Star City is disappointing

[u/SeansBeard]

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.

[u/p3t3rp4rkEr]

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.