‘Star City’ Finale Reveals Whether the Venera 7 Crew Made It Home Alive

Apple TV’s ‘Star City‘ closed out its first season with a finale that finally answered the question fans had been holding their breath over since the Venus mission seemingly ended in disaster. The fate of the ‘Venera’ spacecraft and its cosmonauts became the emotional backbone of the back half of the season, and the show did not waste the buildup.

For anyone following the alternate history space race drama, the payoff in the finale delivers exactly the kind of gut punch and relief combo that ‘Star City’ has built its identity around this season.

Did the Venera Crew Survive the Explosion

Episode 6, titled “Awl in a Sack,” left things about as bleak as possible. The episode ended with the finale not confirming whether Valya, Sasha, and Lakshmi survived the explosion, leaving the Venera crew’s fate unresolved. That cliffhanger followed a forced depressurization ordered from mission control, sparking a fire aboard the spacecraft.

It was a gut wrenching moment for viewers who had grown attached to the three cosmonauts, and the show leaned hard into the grief of the survivors on Earth rather than rushing to resolve the mystery. That patience paid off in the following episode.

Episode 7 revealed that the Venera astronauts were miraculously still alive and heading back toward Earth, with the reveal coming through a coded signal that Sergei recognized as using his own specific algorithm. The discovery proved that the spacecraft, believed destroyed, had actually survived the disaster all along.

Venera 7 Astronauts Fate in ‘Star City’

By the finale, the show filled in exactly how the crew pulled off their survival. Flashbacks revealed that the crew survived Lyudmilla’s depressurization of the vessel, since the lack of pressure actually extinguished the fire, saving everyone but leaving them adrift and off course.

That fix came with a steep cost though. The outgassing from the depressurization had shifted Venera’s trajectory so severely that the crew would miss Venus entirely, meaning they would eventually be pulled toward the sun if nothing changed.

Valya, previously revealed as an American asset within the show’s espionage plotline, is the one who comes up with the fix. He proposes manually operating the bathysphere to help course correct ‘Venera’ back onto its original trajectory, fully aware it amounts to a one way trip to Venus with no chance of return.

‘Star City’ Season 1 Ending Explained

The sacrifice works. Valya successfully corrects Venera’s trajectory, putting the ship back on track for Earth, and in his final moments on the surface of Venus, he smiles, having briefly experienced the joy of being the first man there before the bathysphere collapses under the planet’s extreme pressure.

That leaves Sasha and Lakshmi as the two returning home. Landing back in the Soviet Union was never an option though. The Chief Designer points out the obvious problem that the craft cannot land in Soviet territory since the crew would be immediately intercepted and killed as traitors, so the landing site gets changed from Kazakhstan to Finland instead.

That change sets up one of the finale’s more devastating emotional beats. The shift to a landing spot outside the Iron Curtain leads to a touching farewell between Anastasia and Sasha, since saving him this way also means the two of them will likely never be able to be together. On the ground, Lyudmilla scrambles to maintain control of the fallout, and the political consequences ripple through Star City’s chain of command as season one wraps.

What ‘Star City’s’ Creators Say About the Twist

The show’s writers confirmed the reveal was planned from the start rather than a last minute swerve. According to ‘Star City’ co-creators Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert, speaking to Collider, the season was always building toward the reveal that the Venera 7 crew survived their ordeal, with the exact mechanics of how they made it back to Earth unfolding gradually across the finale.

Wolpert also detailed the writers’ approach to structuring the reveal itself. He explained that the team wanted to first sell the drama of the mission being lost and the characters being gone, before circling back with the reveal that they had survived and completed the mission in some form, working backward from that emotional beat to figure out the science.

The result is a finale that critics have responded to warmly, praised for paying off its slow burn tension without undercutting the stakes of Valya’s sacrifice. With ‘Star City’ clearly setting up threads for a potential second season, from Lyudmilla’s power struggle with Petrovsky to the unresolved romance between Sasha and Anastasia, there’s plenty left to unpack.

Now that ‘Venera’ has finally made its way home, do you think Sasha and Lakshmi will ever get a real reckoning for what happened aboard that ship, or will the Soviet cover-up bury the truth for good?