When Apple TV launched in 2019, it arrived with a slew of original content. Among them is the Emmy-winning drama series The Morning Show, which is set to return for a fifth season in the not-too-distant future. Apple TV also rolled out the science fiction series See, the period comedy Dickinson, and even the animated adventure Snoopy in Space. The series that has become a foundational piece for the streamer, though, was For All Mankind, the alternate-history sci-fi show that has given us a peek at a totally different world where the space race became the single most important element of the past seventy years.
This week saw the conclusion of the fifth season of For All Mankind, with plans for a sixth and final batch of episodes already confirmed, but it’s not even the biggest thing to happen to the franchise. In conjunction with the Season 5 finale of For All Mankind, Apple TV has also rolled out the first two episodes of the spinoff series for the show, Star City. Set against the backdrop of the Cold War at its very coldest, the new series shows the perspective of the Russian space program during the same time period that For All Mankind started in. As one might expect, though, the series may be all new faces than what fans know from For All Mankind, but a lot of the characters will be very, very familiar. Spoilers for the first two episodes of Star City follow.
One of the absolute coldest characters in all of For All Mankind is Irina Morozova, the terrifying former KGB handler and director of Roscosmos, played by Svetlana Efremova in Seasons 4 and 5 of For All Mankind. With Star City, however, actress Agnes O’Casey steps into the role, taking on Irinia not only as a young woman but long before she had reached the heights of being a deceptive and calculating schemer. The first episode of Star City reveals just how far Irina has to go, with O’Casey’s version of the character clearly far away from the amoral and hard-nosed version seen in For All Mankind‘s later seasons. The series also has a surprise, revealing that Irina has a daughter, but what happens to her or even the child’s father in this universe remains to be seen, though.
One of the biggest thumbs in the eye of America in For All Mankind isn’t just that the Russians beat the Americans to the moon, but that they took it a step further and sent a woman to the moon as well. In For All Mankind, the young Russian cosmonaut who lands on the moon is Anastasia Belikova, played by Rita Khrabrovitsky in the original series and now played by Alice Englert in Star City.
As expected, Star City goes deep not only into the circumstances of what led to Anastasia becoming the first woman to step on the moon, but also into what happened to her in the aftermath. In For All Mankind, she’s something of an afterthought, fuel simply for the American side of the story. Star City, however, reveals that not only was she not the first choice to go on the mission, but that the Soviets were willing to replace her with a double after she attempted to deliver her own message to the world from the lunar surface. Anastasia’s depth as a character is clearly one of Star City‘s unique narratives to explore, and Alice Englert is already doing great work with this woman now thrust into the public eye.
For All Mankind fans fell in love with Sergei Nikulov ever since he debuted in Season 2, with actor Piotr Adamczyk embodying his kind disposition, clear aptitude for science, and soft-spoken affection for Margo Madison. Star City, however, rolls back the clock more than a decade from the first version of the character we met in the 1980s, to the one in the late 1960s played by new actor Josef Davies. As we might have expected, Sergei is but a young engineer working in the Soviet Space Program, but two things become clear about him even at this stage in his life: he still has a major passion for science and space travel, and he still loves music (even if the artist is forbidden by the state).
Josef Davies’s version of Sergei is one that has not yet achieved a major status within the Soviet Space Program, but it’s clear that he’s smart and has already earned the attention of the Chief Designer.
The man who started it all, naturally, returns in Star City. In a fitting bout of poetry, the opening scene of Star City is the clear inverse of the same one from For All Mankind, showing the perspective of the Soviet space program and other Russians as they react to astronaut Alexei Leonov successfully becoming the first person to land on the moon. In For All Mankind, an uncredited actor plays Alexei Leonov for his brief appearance, but Star City actually gives credit to its actor, with Sam Wilkinson playing the character in the opening scene. It remains to be seen if Wilkinson will return as Alexei Leonov, or if the character, like Anastasia Belikova, is considered too important to the Soviet state to risk his life.
A key piece of the Soviet space program and one of the main characters in Star City…doesn’t even have a name. Rhys Ifans takes on the role of the Chief Designer in the series, leading everyone at Star City and with grand ambitions for how the Soviets can reach every corner of the solar system. Star City makes a point to denote that the Soviets believe it’s best that no one ever know the Chief Designer’s name, so across the first two episodes, he’s referred to by nothing else but his title.
That said, there has been major speculation from fans that Ifans’ character is real-life Soviet figurehead Sergei Korolev, who was referred to as the Chief Designer in his life as a means of protection amid the Cold War. In our real-world history, Sergei Korolev died in 1966, three years before the 1969 setting of Star City, reportedly from complications with surgery. A key piece of For All Mankind‘s lore is that in this universe, Korolev didn’t die at that point in time, making it one of the key reasons that the Soviets managed to beat America to the moon.
In truth, it seems very likely that Ifans IS playing Korolev since he’s already been shown to have mysterious illnesses and doctors waiting on him, but this also brings us to the long-winded notation that this is yet another recasting for the franchise. Korolev only appears in two episodes of For All Mankind, where he is played by Endre Hules.
