Apple TV’s alt-history series For All Mankind begins in 1969 with the Americans being beaten in the space race as the USSR put a man and then a woman on the Moon. Over the course of five seasons, series creators Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi have moved forward through the decades, imagining a world transformed by more ambitious and equitable space exploration.
Now they’re going back to the beginning of the rivalry with the prequel Star City, which got a big trailer ahead of its summer launch.
Set in Star City, the home of the Soviet space program that For All Mankind first visited in season 2, the spinoff fuses sci-fi drama and paranoid spy thriller. While the Soviets may have scored two big victories, they know their Cold War rivals will do anything to catch up.
The Americans have a mole within Star City who has given them the plans the Soviet Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans of House of the Dragon) created for a lunar base. Ifans’ character is only referred to as Chief Designer, but he is meant to be Sergei Korolev, the father of the Soviet space program. Korolev died in 1966, and Moore said extending his life is one of the key points of divergence in For All Mankind’s world.
The trailer shows the Chief Designer pushing back against Soviet bureaucrats who want him to accelerate his plans to maintain the Soviet Union’s competitive edge, even if it puts the cosmonauts at more risk. His chief foil is Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin), the head of KGB surveillance in Star City, who will do whatever is necessary to keep her country’s secrets. The dangerous space operations are complicated enough, but tensions are high as security is tightened and all the cosmonauts and engineers become suspects.
Star City arrives as For All Mankind prepares for a landing. Earlier this year, Apple renewed the alt-history space drama for a sixth and final season, which is expectd to arrive in 2027.
The first two episodes of Star City premiere on Apple TV on May 29, with new episodes releasing on Fridays through July 10.
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