Ronald D. Moore Dives Into For All Mankind’s Russia-Set Spinoff

Fans of Apple TV+’s show For All Mankind got some very good news earlier this year. Not only would the show be coming back for a fifth season, a spinoff show called Star City was in the works, which tells the story from the Russian point of view. It was an intriguing, but very curious proposal. Russians already play a big role in For All Mankind. How was it all going to work?

In a new interview with Collider, one of the show’s producers, Ronald D. Moore, explained in more detail. “We’re in the writing period of the spinoff series, which is Star City, which is very exciting,” Moore said. “I’m very happy that Apple was supportive of that whole concept and to do it and to tell the story from the cosmonaut point of view and how the Russians got to the moon first and what it was like to work in that program.”

Moore goes on to explain what will set the two stories apart. “I didn’t know a lot about the Russian space program before I started doing this project,” he said. “It was pretty ballsy stuff that they did. The spacecraft were not quite as reliable as ours were. They lost a lot of good people on them. The conditions were tough. They also had things like the KGB being around and hanging out in mission control, so there’s a lot of espionage and Cold War kind of environments that you’re dealing with in that particular show. So, it’s a familiar tale in terms of the narrative for people who watch Mankind. They know the Soviets got there first and they know that they have a robust space program in our alternate history, but certainly the details of how that program worked and what it was like to be on the inside of that program, I think are gonna be really interesting to the audience.”

With Star City still in the writing phase, not every detail has been set in stone. For example, Moore isn’t sure how the language barrier will be handled. But he did reveal they have a larger outline of where it could go. “We have a path,” he said. “We have a general arc. It’s probably not as detailed as what we started off with on For All Mankind, but we have a general sort of, ‘Okay, here’s the structure of how this would play out over several seasons.’”

And, yes, Star City will follow that all too crucial For All Mankind device of jumping ahead in time each season. “I’m not sure [how long] the jumps will be,” he said. “We know we are gonna jump through time. We haven’t quite got to that point yet. It’s probably still an in-the-decade, or so, jump ahead. We don’t know if we’re gonna do exactly what the Mankind jumps were or if we’ll try to split them in the middle.”

But it’s still a format that works for us and makes it a unique part of this universe. It also allows their space program to advance. That was why we did it on Mankind, so that you could see the advancement in chunks instead of getting stuck in a very limited timeframe where there really wouldn’t be a lot of change.”

Head over to Collider to read more from Moore about Star City, For All Mankind, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica.

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