Apple’s For All Mankind spinoff Star City lands as a Soviet-side retelling of the space race, with Rhys Ifans leading a drama that begins in 1969 and pushes the alternate history into the 1970s. The series opens with a cosmonaut becoming the first man to walk on the moon, then cuts to the human cost behind the triumph: his wife is dragged from bed by the KGB in the dead of night to watch the landing.
That opening is the hook for viewers searching for Appletv’s next big franchise play. Star City is set up as a companion to For All Mankind, but it shifts the viewpoint away from the American astronauts at the center of the parent series and onto the cosmonauts, scientists and intelligence officials trying to carry the Soviet program forward after the U.S. lost the space race. In that sense, it is less a replay of familiar beats than a new angle on the same alternate timeline.
Ifans plays the Soviet program’s as-yet-unnamed Chief Designer, the figure around whom the machine turns. In the opening story, he is handed a special commendation only for the medal to be returned immediately to the government, a move meant to protect him from American interests. The detail tells you almost everything about the world Star City is building: prestige is public, but power is guarded, brittle and watched.
The series is also notable because five of its eight hours were sent to critics, enough for an early read on what Apple has on its hands. That early verdict is that the show works in two directions at once. It can stand beside For All Mankind as a companion piece, but it also holds up on its own as a tense, Soviet-era story rather than a simple extension of the original premise.
That is where Star City finds its sharper edge. It may live in the same alt-history universe as For All Mankind, but the tone is different enough to matter. Instead of the hopeful sweep that often comes with sci-fi built around progress and exploration, this one plays more like a paranoid Cold War thriller, with scientists and intelligence officials moving through a system where advancement, loyalty and suspicion are all entangled.
Apple has not yet answered every question the setup raises, including how far this secretive Soviet program can go and what its chief designer will become once the story moves beyond the opening moon landing. For now, Star City looks designed to do something the franchise has not done before: tell the same world’s history from the other side and let the fear drive the story as much as the stars.
