SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from “The Wolves,” the Season 1 finale of “Star City,” now streaming on Apple TV.
The Soviet Union took an unexpected leap into the history books, again, in the Season 1 finale of Apple TV’s “Star City,” which saw the cosmonaut program actually make it to Venus and do something wholly unexpected back on Earth — give audiences a romantic ending.
First, let’s talk romance. In the finale of the “For All Mankind” spinoff, Anastasia (Alice Englert), back in space on a mission to launch an orbiting station, must weigh whether to defy all directives to save her beloved Sasha (Solly MacLeod) as he barrels back to Earth with a kill order on his head. Although they shared only one night of passion together within the confines of their arranged marriage before he is sent to space on a secret mission to Venus, Anastasia and Sasha have spent most of the season pining for each other from afar. But when the Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans) informs her that his mission wasn’t lost like everyone believed, she knows he is in danger the second he touches down on Earth.
So she steals a transport ship, pops down to Earth with remarkable precision to his location and races against the KGB to find him and his fellow survivor, Lakshmi (Priya Kansara), before they can cross the border and seek asylum in Finland. In a thrilling sequence, nothing but a field separates Sasha and Lakshmi from safety, but the KGB is hot on their heels. Anatasia steals a truck and obstructs their path, sacrificing herself to a bleak future, all in the name of love. When Sasha sees this, he can’t bear to be on the opposite side of the fence from his wife, and he gets Lakshmi over the border and then surrenders himself with a peaceful smile on his face.
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It’s the kind of grand declaration of love most romantic comedies strive to replicate in their final moments, minus the gun-toting KGB. But co-creators Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert say this big gesture was inspired by something a lot closer to home.
“The fact that the forces of the world pull them apart and they struggle against that just felt very Russian to us,” Wolpert tells Variety. “In that Russian literature kind of way, like ‘Anna Karenina’ and “War and Peace,” and all these Tolstoy books about two star-crossed lovers who the world is conspiring to keep apart. But they’re not willing to let that happen, and sometimes it costs them everything.”
How much it will cost them is a question looming over the series, which has not yet been renewed for Season 2 by Apple TV, despite getting some of the best reviews of the year (including a spot on Variety’s best shows of the year so far list). Also of great importance in the finale is the revelation that the Soviets, thanks to the cunning genius of the Chief Designer, made it to Venus after all. Valya (Adam Nagaitis) decides to sacrifice himself and complete the Chief Designer’s mission to ensure Sasha and Lakshmi can make it back to Earth.
Clutching a picture of his wife, Tanya (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), Valya relishes his success and accepts his fate as the pressure of the planet’s surface flattens his ship in an instant –– a visual the creators are fully aware will likely evoke the computer generated images that came out after the Titan submersible disaster in 2023.
Below, Nedivi and Wolpert share why revealing such blindspots as the Venus mission and everything that happened in response to it are what got them excited about making the “For All Mankind” spinoff series — and why a guaranteed trip to the Gulag for half a dozen characters isn’t necessarily the end of their story.
This finale ends with what will probably be the closest this show ever gets to rom-com territory with this beautiful and thrilling scene with Sasha and Anatasia. Why did you decide to go all in on this grand romantic gesture in a very unromantic world?
Matt Wolpert: For us, their arc, both as individuals and as a couple, is one of the things we’re most proud of in this season, because these are two people who are, in their own ways, very closed off to the world and not willing to be vulnerable in front of anyone. And yet, when they have their night together and they wake up in the morning, you see them being totally vulnerable and, with no dialogue, you get they’re connected. There’s something there that is more than just one night. The fact that the forces of the world pull them apart and they struggle against that just felt very Russian to us. In that Russian literature kind of way, like “Anna Karenina,” and “War and Peace,” and all these Tolstoy books about two star-crossed lovers who the world is conspiring to keep apart, but they’re not willing to let that happen, and sometimes it costs them everything.
One of the things we latched onto in the writers’ room that felt like it captured the show perfectly was this idea that, in “For All Mankind,” the danger ends when you land the ship. But that was the middle of this finale for “Star City,” because now you’re a cosmonaut being chased by your own government, which is trying to kill you because the mission must remain a secret.
Ben Nedivi: If there’s something that connects the stories of this season, it’s that idea of overcoming fascism, overcoming the pressures put upon humans, and how the very act of being human is wanting to run across a field, or run up a mountain, or fall in love. There’s no way anyone can stop you from doing that as hard as they try, and I think that’s how we had always seen the story of many of our characters, but especially Sasha and Anastasia at the end. This reckless act that has little chance of success is so beautiful because it’s about sacrifice, it’s about more than just yourself. You’re not questioning why he’s not crossing the border, or why she landed her ship to save him because it’s about love. That’s the defiance.
Courtesy of Apple TV
Should we expect nothing less than the Gulag for these two moving forward?
Wolpert: The first half of eight episodes is really about people rebelling against the state, and then the second half is kind of the state swatting them all down in different ways. That doesn’t mean it’s the end of the story. There’s the Soviet tradition of putting somebody in the Gulag in case you need their help so you can pull them out, versus just killing them. So for Sasha and Anatasia, it is not necessarily an ending being arrested in that way. It’s really a question of what awaits each of them.
On the flip side of that struggle is surveillance agent Irina (Agnes O’Casey), who only further succumbs to the pull of the KGB and Colonel Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin). Her involvement in getting Sergei (Josef Davies) to spill the secrets of the Venera mission by making him think they were killing the Chief Designer was diabolical. Yet Irina is, arguably, the lead of this series. How do you approach a character that is so easy to hate being at the center of your ensemble?
Nedivi: I don’t necessarily hate her, but I think I also understand in that moment why some people will. It’s very easy in this system to judge people by their actions, but it’s not like she had much choice. We know where Irina is going and the woman she becomes when we meet her in “For All Mankind,” but I think this whole season we wanted the audience to wonder how this girl who’s just starting out, who has a daughter, who wants to protect people gets there. She doesn’t shoot the cosmonaut in Episode 1, but by the end of the season, you see the turn start to happen, and it doesn’t come out of nowhere.
Wolpert: From the beginning of the series, the tension with her character has been between her humanity and her ambition. There’s something about her that keeps her here and keeps her trying to impress Colonel Raskova. I mean, she throws scalding hot water on a guy’s face in the second episode, so she has a certain comfort with violence when it suits her. The key thing for us was that it’s really a story of a human being in this system slowly starting to lose their humanity, and how that can kill the human spirit on a certain level. It’s sad to see, but also very real.
Courtesy of Apple TV
How should we read the final scene where Irina is watching her daughter play piano? She looks a little dead behind the eyes now.
Nedivi: We purposely write these moments for different interpretations, and we don’t tell you what we want it to be. But what I will say is that the song her daughter is playing clearly speaks to something deep in Irina, and what has been lost. By now, a little bit of her outer skin has been hardened by the experiences of the season. She has had to toughen up to survive.
One person that didn’t survive was poor Valya. He became the first (and, so far in the “For All Mankind” universe, only) human to land on Venus. This is something the Americans in “For All Mankind” know nothing about. Is filling in those blindspots what guided you while making “Star City,” and could we see more?
Wolpert: The Soviet program was so secretive, and there are myriad events that would never have been known to the American program. That alone, that someone got to Venus in the early 1970s and nobody knew about it, is just such a juicy thing that we had to do it. Also, Valya is a man who has really been yanked around by competing systems the whole time we’ve known him. So the second he says, ‘I’m going to complete the mission,’ he’s in control of his own destiny for the first time. I actually find Valya’s ending to be incredibly touching and inspirational because he ended it the way he wanted to. He accomplished something amazing. He was the first human being to be on the surface of Venus, and he was able to share it with his wife, or at least a picture of her, and say goodbye. It’s beautifully tragic, but I think if you told Valya that was how he was going to go, he’d probably say that sounds great.
Nedivi: But it also shows that, yes, they had to hide their failures, but the true tragedy was that they had to hide their successes too. They landed a man on Venus, and they can never talk about it because of what it would reveal about that man, what he did as a spy and it would show the weakness of the state. On that level, it really conveys the true tragedy of that system, how broken it was. You’re more afraid than you are hopeful, and I think that’s kind of exemplified in that ending.
Courtesy of Apple TV
Finally, perhaps the most affirming and touching scene of the season, was Sergei being hauled into the back of the KGB van believing he had given up the Venera mission and the Chief Designer had been beaten to death. But then he sees his mentor in perfect health, imprisoned with him. Cruel deception aside, these two men really solidify why relationships are the only refuge in a system that won’t offer you any safety.
Wolpert: I love that scene so much. Josef is amazing in that scene. It’s his best work in this season, I think. But the thing I really love about it is that in the wake of this completely awful moment, the Chief Designer still has this hope that they did something nobody can ever take away from them. That’s the mission of our show, which is that the power of the human spirit under these insanely oppressive conditions can survive. There’s nothing more oppressive than this: you’ve just been forced to betray your compatriots, and yet you still find hope and a little beautiful glimpse of light in the back of that dark truck shipping you off to the Gulag.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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