Spoiler Alert: This post contains spoilers for the Star City season 1 finale, “The Wolves,” now streaming on Apple TV.
The Season 1 finale of Apple TV’s Star City once again gave viewers a romantic ending, with the Soviet Union making an unexpected breakthrough and the astronaut program actually reaching Venus and returning to Earth to do something completely unexpected.
First, let’s talk about romance. In the finale of the For All Mankind spinoff, Anastasia (Alice Englert) returns to space on a mission to launch an orbiting station and ponders whether to defy all orders to save her beloved Sasha (Solly McLeod), who flies to Earth with a murder order on her head. Although Anastasia and Sasha only shared one night of passion within the confines of an arranged marriage before they were sent into space on a secret mission to Venus, Anastasia and Sasha spent most of the season thinking about each other from afar. But when she is told by the Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans) that his mission was not lost as everyone believed, she knows he is in danger the moment he lands on Earth.
There she steals a transport ship, pinpoints his location with astonishing precision, and races with the KGB to find him and his fellow survivor Lakshmi (Priya Kansara) before crossing the border and seeking asylum in Finland. In a thrilling scene, only a field separates Sasha and Lakshmi from safety, but the KGB is in hot pursuit. Anatasia steals the truck, blocks their path, and commits herself to a dark future. All in the name of love. Seeing this, Sasha can no longer bear to be on the other side of the fence with his wife, so he lets Lakshmi cross the border and surrenders with a gentle smile.
Courtesy of Apple
It’s the kind of grand declaration of love that most romantic comedies, minus the gun-toting KGB, strive to recreate in their final moments. But co-creators Ben Nedivy and Matt Wolpert say the big gesture was inspired by something much closer to home.
“The fact that the forces of the world are pulling them apart and they’re struggling against that felt very Russian to us,” Wolpert told Variety. “In the way that Russian literature does things like Anna Karenina and War and Peace and Tolstoy’s books about two doomed lovers that the whole world conspires to separate. But they won’t let it happen, and sometimes it costs them everything.”
The question of how much that will cost looms over the series, which has yet to be renewed for a second season by Apple TV, despite getting some of the best reviews of the year (including a spot on Variety’s Best Shows of the Year list so far). Also of great importance in the finale is the revelation that, thanks to the cunning genius of the chief designer, the Soviet army ended up reaching Venus. Valya (Adam Nagaitis) decides to sacrifice himself to complete the Chief Designer’s mission in order to ensure Sasha and Lakshmi return to Earth.
Clutching a photo of his wife Tanya (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), Valya celebrates his success and accepts the fate of his ship being instantly flattened by the pressure of the planet’s surface – the creators are well aware that this visual is likely to evoke the computer-generated images that emerged after the Titan diving disaster in 2023.
Below, Nedivy and Wolpert discuss why revealing blind spots, such as the Venus mission and everything that happened in response, made them excited to create the For All Mankind spinoff series, and why the six characters’ guaranteed trip to the concentration camp isn’t necessarily the end of their story.
The finale ends with a beautiful and thrilling scene between Sasha and Anatasya, perhaps the closest this show has ever gotten to romantic comedy territory. Why did you decide to commit yourself to this grand romantic act in a world that is not very romantic?
Matt Wolpert: For us, their arc, both individually and as a couple, is one of the things we’re most proud of this season. This is because these two are very closed off to the world in their own ways and are unwilling to show their weaknesses in front of anyone. Yet, when you spend the night together and wake up in the morning, you find them completely vulnerable, and even without conversation, you know that they are connected. There’s more to it than just one night. The fact that the forces of the world are separating them and they are struggling against it felt very Russian to us. Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Tolstoy’s books about two doomed lovers that the world conspires to separate, are like Russian literature, but they won’t let it happen, and sometimes it ends up costing them everything.
One of the things that we felt in the writers’ room was perfect for this show was the idea that in For All Mankind, once you land the ship, the danger ends. But it was in the middle of the “Star City” finale. Because you are now an astronaut being chased by your own government who is trying to kill you because the mission has to be secret.
Courtesy of Apple
Ben Nedivy: If there’s one thing that connects the story of this season, it’s the idea of overcoming fascism and overcoming the pressures that are placed on humans, and the very act of being human is wanting to run through fields, run up mountains, fall in love. No matter how hard you try, no one can stop it. And I think we’ve always seen the story of a lot of our characters that way, especially Sasha and Anastasia at the end. This reckless act with little chance of success is so beautiful because it involves sacrifice and is about more than yourself. You don’t question why he doesn’t cross the border, why she lands a ship to save him, because it’s about love. That is rebellion.
Provided by Apple TV
Should we expect more from these two in concentration camps in the future?
Wolpert: The first half of the eight episodes are about people rebelling against the state, and the second half is about the state bashing people in different ways. That’s not the end of the story. The Soviet Union has a tradition of putting someone in a concentration camp and bringing them out, rather than just killing them, in case they need help. In other words, for Sasha and Anatasya, it doesn’t necessarily end up being arrested like that. The real question is what each is waiting for.
Behind the scenes is the warden Irina (Agnes O’Casey), who only succumbs to the temptations of the KGB and Colonel Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin). Her involvement in leaking the secrets of the Venera project to Sergei (Joseph Davis) and making him think he was killing the chief designer was nefarious. But perhaps Irina is the main character of this series. How do you approach characters who tend to dislike being at the center of an ensemble?
Nedivi: I don’t necessarily hate her, but I think in that moment I understood why some people do. In this system, it’s very easy to judge people by their actions, but she didn’t really have much of a choice. We know where Irina is going and what kind of woman she becomes when we meet her in For All Mankind, but I think throughout this season we wanted viewers to wonder how this girl who is just starting out in this life, has a daughter, and wants to protect people gets there. She doesn’t shoot the astronaut in episode 1, but by the end of the season the turn starts to happen, but it doesn’t happen all of a sudden.
Wolpert: From the beginning of the series, there was a tension in her character between humanity and ambition. There is something about her that keeps her here and keeps trying to impress Colonel Raskova. I mean, she has a certain level of comfort with violence when it suits her, as she pours boiling water on a man’s face in the second episode. What’s important to us is that this is actually a story of humans slowly starting to lose their humanity within this star system, and how that can kill the human spirit on some level. It’s sad to see, but it’s also very real.
Lucas Aruna
How should we read the final scene where Irina watches her daughter play the piano? She looks a little dead behind her eyes now.
Nedivi: We intentionally write these moments to be open to different interpretations, and we don’t tell them what we want them to be. But what I want to say is that the songs her daughter is performing clearly speak of something deep within Irina, and something that is lost. By now, her skin has hardened little by little from this season’s experiences. She had to become strong to survive.
Poor Varya did not survive. He became the first (and so far only in the “For All Mankind” universe) human to land on Venus. This is something the Americans in For All Mankind know nothing about. Was filling in those blind spots a guiding principle in making “Star City,” and can we see more of it?
Wolpert: The Soviet plan was very secret, and there are countless events in the American plan that were never known. We had to do it because just the fact that someone reached Venus in the early 1970s and no one knew about it is very fascinating. Also, Valya is a guy who has really been at the mercy of competing systems for the entire time we’ve known him. Therefore, the moment he says, “I am going to complete the task,” he is for the first time in control of his own destiny. In fact, I think the ending of Varia is incredibly touching and moving. He accomplished something amazing. He was the first human to reach the surface of Venus and was able to share a photo with his wife, or at least a photo of her, to say goodbye. It’s beautiful and tragic, but if you tell Varya that’s the way he’s going, he’ll probably say it’s great.
Nedivi: But it also shows that while they certainly had to hide their failures, the real tragedy was that they also had to hide their successes. They land a human on Venus, but they can never talk about it because what it reveals about the man, what he did as a spy, and it would show the weakness of the nation. On that level, it really conveys the true tragedy of that system, how broken it was. You have more fear than hope, and I think that’s symbolized by that ending.
Provided by Apple TV
Finally, perhaps the most positive and moving scene of the season was when Sergei abandons the Venera mission and is dragged into the back of a KGB van, believing the lead designer has been bludgeoned to death. But then he saw his leader perfectly healthy and imprisoned with him. Cruel deception aside, these two men truly convince us why relationships are the only refuge in a system that offers no security.
Wolpert: I love that scene. Joseph is amazing in that scene. I think this is his best work this season. But what I really love about this piece is that even after this absolutely awful moment, the chief designer still harbors hope that he accomplished something that no one can ever take away from him. That’s the mission of our show, that the power of the human spirit can survive even under these very oppressive conditions. There is nothing more oppressive than this. Even though you are forced to betray your people, you still find hope and see a glimmer of beautiful light in the back of the dark truck that transports you to the camp.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
