Star City Review

Apple turns its alternate history of the space race into a shared universe, and the first spinoff works because it inverts the original rather than repeating it. For All Mankind is hopeful and expansive. Star City is cold, quiet and watched, a series about people building rockets inside a system that will destroy them for a mistake nobody could have avoided. Reviewers were close to unanimous, several calling it the strongest thing on Apple's science fiction slate this year, with particular praise for the design work, which renders the closed world of the training center as grand and suffocating at once.

Rhys Ifans and Anna Maxwell Martin anchor it, and the younger cast, Alice Englert and Agnes O'Casey among them, carry the spy plotting without tipping into melodrama. The one genuinely cooler signal comes from viewers rather than critics, who have graded it a good deal below the press, and the likely reason is the pace: the first half is deliberate to the point of testing you, and the relentless grimness gives none of the relief the parent series found by letting its characters be funny.

That is a real cost and it is the only one worth reporting. What it buys is a show that treats the closed world of the training center as a place with weather and consequence, and a second half that pays back every slow hour of the first.