Why You Should Watch One 2019 For All Mankind Episode, Right After The Latest Star City
Let's talk about world-altering meet-cutes.
Although Star City is very much its own show, with its own conflicts, aesthetics, and narrative drive, these episodes are running parallel to For All Mankind Season 1. And, it turns out, not all those parallels are just connected to the timeline. Some character arcs are echoed in the basic setup of Star City, including the notion that the loved ones and families of the astronauts, or cosmonauts, are an integral part of the unfolding story. And, with Star City Episode 4, the series is, purposefully or not, using a similar plot device that occurred in For All Mankind, Season 1, Episode 3, mirroring the events and character dynamics in both shows.
In Star City Episode 4, “Dark Forest,” the origin of Tanya (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) and Valya’s (Adam Nagaitis) couplehood is revealed in a flashback. And, suddenly, the parallels to Gordo (Michael Dorman) and Tracy (Sarah Jones) in For All Mankind are very, very strong.
Spoilers ahead.
The story of Valya and Tanya isn’t directly parallel to Gordo and Tracy, but the timing and similarities are striking.
Just like For All Mankind Season 1 Episode 3, Star City Episode 4 flashes back to an earlier moment in the 1960s, to tell the story of how Tanya and Valya first met. Although the series is currently taking place in 1970, “Dark Forest” begins in 1964, when Tayna and Valya first have a meet-cute at a party. And it’s here we learn that Valya has been under observation by a Western agent for quite some time. The genuine romance between Tanya and Valya unfolds throughout the flashback, which eventually results in Valya getting blackmailed by the agent because Tanya had previous ties to dissident anti-Soviet groups, or at least, hippie-ish groups that were deemed anti-Soviet enough to get a cosmonaut into trouble.
What Star City does with this flashback is give a ton of weight to the relationship between Valya and Tanya, while also helping to contextualize their current dysfunction. Again, this is shades of Tracy and Gordo, but from another perspective. In 1961, Tracy and Gordo had their meet-cute via flashback, when Tracy pretended not to know anything about flying, but was actually a very experienced pilot. Then, in 1970, after the USSR put Anastasia Belikova (now a major Star City character) on the Moon, NASA started recruiting women for the space program, which unfolds in the events of “Nixon’s Women,” the FaMk episode with Tracy and Gordo’s relationship origin.
Tracy's being brought into NASA creates a lot of tension in For All Mankind Season 1, and although Tanya isn’t becoming a cosmonaut or anything in Star City, she is, like Gordo, committing adultery and coming up with a double standard when she suspects that Valya is stepping out on her. (He’s not, he’s just getting hassled by spymakers who are blackmailing him!)
Adam Nagaitis as Valya in 'Star City.'
The point is, like For All Mankind, Star City has given one of its central couples an entirely new dimension, thanks to a well-placed flashback. This fact is made all the more interesting if you watch Star City Episodes 3 and 4 side-by-side with For All Mankind Season 1 Episodes 3 and 4. The impacts of what Anastasia did hugely changed the lives of Tracy and Gordo (and everyone else) in For All Mankind, but the details of how that happened, as revealed in Star City — including that Belikova was not the first choice for that mission — make the pivots in 1970 in FaMk all the more interesting.
Gordo and Tracy probably didn’t think they had all that much in common with their Soviet counterparts. But it turns out that across the globe, the lives of various future (fictional) space pioneers were inexorably linked.
