Gerry Nordley asked, during the meeting, whether the alternate history of "Star City" (and of "For All Mankind", of which the former's an offshoot) hinging on the survival of "Chief Designer" Sergei Korolev -- who, in our reality, died in mysterious circumstances* in 1966 -- meant that the USSR "N1" super-heavy launch vehicle got built and worked in the series.
Answer is "yes". Last Friday, I was doing baking in the kitchen while mostly _listening_ to the premier pair of episodes, so I didn't catch a lot of the visuals, including a totally compelling re-creation of the N1 rocket, Korolev's brainchild that, in the alternate reality, got them to the Moon before the Americans even got serius about space at all. Yesterday, I re-watched the intro episodes, giving them my full attention. The visuals in this series are brilliantly done, and mesmerizing. Practically every scene is gorgeously shot, and much credit must go to the use of very high-Soviet locations in Vilnius, Lithuania, and also in the town of Kaunas. The former includes Brutalist architecture that survives from the Stalin & Brezhnev eras. (Kaunas has wider street layout, hence seems less claustrophobic.) There's something brooding and dramatic about the light and shadows in the Baltics, that is an excellent stand-in for the Brezhnev-era Moscow Oblast where the "Star City" cosmonaut-training center was (and remains). As with "For All Mankind", the series opening titles and graphics are extremely evocative. As Yochanan said, it's pretty dark, both thematically (it's the USSR, so this is realism!) and visually. The shadows and play of light do a lot to reinforce that. I haven't yet gotten to Vilius, but I've been (around September) to Tallinn, Estonia, nearby, and, yep, the light and shadow are like that. I mentioned that Korolev is played by an excellent Welsh actor. It's Rhys Ifans. (The brief appearances of Korolev in "For All Mankind" have been done by a Hungarian actor, Endre Hules.) During Monday's meeting, we talked about the weird accent thing: In the prior (and still ongoing) series "For All Mankind", telling the American side of a still-hot space race, Soviet characters had Russian accents (usually showing "speaking Russian" by speaking English with a Russian accent , and (usually, with some exceptions such as Mr. Hules) were played by veteran ethnic-Russian actors living in Southern California -- e.g., Svetlana Efremova playing high-ranking Soviet intelligence official Irina Morozova. In "Star City", a much-younger, more-naive Irina Morozova is played by English/Irish actor Agnes O'Casey. The accent convention applied to "Star City" is that speaking Russian is portrayed on-screen by actors speaking English with a British accent. This is doubtless in larger part because the main-cast, recurring, and guest actors are mainly British, the few outliers being a Swede/Dane (yay, Scandinavia! Go, team!), an Aussie, and a couple of actors from Ireland. Before I looked up the cast on the Wikipedia page, I'd assumed this was the old Hollywood trope that _good_ foreigners are represented by speaking English with an American accent, and _evil_ or morally ambiguous ones by RP British accents -- but this was more likely just "Hey, almost all of us are Brits, here. Let's not all spend six months learning to fake a Russian accent." Yochanan, I really doubt the series is going to become less (thematically) dark as you wish it would. I think they absolutely nailed the Soviet mentality of (a) everyone's paranoid, all the time, (b) everyone has a hidden agenda, and (c) the State is always right, especially when it's wrong. I would be very surprised if they don't keep that up, exactly as in the first two episodes. * His is a very dark, typically Soviet story. He was a typhus survivor during the severe food shortages of 1919, alone enough to ruin one's health, but kept rising in a brilliant career until he was somehow caught up in Stalin's 1938 Great Purge, tortured, forced to make a false confession, sent off to the worst gulag assignment of all, gold mining in ultracold Kolyma, east Siberia, barely survived, and was brought back to help in the war effort, still officially a supposed criminal. In the 1950s and 1960s, while remaining under that absurd cloud, he was the driving force advancing the Soviet space program, but in 1960 had a heart attack and kidney problems, and started having further accumulating health consequences from the gulag, and died in a hospital in January 1966 where he was present for routine surgery. Claims about his actual treatment and actual cause of death are various. Only after his death was anything about him, including his name, revealed to the larger public: During his career as "Chief Designer", he was called only that, never referred to by name. _______________________________________________ Basfa mailing list [email protected] http://lists.basfa.org/listinfo.cgi/basfa-basfa.org
