‘Star City’ Season 1 Episode 8 Review: A Soviet Space Opera Sticks Its Landing Where It Matters Most
‘Star City’ closes out its first season on Apple TV with an episode called “The Wolves,” and by the time the credits roll, the show has answered nearly every question it spent eight hours building. The series has always lived in the shadow of ‘For All Mankind’, reimagining the Soviet side of an alternate space race under Chief Designer Sergei Korolev, played by Rhys Ifans. Coming into the finale, three cosmonauts, Valya, Sasha, and Lakshmi, were presumed dead after a catastrophic fire aboard the Venera spacecraft, and their unexpected survival sets the entire hour into motion.
What struck me watching “The Wolves” is how little interest the finale has in spectacle for its own sake. The mission that should be a triumph instead becomes a logistical nightmare, since the very fire that should have killed the crew has knocked their trajectory off course and put them on a collision path with the sun. The solution the show lands on forces an impossible choice among the three survivors, and I appreciated that the episode never pretends this is a clean or heroic decision.
This is where ‘Star City’ proves it understands its own identity. The season could have leaned into the triumphant, moon landing energy of its parent series, but instead it keeps circling back to the human cost buried underneath Cold War ambition. Ifans has been quietly excellent all year as a man forced to choose between scientific legacy and political survival, and the finale finally lets those two pressures collide directly. There is a stillness to his performance here that feels earned rather than showy.
Anna Maxwell Martin continues to be the show’s secret weapon as Lyudmilla, the KGB figure whose menace never tips into cartoonish villainy. She remains just ambiguous enough that I still could not tell you, even now, whether she believes in the system she enforces or simply fears what happens if she stops. That refusal to simplify her is one of the season’s smartest choices, and it pays off in a finale where her decisions ripple through nearly every other storyline.
The Anastasia and Sasha thread gives the episode its emotional backbone, and it works because the show has spent all season earning it rather than manufacturing it in the final stretch. Alice Englert’s arc as a woman who has become a symbol rather than a person finally gets room to breathe, and the choice she makes near the end lands with real weight rather than melodrama. Even Valya’s fate, which could have felt like a cheap sacrifice, instead plays as oddly peaceful, a man choosing to die on his own terms rather than back in a Soviet prison cell.
If the episode stumbles anywhere, it is in how much plot it still has to juggle in a single hour. A subplot involving Tanya’s escape to Paris and a mysterious woman trailing her feels more like season two setup than a satisfying capper to season one, and a couple of the political maneuvering scenes move faster than the emotional material really wants them to. It is a minor complaint against a show that has otherwise been remarkably disciplined about pacing.
Visually, the finale might be the strongest hour of the entire season, contrasting the cold optimism of Soviet engineering with the suffocating paranoia of the state watching over it. That tension between ambition and control has been the show’s defining idea since episode one, and “The Wolves” finally lets it boil all the way over without losing the show’s grounded, spy thriller instincts.
What did you think of the episode?
By the time Valya smiles out at the surface of Venus, alone and dying, I found myself genuinely moved by a season that started as a clever spinoff premise and turned into something with real emotional stakes of its own. ‘Star City’ earns its ending, flaws and all, and leaves just enough unresolved to make a second season feel necessary rather than obligatory. I am landing on a score of 9 out of 10 for this finale, a near perfect close to one of the best new sci-fi dramas of the year.
Did “The Wolves” stick the landing for you, or did the finale leave you wanting more from Star City’s first season? Share your verdict in the comments.
