Apple TVThe first two episodes of Star City have arrived, and that means an incredible dive back into the early days of the For All Mankind timeline, but from the Soviet point of view. For new viewers, there’s literally nothing you need to know about this show, other than the fact that in this timeline, the USSR’s space agency, Roscosmos, successfully landed humans on the Moon, well before NASA did. From there, the show dives into the men and women who struggled to make this happen, which includes a lot of surveillance. And, while this cold, unforgiving life — lacking in personal freedoms and privacy — is well known to historians, For All Mankind depicted this through very specific characters. And, one character, Irina Morozova (Svetlana Efremova), has been a ruthless enforcer and intelligence operative since Season 4. But, here, in the opening episodes of Star City, back in 1969, the younger Irina, as played by Agnes O'Casey, is...nice? “Actually, at first, I misunderstood where we were starting Irina from,” O’Casey tells Inverse. “I assumed she'd be much more confident. I assumed she'd be much more at ease with the brutality of the time. But then I sat down with [showrunners] Matt [Wolpert] and Ben [Nedivi], and they were like, ‘No, no, we're starting her right from the beginning.’ You see her at the inception of her journey, which is so fun and dramatically exciting. Everyone knows where she's going. To see this sort of quivering version of her is exciting and more realistic.”Irina in 1969 and 2003; Agnes O'Casey in Star City and Svetlana Efremova in For All Mankind. | Apple TVWe’ve known since Season 4 of For All Mankind that Irina worked in the titular Star City since the early days of the Soviet space program. And, in the opening two episodes of the new series, we learn that right away, the innocent Irina started learning the hard way as to what counts as truth and justice behind the Iron Curtain.In the series premiere, she discovers that some intelligence provided by her colleague, which indicated that one cosmonaut was a traitor, was false. But her tough-as-nails supervisor, Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin), makes clear, it doesn’t matter. The state does not “arrest innocent people,” meaning even if someone was innocent, the powers-that-be will never admit it. Interestingly, in Episode 2, Star City also floats a conspiracy theory that the KGB murdered the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, which isn’t something that is generally considered to be provable, one way or another, though in this series, and in this timeline, it feels very likely to be true.Anna Maxwell Martin as the unflinching Lyudmilla Raskova in Star City. Irina, seemingly, bases her future personality on this task master. | Apple TVMixing historical fact with fiction connects to Irina’s story in another way: Her new boss, Lyudmilla Raskova — whose cruel demeanor recalls the way the older Irina behaves in For All Mankind — is based on a real person: Marina Raskova, the first woman to become a professional pilot in the Soviet Union. The reference made in the show to Col. Raskova being one of the “Night Witches” is also a real part of history; the real Raskova convinced Stalin to allow women to fight in WWII and created an all-female squadron known as “the Night Witches.” While Star City’s Lyudmilla Raskova is not strictly the same as the historical Raskova (who passed away as the result of a plane crash in 1943), Martin did use the real history to help craft the character.“I was sort of dubious at first. I was like, ‘Can this possibly be all true?’” Martin tells Inverse. “But she was real, I really seized the opportunity of playing my first night witch!” Both Martin and O’Casey point out that the relationship between Lyudmilla and Irina is central to the overall story of Star City; certain brutal qualities from this military stalwart (who at times has shades of the Bond villain Rosa Klebb) will shape Irina into the woman she will become. In a sense, it’s basically like Irina will become Lyudmilla as the story goes on.“We love that. We fully embrace that,” Martin says. “It's exactly that. It's like, how is she shaped? Is she going to boot the old hag down the stairs in the end?”“Irina really looks up to Lyudmilla,” O’Casey says. “She's terrified of her, and she judges her very deeply, but she also can't help but idolize her and sort of long for her approval.”Agnes O’Casey in Star City. | Apple TVWhile the fate of Lyudmilla is unknown, we do know what will happen to Irina in the future, and in a bit of franchise synergy, the future (or present-day) Irina (Svetlana Efremova) seems to have softened in the Season 5 finale of For All Mankind, sharing with Aleida (Coral Peña) some of her past idealism, and assisting Aleida with to transmitt certain signals to stop the fighting on Mars. Co-showrunner of both series, Matt Wolpert, tells Inverse this is all part of the plan.“At the end of For All Mankind Season 5, you really do get the sense that Irina is reengaging with some parts of her younger self,” Wolpert says. “She’s discovering an ability to connect back to that idealism in her youth.”So, while the stories in Star City are firmly about the events in Star City, there’s a larger novelistic tapestry here, and the lives of some of these characters are bigger and richer than just one single moment in time.Star City and For All Mankind stream on Apple TV. Star City drops new episodes on Fridays.