The Best Scenes In Apple Tv's Star City Have Nothing To Do With Space

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Warning: This article contains spoilers for "Star City" Season 1, Episode 3, "Bad Dancer."

Every new show has its turning point episode, and you usually know it when you see it. While the best television pilots tend to get all the credit for introducing viewers to a world and making a strong first impression, there comes a time when the writers have to kick things into a new gear and come out swinging with an episode that properly sets the tone for what's to come.

We may have just seen that with this week's installment of Apple TV's "Star City," titled "Bad Dancer." Picking up in 1970 after a minor time jump, Episode 3 continues to develop these characters as the space race heats up to a boiling point. Ostensibly, the bulk of the plot concerns Russia's next lunar landing in order to establish a base on the moon. Although this builds to a show-stopping crescendo where the mission goes haywire and Solly McLeod's cosmonaut Sasha Polivanov (who may or may not be related to a key "For All Mankind" character) is forced to abort the planned touchdown, the real highlight of the hour proves to be something very different ... and not involving space whatsoever.

In other words, this is when "Star City" firmly establishes itself as a political thriller with space as a backdrop, rather than a sci-fi series that happens to include politics and espionage. The best moments in the episode are completely grounded. One involves a tense shakedown at a security checkpoint outside Star City, while the other is a continuation of a classic spy trope with KGB operative (and future "For All Mankind" villain) Irina Morozova (Agnes O'Casey) finding her work life and personal life on a collision course. This is "Star City" at its best.

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For an episode that ends with a climactic action sequence in orbit around the moon and the tragic death of a cosmonaut, it might be stunning to propose that the actual high point of this week's "Star City" is actually far more grounded. Though the logistics of the lunar mission hang over much of Episode 3, the real drama unfolds during the ongoing storyline with Rhys Ifans' unnamed Chief Designer. In order to enact his secret mission to broaden the scope of Russia's space program (albeit under the Soviet regime's nose), the Chief Designer must smuggle a crucial probe into Star City — a years-old bathysphere to be repurposed for an exploratory mission to Venus.

There's only one problem: that strict and wildly imposing security checkpoint preventing anyone from getting in or out without a thorough inspection. Should he be caught and his plans exposed, the stakes are much higher than whether he ends up in a gulag in Siberia or not; the very future of the USSR hinges on their progress into humanity's final frontier. The shortsighted Soviet decision-makers are content with aiming only as high as the moon, while the Chief Designer knows they need to take a page out of the Nikolai Fyodorov playbook and expand beyond their most convenient political targets. All of this comes to a head in one routine stop, personified by the push/pull between the Chief Designer and the overbearing KGB head Colonel Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin).

Over the course of just a few nerve-wracking minutes, we watch helplessly as the mission rests on a knife's edge ... only for a miraculous distraction to divert Raskova's attention, prevent disaster, and allow our dogged protagonist to finish his work.

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Not content to stop there, "Star City" also stages another standout sequence in the main arc of its third episode. To date, we've been following young Irina Morozova as she rises through the ranks of the KGB, earns Colonel Raskova's trust, and embeds herself as a valuable asset as one of the ever-present spooks listening in on various bugs placed throughout the Soviet Union. Her current target is Tanya Markelova (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), a young housewife and music teacher who also happens to be married to Russian cosmonaut Valya Mironov (Adam Nagaitis). The more she listens in on Tanya's increasingly unhappy domestic life, the more Irina seems to sympathize with her. Of course, that only complicates matters when their paths cross in real life and Irina finds herself drawn in more and more by this strangely compelling figure in her life.

Any fans of "The Americans" will likely see where this plot line is going immediately. The classic FX spy series was a masterclass in turning the screws on its characters, most of whom are hiding some major secrets from one another and whose personal/professional lives must never intersect. Naturally, that's exactly what happens on numerous occasions, which proves to be the secret sauce to "Star City" in its most overt homage yet to "The Americans." When Irina is invited to actually step foot inside the apartment that she's spent so much time eavesdropping on, the episode stages an evocative sequence where she "hears" intimate conversations from the past intruding upon the present.

Taken together, both sequences underline what "Star City" excels at most: intrigue and espionage amid the space race. New episodes stream on Apple TV every Friday.