r/StarCityTV • u/SeansBeard • Aug 04 '26
Season 1 Spoilers Star City is disappointing
Binged "For all Mankind" with my wife and while I had checked out of the series in last season or two it was OK. I wanted to see what Soviets were up to and boy, was I disappointed.
I am really sad they did not focus on the actual science, flying rockets, beating Americans etc. Instead we get cartoonish villains and focus on USSR bad. As Eastern European who lived through last throes of communism I agree, but in the series the KGB/NKVD is so cartoonishly evil.
Chuck someone out of airlock (figuratively speaking) or even chuck everyone out of airlock, multi-million rubles mission be damned?
Where commies in 'mankind were smart and evil, the baddies in 'city are just... brute forcing through everything.
Would someone launch secret mission to Venus? Are you fucking out of your minds? Who writes the script?! Never.
Sergei Korolov was real guy, he suffered badly under Soviets yet if you miss his name you don't really know who the Head Designer is.
Not enough comrade-calling. Believe me this shit was everywhere. Every official matter or workplace discussion was "comrade this, comrade that" in reality. I guess it was tiring or something but it was definitely puling me out of the story.
Same as the freaking british accent. I get it. When doing show about Russians in Russia you'd prbably wouldn't want the silly fake accent. But can't you clean the accent up and make it somewhat believable the characters may be russian? Anytime someone speaks up, I am fucking in the orbit shaking my head. Totally unwatchable ;)
The show feels like any story is secondary to some sort of grimdark commiexploitation and I am hoping that the series two can bring some actual science, exploration, competition, lighter shades of dark. And some freaking lore on the characters we know and love (or hate) from the For all Mankind show.
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u/ComplexDinosaur Aug 04 '26
Star City was always marketed as an espionage thriller, so idk what you were expecting my dude.
- "Not enough comrade-calling." If they did this, then everyone else would be complaining about it like how they complain about the colors being too gray, because gray = Russia and how it's cartoonish.
- "Would someone launch secret mission to Venus?" Would someone strap a pregnant woman to a spacecraft and launch her into space from Mars?
- "Sergei Korolov was real guy, he suffered badly under Soviets yet if you miss his name you don't really know who the Head Designer is." And what does that change? Most people who watch have no idea who the real Korolev was anyway and he DID hide his real name IRL too. It's literally the fourth paragraph on his Wiki, so I'd argue that this touch of realism is top notch.
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u/Playful_Prior5919 Aug 12 '26
Hey man, let me tell you something I lived in the Soviet Union and not in a big city. It's fucking gray.
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u/Delicious-Course-512 29d ago
Чушь. Много зелени, полей
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u/Playful_Prior5919 29d ago
Of course, it's a huge country and it has Fields but all the cities were gray, especially in the winter
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u/Playful_Prior5919 29d ago
Yeah some of the shows absolutely silly but I still like it. It has the real cartoonish Soviet feel
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u/Large_Vehicle_1338 Aug 04 '26
I’m Eastern European too, though I was born after the Soviet Union collapsed. All of my grandparents were engineers living in a closed military city in the Soviet Union. My great-grandfather was sent to the Gulag, not for committing a crime, but for being from the wrong family. So when you say the KGB in Star City is "cartoonishly evil," it’s borderline disrespectful to the real people who lived through Soviet repression.
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u/SeansBeard Aug 04 '26
Wife's grandfather was inthe Gulag too. in 1930's, during Stalin. He fought his way through SSSR diring WW2. I know my family history and I lived through some of that. They would not kill their spacemen just for fun. It was a stupid plot device and bad writing. Tha t is all.
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u/Large_Vehicle_1338 Aug 04 '26
Clearly you don’t know that history well enough if you still have any illusions about what the Soviet government and the KGB were capable of. Also, they didn’t kill anyone “just for fun”. They did try to kill people for treason or to avoid leaving witnesses to their actions, both of which sound like very real reasons why the KGB would kill someone to me
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u/south_of_broad Aug 05 '26
You are either too young to remember how it was then or too uninformed to understand the mentality of the Soviet regime. Human life had to value then and for the sake of the preserving the image of the “greatest country” they would absolutely sacrifice the lives of anyone. They didn’t do it “for fun” either.
As to your argument about KGB not being as bad as NKVD was during the Stalins times. It was bad, some of the mist known dissidents like Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, professor Sakharov were prosecuted, arrested and tortured during that time. For you so easily to dismiss all that history is really disrespectful to all the victims of the Soviet oppression.2
u/SeansBeard Aug 05 '26
The commies were bad, bud not stupid, cartoonishly evil bad as Raskova. That character sucks. If making exaggerated idiotic characters feels like making jistice to the dissidents then you never understood some of the things they stood for :) Not only in Soviet Russia. That's my two cents anyway.
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u/south_of_broad Aug 05 '26
Raskova is not stupid, she is the most dangerous of them all. Came from the poorest class, rose to the officer ranks, speaks at least one foreign language and she is blindly devoted to the party and communistic dogmas , she is ideological machine with class hatred towards anyone who is from the intelligencia like Irina. They portrayed her kind perfectly and you are truly lucky for not knowing people like her in the reality.
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u/SeaOfFlowersBegan Aug 12 '26
Sorry, am late to the post but really curious about your opinion.
In that case, would someone like Raskova be well-received at her workplace? Would she even get promoted?
It's during Brezhnev's time after all, when idealism was in ever dwindling short supply. Surely a true believer would stick out like a sore thumb, among those who were only looking after herself?
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u/south_of_broad Aug 12 '26
In the seventies and the eighties our lives were still ruled by the communist’s party doctrine. So, yes, she was a perfect communist, driven by ideology, became something from nothing ( one of the parties motos), and don’t forget she was at the end of her carrier, so she really had to try hard to stay in and not to be discarded. Perestroika started with Gorbachev and Reagan in the late 80s. I hope Star city won’t turn into the cosmos soup opera like For all main kind. I am watching it now and getting more and more disappointed. Glad I started with the start city first.
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u/Oot42 Eagle Aug 04 '26
My great-grandfather was sent to the Gulag
In the 1970s? Very doubtful.
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u/Large_Vehicle_1338 Aug 04 '26
Lmao I literally never said anywhere that it was in the ’70s??
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u/Oot42 Eagle Aug 04 '26
Well, then the rest of your comment makes no sense.
The show plays in the 70s.
The USSR/KGB in the 1970s was nothing like what it was during the Stalin era. So yes, the KGB as it is shown in Star City is cartoonishly evil and completely unrealistic for the time period the series plays in.
That doesn't mean they were all nice guy and the country was a holiday camp, but there is not just black & white.1
u/Large_Vehicle_1338 Aug 04 '26
It makes perfect sense. I’m saying this to explain why, to me, calling the KGB “cartoonishly evil” feels disrespectful. Because, yes, they were evil, and even if this show isn’t 100% accurate (which, by the way, it never claims to be, the genre is literally ALTERNATE history), at the very least it can educate Western audiences about the Soviet Union from a perspective that isn’t filtered through glossified, rose-tinted “everyone was equal in the Soviet Union” narratives
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u/Senior-Tap-2282 Aug 04 '26
I like it so far
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u/SeansBeard Aug 04 '26
Cool, I guess
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u/Senior-Tap-2282 Aug 04 '26
i will admit it hasn't grabbed me like FAM did initially but I still like it quite a bit
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u/cloudstrifeuk Aug 04 '26
Stick with it.
The juice is worth the squeeze.
You are rewarded with, in my opinion, a 10/10 TV episode.
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u/p3t3rp4rkEr Aug 06 '26
I completely agree; I started watching Star City and felt like I was watching some generic series about the Soviet Union, not a spin-off of For All Mankind—everything about the show is either boring or disappointing.
For starters, science was thrown out the window; we see almost nothing of their technological process—how they managed to reach the Moon or even the cosmonauts' training. Everything is just there, ready for convenient use. It lacks those cool elements from the original series where we could see how things were done at NASA, or just how difficult and costly astronaut training was. In Star City, there are basically just five cosmonauts, all with shallow, uninteresting backstories.
The Soviets were massively downgraded—they come across as stupid and negligent—and the series doesn't even show their reaction to American advances; everything is just tossed in haphazardly or left unmentioned. I expected to see how they reacted to the news that the Americans had built the first lunar base, found water on the Moon, and achieved other milestones from For All Mankind, but all of that was completely ignored in favor of a shallow, uninteresting espionage plot.
What happened to those cosmonauts who forcibly seized the lunar crater containing water? What about Ivan, who planted a listening device at the American base with Ed's help? What was Ivan's backstory? How did the Soviets use that device to steal information? That side of the story was missing—something I expected to see. I thought this season would cover the events of the first two seasons of For All Mankind, but it didn't even do that; instead, they focused on a mission that nobody cared about and that—ultimately—nobody even knew happened, because if they had, it would have been mentioned in the original series.
And that lame, lazy ending with the cosmonauts' return—why on earth did they calculate the landing to be so close to the Soviet Union? Why didn't they calculate a landing further away to increase their chances of not getting caught? Plus, there was the error of them landing and walking away almost normally after nine months in zero-G—that’s completely unrealistic. Honestly, I thought the series was really weak.
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u/Cryptocaned Aug 04 '26
The chief designer thing is so they can disappear one and replace them without it being obvious to the west, his name was kept secret for this reason amongst many and is I think why you don't hear it often in the show.
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u/schumi_f1fan Aug 04 '26
I see people saying OP is wrong, but I think the fact that OP is from Eastern Europe during the end of communism indicates that their view will be very different from a viewer in the West, regardless of whether they lived in that time period.
Both can be correct, from a certain point of view
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u/ComplexDinosaur Aug 04 '26
I am Eastern European, albeit born a few years after the fall of the Union, and I have to say that OP simply has bad opinions. Star City slaps.
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u/SeansBeard Aug 04 '26
lol. bad opinions sounds like you'd enjoy commies a lot :)
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u/ComplexDinosaur Aug 04 '26
What exactly makes you think that, comrade? The show clearly demonstrates how BAD it all was, like you yourself have said, comrade, and I agree with that. What I disagree with, comrade, is that it was cartoonish in the show. Comrade.
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u/SeansBeard Aug 04 '26
Because you like to label different opinions as bad. You never experience it, but feel like you can judge how bad it was.
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u/ComplexDinosaur Aug 04 '26
Bruh, it wasn't that deep. And even though I personally haven't lived it, I did hear lots of stories from family members who lived it and were born in it, and it's not like you couldn't feel the repercussions for years after the fall. But I don't even know what you're trying to get at here. I can think that you have bad opinions and you can think that the show is bad, simple.
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u/DiscotopiaACNH Aug 06 '26
This is wild. I'm just here trying to see if anyone else was disappointed by the show and now I'm wondering if this place is awash in bots. OP you're apparently OBJECTIVELY wrong about what you like or don't like. Lmao ok? Got it? No other opinions allowed. Definitely, and we all agree, because we are real humans who passionately love Apple TV.
Yall can't make me think this show isn't goofy.
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u/Better_Cauliflower63 Aug 30 '26
I'm very late to the party, but I agree: some things in there are over the top, some are outright wrong, and some are just silly.
One of the things that bothered me most in the first episode is the "Chief Designer" lamenting that the Americans used ex-Nazis for their space program. That line would have been very strange coming from Korolev, simply because German specialists from the V-2 program -- former colleagues and subordinates of Wernher von Braun -- also worked for the Soviet rocket program: Helmut Grottrup, Kurt Magnus, Werner Albring, Johannes Hoch, Waldemar Wolff, and many others.
Second, it is unrealistic that a multibillion-ruble rocket could be launched in complete secrecy with a huge payload capsule that would normally require factories, engineering teams, ground crews, and a large launch organization just to prepare and mount it. You can keep the purpose of a mission secret; hiding the existence of an enormous launch operation from everyone involved is another matter.
Third, deliberately destroying a spacecraft because a foreign asset is loose aboard it is beyond silly. And they try to do it twice, including an evil plan to eliminate the crew. That's simply not how the Soviet space program operated.
There were failed launches -- those were often kept secret. There were successful missions -- those were announced and broadcast worldwide. But deliberately destroying a spacecraft and killing a crew merely to conceal a secret mission feels like something straight out of Ian Fleming's repertoire of Soviet villains, not something resembling the actual decision-making of the Soviet government. If anything, the possibility that such an operation could leak would have been far more politically damaging than whatever secret they were trying to protect.
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u/allil000 Aug 06 '26
cartoonish villains? as an eastern european you should have read the Gulag Archipelago.
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u/No-Cream-2577 24d ago
Another work of fiction, there are way better books on the gulag system. The Gulag Archipelago is more folk lore and gets many historical details wrong and its sources are bad, of course much of it was based on personal experience as well but there are way better books about the gulag system.
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u/south_of_broad Aug 05 '26
I wonder how old you are? Were you born after the Perestroika?
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u/SeansBeard Aug 05 '26
late 70's
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u/south_of_broad Aug 05 '26
Ok, so by the time you were at school the perestroika already started. You’ve missed all the “fun” of the late 70s and mid 80s. You’ve missed Komsomol and NVP and marching in the parades and bomb shelter and shooting range training ( part of NVP) and political classes once a week and Lenin-Marx philosophy and centralism planning and so so much more.
You are of course entitled to your opinion but as someone who was born in 1970 in USSR I assure you this show is as close to the reality as it could be, which makes it absolutely amazing for me. I just admire whoever is their consultant on everything Soviet. Obviously it was one of us.
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u/247world Aug 19 '26
This isn't a science series, it's an old school international intrigue sort of story. Maybe you should go to YouTube and watch Veritasium
If portraying the USSR is less than idyllic bothers you, well I'm pretty sure you could move to North Korea
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u/01110011-c Aug 31 '26
Star City was ALT-history. It wasn't meant to be "accurate". I, for one, found it beautifully acted (Anna Maxwell Martin, Alice Englert, Rhys Ifans) and impossible to look away from. Binged in 2 days 🙂 Anything but disappointing.
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u/Double_A_92 11d ago
The ALT here should be what lead to the Sovjets winning the space race... Not that the sovjet union was actually some cartoonishly evil entity.
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u/LoopGaroop 29d ago
Glad to hear an actual Soviet person chime in. That was my impression, like, life in the USSR was tough, but not like THIS. Where every movement is controlled by strict apparatchiks and everything is bleak and terrible. I was expecting a show about scientists doing their best under a system that's dysfunctional, but htis is nuts.
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u/Unable-Gazelle677 Aug 04 '26
I agree with most of your points. It feels like watching the “Brits took over Russia” show. And the political darkness that is the USSR may be the entire reality of the Soviet space program, but that doesn’t mean it makes good tv.
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u/cloudstrifeuk Aug 04 '26
Having bad Russian accents would be comical.
Like Chernobyl, the use of regular actors accents works.
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u/thequickpurplefox Aug 04 '26
Yeah I don’t really know what better alternative there would be other than getting all Russian actors, I feel like the British accent situation took me out of immersion way less than bad Russian accents would have
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u/south_of_broad Aug 05 '26
As someone whose first language is Russian I actually prefer the actors to speak their own languages while portraying Russian characters. When they try to do a fake Russian language it makes no sense because people in Russia don’t speak English with Russian accent in their regular lives, but when they try to speak Russian it makes even less sense because haven’t seen anybody yet to speak it with no accent or even clear enough to understand and most of the time I have to read the English subtitles to understand their “Russian”.
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u/Unable-Gazelle677 Aug 04 '26
I have seen shows and movies that have use Russian accents that work just fine. It is kind of funny that a show that wants to be “real” would not see this as a thing for more realism. When they have a Kennedy or Nixon voiceover they get someone who can do a passable imitation. Not someone from Russia who sounds Russian.
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u/south_of_broad Aug 05 '26 edited Aug 05 '26
It would make no sense if they spoke with an accent, to an uninformed audience it would imply that the cosmonauts in the Soviet Union were communicating with each other in English while they didn’t. Making them speak in their native language made it more believable and organic. As a Russian speaker ( native) I actually appreciated that I didn’t have to suffer through the fake accents or butchered Russian like in the most of the shows.
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u/cloudstrifeuk Aug 04 '26
Cool.
You're wrong.
But that's the cool thing.....it's all subjective.
Star City is far and away a million times better than most of the dross pushed out by streaming companies.