‘Star City’ Episode 6 Shocks With Its Boldest Swing Yet — and Nobody May Survive It
The Apple TV series ‘Star City’ has spent its first season carefully threading tension between its cosmonauts, engineers, and KGB operatives. Created by Ben Nedivi, Matt Wolpert, and Ronald D. Moore, the show serves as a spin-off of ‘For All Mankind’ with a focus on the Soviet Union, premiering on Apple TV on May 29, 2026. Through five episodes, it earned its audience’s trust through patient, paranoid storytelling. Episode six, titled “Awl in a Sack,” collects on every debt at once.
In many ways, “Awl in a Sack” is the episode that ‘Star City’ has been building toward throughout its first season. It is where all of the various character arcs and subplots dovetail into a string of sustained, claustrophobic tension, building to a major cliffhanger for good measure. What follows is a breakdown of exactly how the show gets there, and what it might mean for the episodes still to come.
The Venus Mission and Valya’s Desperate Gamble
The episode picks up in the aftermath of Valya’s exposure as an American informant. After being outed as the mole, Valya thought he had found a way out by securing his place on the Chief Designer’s unsanctioned mission to Venus. But Lyudmilla Raskova proves impossible to outrun, even in orbit. She is alerted to the unauthorized launch and immediately moves to assert control over the situation from the ground.
Even though Valya has broken the Chief Designer’s trust, the Chief Designer does not want him to die on the spaceship. He believes there is a better way to deal with the situation than killing Valya in space. That position puts the Chief Designer in direct conflict with Lyudmilla, a confrontation that will cost him dearly before the hour is out.
To reach Valya aboard the craft, Lyudmilla turns to Lakshmi, an unwitting participant in her plan. By having Lakshmi liaise with her husband in their native language, authorities on the ground secretly instruct her to perform a system reset without Sasha or Valya being alerted. This allows Valya to be isolated in one of the ship’s modules so Lyudmilla can interrogate him. The use of Lakshmi as an unknowing instrument is one of the episode’s more quietly devastating choices.
What the Ending Actually Means for Sasha, Valya, and Lakshmi
The episode’s final sequence is where ‘Star City’ makes its most uncompromising statement. When Lyudmilla commands the engineers at Star City to depressurize the utility module, the Chief Designer is completely shocked. He warns her not to do so, and adds that his engineers are not executioners. Lyudmilla reminds him that they are not his engineers and that they will only do what she asks. It is a chilling demonstration of state power overriding human decency.
Holding a technician at gunpoint, Lyudmilla forces the entire craft to be depressurized. In Sasha’s attempts to reverse the process, he causes an explosion that seemingly kills everyone aboard. The show cuts to black on an image that offers very little room for optimism. The Chief Designer is arrested for going against Lyudmilla’s orders. Irina risks being exposed. It is made to seem that Sasha, Valya, and Lakshmi are dead.
For this to be happening so soon in a first season, with two episodes still remaining, feels like a significant change of pace. The show had already demonstrated it was not afraid to make big swings, but this lands differently given how early the series is in establishing its world. Whether the show pulls these characters back from the brink or commits to its apparent ending remains the central question heading into the final stretch.
Irina and Tanya’s Parallel Crisis on the Ground
While the events aboard the spacecraft dominate “Awl in a Sack,” the ground-level story carries its own weight. Lyudmilla’s problems begin with Tanya. Despite Irina’s efforts to protect her from the fallout of Valya’s exposure, Tanya tipped Valya off that she knew he was a traitor. Irina finds the safehouse she prepared empty, Tanya gone, and Lyudmilla furious that she collaborated with a known traitor. What seemed like a careful plan from Irina now stands to implicate her in a treason plot.
Finding Tanya means finding Valya’s handler, Ekaterina, to whom Tanya has turned for help. Ekaterina takes visible pleasure in breaking the news that Valya was never truly a traitor. Everything he did was to protect Tanya, and instead of giving him the benefit of the doubt, she turned on him and believed the lies she was sold. It is a reversal that reframes much of what has come before.
Irina tracks down the Western spy Ekaterina and almost manages to find Tanya, but ultimately comes up short. The subplot develops further but remains unresolved by episode’s end, leaving Irina’s own exposure as an open thread heading into the final episodes. Agnes O’Casey carries these scenes with quiet precision, making Irina’s predicament feel as urgent as anything happening 200 miles above the Earth.
The Chief Designer’s Arrest and What It Signals
Rhys Ifans brings dignity, warmth, and keen intelligence to the role of the Chief Designer, a figure whose anonymity within the Soviet system is itself a defining feature of the character and the show’s world. His arrest at the episode’s close is not just a plot development but a symbol of how completely the state can consume even its most essential architects.
The series earned a 97% positive score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes across 30 reviews, with an average rating of 8.4 out of 10. Episode six represents a culmination of the dramatic groundwork that earned those marks, and it raises the stakes for the remaining two episodes in a way that makes the season finale feel genuinely unpredictable. The eight-episode season is set to conclude on July 10, 2026, meaning audiences won’t have long to wait for answers about who, if anyone, survived the fire in orbit.
If you’ve made it this far into ‘Star City,’ the question is unavoidable: do you think Sasha, Valya, and Lakshmi are actually gone, or is the show setting up a resurrection that changes everything we think we know about the Venus mission?
