Anna Maxwell Martin, Star City
Apple TV[Warning: The following contains spoilers for Episode 6 of Star City, “Awl in a Sack.”]
Ah, there’s nothing like a little bout of TV Actor-Induced Emotional Whiplash to rock your world from time to time. That’s certainly what happened to me recently when I rewatched the three-episode miniseries Death Comes to Pemberley (based on P.D. James’ Pride and Prejudice-inspired novel) for a third time like the good little Jane Austen universe completist and Matthew Rhys fan I am (Rhys plays Mr. Darcy, is amazing) and then immediately jumped over to Apple TV’s For All Mankind spin-off Star City. Instant and deeply unsettling emotional whiplash ensued. Why? Well, Anna Maxwell Martin’s got range, that’s why.
In Death Comes to Pemberley, Martin is radiant as that story’s version of Elizabeth Bennet. She is warm and quick-witted and smart and empathetic. In Star City, Martin’s Comrade Colonel Raskova, the head of Star City security, is one of the most terrifying villains on television this year. Suddenly, Elizabeth Bennet was executing cosmonauts with no remorse. It made my head spin in the very best way. The excellent Star City — which takes For All Mankind fans back to 1969 to tell the story of the Soviets winning the space race (in its alt-history) from the Soviet point of view — has an ensemble cast full of knockout performances, but Martin’s KGB villain is the one who will make your jaw drop.
ALSO READ: The complete guide to summer TV
Colonel Raskova has done some pretty terrible things throughout the first season, but she really takes it to a new level in this week’s episode, “Awl in a Sack.” After discovering that the mole working for the Americans whom she’s been hunting since Episode 1 is none other than — surprise! — steadfast cosmonaut Valya Mironov (Adam Nagaitis), she proceeds to tear Star City apart searching for him. When she learns that — surprise again! — Valya is one of three cosmonauts the Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans) just sent on a secret, unsanctioned mission to Venus and he won’t be back for nine months, she is livid. She finally has her guy, and she is so close to putting this to bed — to proving that she can handle a situation that up to this point has only spiraled out of control, to protecting the Soviet Union and getting all the glory for doing so — and this guy is on a rocket ship to Venus that was launched illegally.
In an intense, gut-wrenching sequence of events, Raskova first works with the Chief Designer to get Valya into a separate module from his comrades and lock him in there so she can question him. (The Chief Designer is trying to protect the mission and his cosmonauts while not totally pissing off Raskova.) But when Raskova, unsatisfied with Valya’s answers, orders the engineers in the room to depressurize the module, which will kill Valya, the Chief Designer fights back and secretly sends instructions to the other cosmonauts on how to open the module. Raskova realizes this and calmly orders her men to arrest the Chief Designer. And then she orders the engineers to depressurize the entire ship. She will kill all three cosmonauts — in addition to Valya, who was blackmailed into working for the Americans, by the way, the group includes Sasha Polivanov (Solly McLeod), who is in the middle of an incredible redemption arc, and Lakshmi Chadha (Priya Kansara), a sweet scientific genius who just arrived in Star City like two weeks ago — in order to serve her version of justice.
It doesn’t matter that someone points out that they could work to turn the ship around and she could arrest Valya on sight once they return to Earth, saving the two innocent cosmonauts. She holds a gun to an engineer’s head until he presses the button. The entire time, you’re thinking that there’s just no way she’s going to go through with this. There’s no way Star City is going to do this. Valya, Sasha, and Lakshmi do everything they can to stop the depressurization. There is a chance. And then there is an explosion. Colonel Raskova stands in a near-empty control room looking at what she’s just done. She apparently just executed three cosmonauts.
Solly McLeod, Star City
Apple TVThe visceral intensity in the last five minutes of “Awl in a Sack” certainly comes from the tension of believing there’s hope that Colonel Raskova is not going to kill these people — three main characters— when there is another way, but upon further thought, this hope is foolish. For six episodes, Star City has been not only showing us who Colonel Raskova is but giving us clues that this character, who seems so in control of everything that her bun never has a hair out of place, is losing that control and is increasingly desperate to hold on to it. This isn’t a revelatory character arc, but the way Anna Maxwell Martin plays it makes it feel fresher and more unnerving than you might think possible.
Her Colonel Raskova is cold and calculated, at a neutral emotional state for almost the entire season. Even when we know she’s angry at a mistake being made or an interrogation going too long, she is even-tempered. She speaks firmly but without any emotion in her voice. She barely makes any type of facial expression, aside from some small movements that tell us she is so annoyed with whoever she’s dealing with or the news they bring her. Martin is doing some of the best jaw acting on television. And through her eyes, you can see her mind working. She is calculating her next move and then definitively going forward with her plan. There is no room for emotion.
In the first episode, Raskova shoots an innocent cosmonaut at point blank range after learning that the cosmonaut has been mistakenly arrested for espionage, because the Soviets “do not arrest the innocent.” Never admitting mistakes is how they keep their power, she tells her protégé, Irina (Agnes O’Casey), with the same tone she might use to explain how to fill out an expense report. Star City is adept at creating this truly terrifying villain, shocking us with what she’s capable of and with the cool confidence with which she performs these acts. To her, executing people in prison cells, throwing innocent people in prison to manipulate colleagues, and ripping people’s lives apart is simply part of her job, and she is very, very good at it.
And then Star City does something even smarter: It pushes an already dangerous person to the brink. It’s a slow build but an effective one. When an American frequency is found transmitting from a Soviet ship during a lunar mission in Episode 3, Raskova wastes no time and no words in ordering the Chief Designer to reboot the entire ship in order to get rid of that transmission, even if it could cost them the mission. He tells her it’s too risky; she tells him that his “measure of risk is misguided.” He is trying to protect his cosmonauts and the mission; she is trying to protect the country. They succeed in losing the errant transmission, but it creates complications that lead to the death of one of the men on the mission. Raskova shows no remorse, not even a hint of it. The only thing she seems rattled by is that the American mole is still at large.
This escalation of the problem earns her a trip into HQ in Moscow. It’s a smart way to reveal to the audience that while Raskova looks untouchable and in charge in Star City, she has people to report to as well. Episode 4 is game changing for Raskova’s character: She is informed by her superior that the higher-ups have decided to put the Second Directorate in charge of finding the Star City mole and, perhaps even more insulting, introduced to the person she’ll now be answering to in Star City, a much younger man of the new guard. The moment is dripping in misogyny as her boss patronizingly tells her that they aren’t removing her from her post; she is a great war hero who has served her country for decades, but they simply think things have gotten too out of control for her to handle.
From this point on, Raskova’s moves grow increasingly desperate, even if her demeanor doesn’t give it away just yet. Arresting the Chief Designer’s golden boy, Sergei Nikulov (Josef Davies), to force him to take the fall for the lunar mission debacle? Diabolical. Tearing apart all of Star City to find her mole before the Second Directorate does? Risky. The control she thrives on is slipping out of her hands, and you know how we know it’s gotten to her? Raskova finally screams. In the control room in Episode 6, when the Chief Designer refuses to depressurize the module Valya is in, telling her that his engineers are not executioners, she finally loses her cool and screams that if they do not follow her order, she will have them all arrested. The Chief Designer calls her a monster as he is hauled off by her men, and for the first time — with a quick hint of hurt in her eyes that is so quickly wiped away — Martin shows us that there might actually be a human under all that military garb.
It’s at this point, with the Chief Designer gone, with the cosmonauts on the ship to Venus disobeying her orders, that Raskova pulls out her gun to force the full depressurization. And wouldn’t you know, a piece of her hair is out of place for the first time since we’ve met her. With a character as tightly wound and bent on control as the one Martin has created, this small detail tells us everything we need to know. Raskova is losing her grip. The quiet coldness has been scary enough; now that she’s revealed there is a limit to that act, one can only imagine what moves she might make next. While Raskova may be losing control, Martin is fully in the driver’s seat of this character, and that makes this pivotal turn, and the promise of what might come next, even more gripping.
New episodes of Star City stream Fridays on Apple TV.