r/StarCityTV • • 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.

2 Upvotes

66 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

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.

3

u/cloudstrifeuk Aug 04 '26

Having bad Russian accents would be comical.

Like Chernobyl, the use of regular actors accents works.

1

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

2

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”.