whilst for all mankind makes me think could be great it's an odd choice to have everyone with English/Irish accents and takes you out of the story. The only way you know it's Russian is due to the fact they say comrade every 5 minutes.

I am enjoying this show. The sets, props, and costumes feel pretty accurate, and the actors look very Russian and period correct despite their UK accents, lol. Even the colorization is drab and oppressive and matches what I imagine what life was like behind the iron curtain in the 60s. The space race and alternate history stuff is compelling but the lives of these characters in the Soviet state is the heart of this series. Hard not to feel sympathy for each and every one of these characters. A really nice foil and expansion to the For All Mankind universe.

It’s exhausting and toxic to see media still trying to humanize and romanticize the Soviet/Russian state. Given the reality of Russia's unprovoked war and daily war crimes today, creating big-budget content that centers and romanticizes them is absolutely unacceptable. Stop romanticizing a terrorist state. This trend needs to be canceled.

I really don't know what to make of it. Presumably, this series in particular would have done better to show the first season in full rather than relying on a weekly release. Visually really high quality produced and also a great cast and good acting. It's the story that don't even captures or captivates me. On the one hand, because it's set very far in the past at the beginning and it doesn't excite me much to return to this point in the story, while I'm actually waiting for the 6th season of For All Mankind and so the actual finale of the Starcity Story also. But what is massively disturbed by the implementation is that it simply does not look like Russia at all, and whether I watch the English audio or the German dubbed version, completely wrong voices, accents and dialects are used, and you can only see from the dark setting, the brutalism and the word "comrade" that it is a Russian view of the same story at all. Maybe we need more episodes to get a complete picture, but unfortunately it currently seems unconvincing to me, not at all captivating, boring, poorly thought out and even devalues the "For All Mankind" IP overall. Especially because we are actually much more advanced in the story in time and the IP, especially through Titan and the aliens, shows completely different directions in the future. Unfortunately, so Star City seems hopelessly outdated. I would rather that the production budget used for this be invested in a continuation of For All Mankind after Season 6 in a spin-off that takes place afterwards. 4/10

Based solely on the pilot, this is tense and undeniably compelling. It loses points for relying on tired anti-communist and russophobic tropes, but it really is excellent on all other fronts. A spectacularly well crafted episode of TV.