buzzing around their apartment and a he is also very paranoic about they been monitor or even listen, without knowing they been recorded all the time. Later that night at work she hears loud clanking, wanders down into a secret basement, and finds the Chief Designer working on a Venus mission that is supposed to be completely classified. He tells her she is going to Venus with Sasha and Pavel on a nine month mission that leaves in exactly three days and it feel like this news had to be bigger than what they make it look like, but the cast still sold it. For a show that leans this hard on secrecy and surveillance, having a brand new scientist wander into the most classified project on the base makes zero sense. The Chief Designer basically force her to take the mission because there is no time to train a cosmonauts on a reciclying oxigent system that is the key for the mission and she is the one that invent it, even as cool as it might sound having the expert on boadrd but three days is absurd for pilots who usually train for years. Even Sasha seems hesitant to join, still dealing with his own trauma, which makes the rushed timeline feel even more reckless. The show is usually smart about its details, so watching them rush the Venus project this hard just feels like a shortcut.

[Source](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/star-city/umc.cmc.2l8p785osmtmiyk64bh6tfde1)

Watching Anastasia deal with the public relations tour reminds me of how other space shows build their world, once the government gets what it needs out of you, your life belongs to the state and that is a statement this series has made form the very first episode everything belogns to the state and nothing is above. Anastasia has become this full blow puppet and she is signing autographs at a girls school one minute and getting drunk by a lake with the physics faculty the next, watching them shoot off model rockets in their underwear, everybody just trying to feel normal for a little while since she just cant handle her fake life anymore and is about to tip over. The whole oppressive Soviet era vibe reminds me a lot of Chernobyl the HBO tv series and that is one of the best series of all times despite how short it is, everything you say gets monitored and every achievement gets twisted into propaganda. On Star City they make this very clear to their face but always with some kind of excuse that some characters decide to buy and others are just full of all the bs. After what she did on her mission she overheard that they are never letting her fly again because she is worth more to them as a symbol turns her into a trophy rather than a tool. You can see the depression setting in when Sasha finally shows up at the lake to drag her home, their roles completely reversed, him acting serious while she is a drunk mess. They end up arguing in their apartment before the anger turns into sex, such a fascination combination that most of the time only happens in the movies to be honest and its always hilarious, but is a perfect example of just how trapped they both are in this system that they are taking any kind of easy escape from their reality. The paranoia here works a lot like For All Mankind, except this is steeped in secret police and labor camps. Even Raskova is not safe, getting called into an intimidating meeting in Moscow where her superiors subtly threaten her and demand reports so she can be replace but some how she still manage to stay relevant, she been doing this for a long time so she knows how to survive.

At the end I got this sense of disapointment because of the rushed Venus mission timeline but the spy takes over finally introducing the one that poison Valya into walking the left hand path. Watching Sasha at the memorial service, barely holding it together while the widow reads a heavily redacted letter from his dead crewmate does paint the picture about the guilt he is carrying, after all the mission is everything they got, they got no personal life, no public achievements, the states has taken everything from them even the glory so its all personal satisfaction when they make it but this time things went wrong and one of the eagles has fallwn. The state redacting a dead mans final letter to his own widow is just cruel but makes perfect sense how harsh this world is as they manipulate all the information. Raskova also tightens her grip by interrogating the engineers, leading to Sergei getting arrested after a some forbiddent text, I'm not so clear on this one but I guess its just some books that turns up during a search of his place, like she needed to make an example with Moscow breathing down her neck and planted evidence. Half the engineers admit to reading that book but Sergei is the only one who refuses to name names and ends up thrown in a cell and hosed down, showing how arbitrary the justice system is when she ask Sergei "yeah can you name those" refering to his coworkers who have read the same book, makes you think like if he does he rat them out and can be taken in with him but if he stays shut then he keeps them safe so he is the only one who sink, crazy stuff. Now that Irina has a solid lead almost evidence, connecting Valya to that transmitter spring, things are about to explode, forcing an impossible choice between her career and her friends, not really friends but aflter all Tanya is her daughters piano teacher and invite them home for private leasons after all. Despite my complaints about the Venus project, there is preasure at every level including Raskova so its not only those below her anymore. I am giving this episode a solid 8 out of 10, watching all these secrets unfold is a damn good content and the performances across the board are so so good.

#starcity, #episodefour, #spydrama, #televisionreview, #scifishow, #russianespionage, #televisionblog, #characterdrama, #venustrip, #coldwar, #secretpolice, #betrayal, #hiddensecrets, #spaceexploration, #tvblogger, #watchthis, #scifithriller, #soviethistory, #episoderecap, #televisioncritique, #spymystery, #spaceprogram, #tensionbuilding, #mustwatch, #blogpost

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Star City is a very very under the radar tv series, such a banger episode after episode. Episode 3 opens with Tanya sneaking around government checkpoints just to grab a smuggled X ray vinyl record, the series has all this interesting tricks and I had no clue an X ray could be a record, they call it a bone record and its the kind of things that get you hooked. She has to lock herself inside her own apartment just to listen to an old rock song and then Valya caught her and just unplugs the record player as he is late looking for his chronograph and you can see the fear and the frustration bubbling up in their home while the Soviet government watches every single thing they do. It is completely messed up, because these people are supposed to be national heroes and watching the constant surveillance strip away their entire freedom just leaves them hollow. You start to feel bad for Tanya as she marks down her limited plays on that degrading X ray sheet, you can only play it three times, it shows how desperate she is for just a tiny taste of rebellion in a place that controls her entire existence. Every time the needle hits that warped plastic it sounds a little worse, getting more distorted but she still tries to get the most out of it, even the idea that you can only play it 3 times makes a reference to how limited is their life and that visual just perfectly shows the sadness of her situation. Valya is clearly cracking under the load and pressure of the upcoming lunar mission and taking out his frustration and stress on his wife just adds that sense of toxicity to a marriage that is already falling apart. Playing a piece of Western music in this world could cost them everything, their positions, their status, their freedom and the show really makes you understand how text and music can be a violation to stablished rules to keep them under the grip. It is a grim way to open the episode, sets the tone fast and you know from that first scene alone that nobody in this story is going to be okay, this is a very very sad tv series got to say.

IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32140872/
Platform: APPLETV

Rottentomatoes Rating

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The absolute best part of this episode is watching the chief designer go completely rogue with his secret plan to reach Venus, because seeing him visit a naval base to inspect an old deep sea submersible is just an incredibly dope concept. He realizes that the bathysphere is already built to withstand massive pressure under the ocean, making it the perfect vessel to survive the ninety atmospheres of crushing pressure on the surface of Venus. It is such a clever way to repurpose old technology for an impossible space mission, there there is also how he try to smuggle this giant metal sphere into Star City, sneaking past that terrifying security colonel, creates some excellent tension. He is sweating through every second of it and you will too by just watching and waiting, think about how he just keep his face flat while she pokes around and getting that equipment past her says a lot about who this guy actually is, how patient he can play it when something matters to him. The audacity here is just staggering, a nine month manned mission to another planet while everyone else is fixated on the moon, and the show sells it without ever letting it feel ridiculous. I love how he pulls Sasha into it, just looks him in the eye and says they need somebody who will not be noticed gone for almost a year and almost sound like it is a perfectly normal job requirement, so deeply unsettling. The show is really good at putting these enormous space ambitions next to all the petty Soviet bureaucracy garbage and it makes every little win feel like something that cost people blood to pull off, always been a second or centimiter away of getting acuse or killed because of treason. The chief designer has weeks to make this happen before someone above him figures out what he is doing, a race against time before he gets discover or someone rat on him. This whole Venus subplot is the exact kind of high scientific gamble that makes space dramas so entertaining and I have to say this is so much more interesting than watching For All Mankind.

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Even though the episode has some incredible highs, the romantic drama around Sasha is a complete waste of time, especially him slipping a handwritten love letter under the door for Tanya right before going into space. Two people are having an affair, we get it, but watching Sasha act like a lovesick teenager while a lunar landing is forty eight hours away just makes him look like a total dumbass. You could see where things were going the moment he sat down to write those mandatory death letters, smirking over there, using official government documentation to flirt with the wife of his best friend like that is a completely normal thing to do, oh my God the balls this guy has. It becomes really hard to root for him when he is that reckless and his whole attitude during training just makes you want to grab him and smack the stupid out of him. They are planning to land the lunar module without spacesuits because two people have to fit inside the lander and Sasha just laughs about it and cracks jokes instead of taking any of it seriously. His fake marriage to Anastasia is falling apart while she drinks through it on Earth and he plays the careless playboy and the show burns too much time making you have to deal with his attitude, to a point where he is the center of the show but adds nothing to the rest, its like he is the chaos but only others get affected. I get that the point is to show how much pressure is eating these guys from the inside but watching him give Valya terrible advice about how to pleasure a woman / his wives is hilarious in a very dark way and just felt like a scene from a different and much worse show, but I totally get the point because you can tell Tanya is going to find out when he pulls that move in bed and she is the one who will get the message. The series does such a great job hidding somethinb behind the draggy pace every time it cuts back to Sasha doing something stupid, because it kills all the tension that the political spying and the Venus plot spent the whole episode building, but believe me all this has a reason and a purpose. Every time he appears on screen I just hope the mission goes wrong just so we do not have to keep dealing with him or Sasha. This love triangle do get exhausted over time and it was just right before it turns the rest of the season into a soap opera.

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The spying and psychological warfare in this episode have that same suffocating quality as the best Cold War stuff, everybody watching everybody, nobody trusting a single word. Irina is easily the most fascinating piece of this paranoid puzzle, lurking in the background, because she literally sits in her surveillance room listening to Tanya and Valya argue, absorbing all their miserable secrets like it is her own personal radio show. When Irina runs into Tanya at the market through Zoya, Tanya invites them over for a private piano lesson, pulling Irina into the exact apartment she has been secretly monitoring, its fascinating to me how she violates all this security meassures and still do both, stay alife and bend the rules in her favor. It's just so unsettling to watch Irina step into the space she has been wiretapping, looking around the room and matching the physical space to all the intimate audio recordings she has memorized in her head. When she sneaks into the bathroom to snoop through the medicine cabinet, touching their things and smelling the perfume Tanya wears, it crosses from professional government surveillance into this weirdly obsessive personal crusade that is both creepy and high tension just waiting for her to get caught. Tanya is sitting there opening up to a woman who is paid to use every word against her, completely unaware that she is essentially handing a transcript to the state, at multiple points in time you are like shut the fuck up because Tanya is basically talking to the enemy withouth knowing. But when Tanya asks about the father of Zoya, Irina lets something slip, says he is not a good man and then later cuts that part of the tape so it disappears, and that small move tells you everything about where her head actually is. Even the most disciplined people in this system have a point where something human breaks through, and it turns Irina from a stone cold tool of the state into somebody much more complicated. Fake friendships sitting on top of government surveillance creates an atmosphere that never lets take a break and the tension builds up as you are basically waiting for someone to say the wrong thing during what sounds like a casual conversation about piano lessons or what to buy at the market. It is smart storytelling, all that dread with no action movie shortcuts, just the weight of knowing the walls are always listening.

At the end everything comes together in a big way and the disaster with Luna 17 is what really seals it, delivering a massive punch when the lunar hub deploys early and ruins the separation process, its hilarious how they keep mentioning "the americans" but so far no one representing the americans have shown up until that moment. There was this sick scene when Sasha had to manually stabilize the capsule to properly engage with the station, wrestling with the controls and even though he managed to dock the ship, seeing Arseni floating dead in the vacuum of space because his section ripped apart was such a very sad moment. That space tragedy hits even harder when the perspective shifts down to Moscow, where Valya has taken Tanya to a fancy piano concert only to use a bathroom break as a cover to sneak out and meet a mysterious American handler. The reveal that Valya planted the American transmitter on Luna 17 turns him from a stressed out husband into a compromised insider secretly helping the Americans, flipping the script entirely on a character we thought we understood, see why I mention "it has a purpose". I literally flip when his handler told him he was far from done, because you can see the absolute defeat in his eyes when he realizes he cannot escape this treasonous arrangement. It is such a shitty twist to realize that the transmitter Valya planted helped trigger the chain of events that led to the death of Arseni, even though he might had the idea that this would set him and Tanya free, it makes you question every single move he has made since the season started. This changes the entire trajectory of the show, proving that the greatest threat to the Soviet space program is not the Americans or the technology falling apart, but the compromised men walking their own halls who obviously cant meassure the impact of the acts. I am giving this episode a solid 8/10 or as in scrobble.life score a 80%, because despite the annoying romance subplots, the space disaster and the spy reveal at the end were executed with absolute perfection. It leaves you completely desperate for the next episode, wondering how Valya is going to hide his guilt while working on the secret Venus project alongside the chief designer. This is exactly the kind of smart, stressful television that makes you want to stay up all night and recelty binge a few episodes of Star City so I know the feeling.

#starcity, #baddancer, #space, #scifi, #tvreview, #episode3, #soviet, #cosmonaut, #luna17, #venus, #submersible, #spies, #coldwar, #betrayal, #tanya, #valya, #sasha, #irina, #surveillance, #vinyl, #secret, #mole, #apple, #drama, #television

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