Star City's Season 1 Finale Twist Gives For All Mankind A Run For Its Money

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for the Season 1 finale of "Star City," "The Wolves."

Just when we thought the stakes couldn't possibly get any higher in "Star City," the Cold War thriller set concurrently with the first season of "For All Mankind," the Apple TV show went and dropped one hell of a bombshell on us. The Season 1 finale, titled "The Wolves," picks up where last week's action left off and confirms the biggest twist of the series thus far: The Venus mission carrying the trio of Sasha Polivanov (Solly McLeod), Valya Mironov (Adam Nagaitis), and Lakshmi Chadha (Priya Kansara) remains intact. That's despite Star City's attempted sabotage once Valya's traitorous actions came to light and our previous assumptions that the entire Venera 7 spacecraft subsequently blew up in a fiery explosion. Instead, they are currently on their way back to Earth ... but, as we quickly learn in flashbacks, not everything went according to plan.

The 1970s-set storyline deals follows the now-retired Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans) and Sergei Nikulov (Josef Davies) as they frantically try to steer Venera 7 away from landing back home in Soviet-controlled territory. This would lead to the imprisonment and/or death of every cosmonaut on board, to spare Moscow the embarrassment of an unauthorized mission and the optics of a fugitive stowing away after being coerced into spying for the Americans. As it turns out, they need not have worried.

In the show's most ambitious flex yet, "Star City" stages a whopper of a space drama that results in Valya heroically sacrificing himself to get his crewmates home. If that sounds familiar, that's because "For All Mankind" just pulled off a similar trick in its Season 5 finale. Here, though, "Star City" resoundingly beats its parent series at its own game.

The student has officially become the master. Apple TV's "Star City" might not have the same buzz surrounding it as "For All Mankind" enjoys ahead of its sixth and final season, but fans of sci-fi and espionage thrillers know that the spin-off show from creators Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert, and Ronald D. Moore might have already upstaged the original — in more ways than one. The Cold War setting has already provided so much fuel to this storytelling engine, allowing us to explore origin stories for villains like Irina Morozova (Agnes O'Casey) while doubling down on a "Chernobyl"-like theme of how bureaucracy and politics can't help but impede scientific progress.

But nowhere does this paranoid atmosphere succeed more than in the cold reaches of space, as Verena 7 narrowly survives disaster and limps its way to Venus. With Valya's two comrades now fully aware of the scope of his treasonous activities, we're treated to a pressure-cooker plot where the fate of the spacecraft takes a backseat to the betrayal that Sasha feels towards his best bud. Things worsen once flashbacks reveal that Valya, who survived the fiery incident earlier, has done the calculations and figured out that their mission is now careening off course. Only a daring stunt involving the bathysphere probe they snuck on board will get them on track for a slingshot back to Earth ... but once someone gets in to pilot it, there's no getting back out.

Valya, of course, valiantly volunteers and saves the lives of his two friends. As his doomed landing on Venus intercuts with Sasha and Lakshmi's landing on Earth weeks later, "Star City" does the impossible: It improves on anything "For All Mankind" has done before.

Is it truly a hot take to claim that "Star City" does it better? If you remember, "For All Mankind" dedicates much of its fifth season to the question of whether life truly exists outside of Earth. When Kelly (Cynthy Wu) fixates on this existential concern and advocates for her position on the Titan mission, it seems clear that yet another member of the Baldwin family is about to change the course of history again. But a mishap on the surface in the finale results in only so much oxygen to go around, meaning only two of the three crewmembers will be able to get back home. Kelly volunteers to stay behind (and, in the process, another villain is born), and her death is certainly a sentimental one as she wades into a pool and is greeted by evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Compare this relatively low-stakes death (of a character who had arguably outlived their usefulness in "For All Mankind" by then) with the chaotic and heartbreaking tragedy surrounding Valya's death, and the winner seems clear. This isn't meant to take anything away from "For All Mankind," a frequently entertaining (if occasionally melodramatic) exploration into a "what if?" hypothetical in which the Soviet Union had beaten the United States to the moon. "Star City" picks up on that thread and runs with it, to be sure, but there's no denying the power of leaning into the Cold War vibes and effortlessly combining a sci-fi series with a political thriller.

Both those aspects come into sharp relief with one lonely death on Venus, and the results speak for themselves. All eight episodes of "Star City" are now streaming on Apple TV.