‘Star City’ Finale Confirms the Fate of the Venera 7 Crew

Apple TV’s ‘Star City‘ concluded its inaugural season with a finale that finally addressed the question fans have been pondering since the Venus mission appeared to end in catastrophe. The fate of the ‘Venera’ spacecraft and its cosmonauts became the emotional core of the latter half of the season, and the show effectively utilized the tension built up throughout.

For those following this alternate history space race drama, the finale delivers the kind of emotional punch and relief that ‘Star City’ has become known for this season.

Episode 6, titled “Awl in a Sack,” left viewers in a dire situation. The episode concluded without confirming whether Valya, Sasha, and Lakshmi survived the explosion, leaving the fate of the Venera crew hanging in the balance. This cliffhanger followed a forced depressurization ordered from mission control, which ignited a fire aboard the spacecraft.

It was a heart-wrenching moment for viewers who had become attached to the three cosmonauts, and the show focused heavily on the grief of the survivors on Earth instead of rushing to resolve the mystery. This patience paid off in the subsequent episode.

Episode 7 revealed that the Venera astronauts were miraculously still alive and making their way back to Earth, with the revelation coming through a coded signal that Sergei recognized as utilizing his own specific algorithm. This discovery proved that the spacecraft, which was thought to be destroyed, had actually survived the disaster all along.

By the finale, the show detailed exactly how the crew managed to survive. Flashbacks showed that the crew endured Lyudmilla’s depressurization of the vessel, as the lack of pressure extinguished the fire, saving everyone but leaving them adrift and off course.

However, this fix came at a significant cost. The outgassing from the depressurization had altered Venera’s trajectory so drastically that the crew would miss Venus entirely, meaning they would eventually be drawn toward the sun if no changes were made.

Valya, previously revealed as an American asset in the show’s espionage storyline, is the one who devises the solution. He suggests manually operating the bathysphere to help redirect ‘Venera’ back onto its original path, fully aware that it amounts to a one-way trip to Venus with no chance of return.

The sacrifice pays off. Valya successfully adjusts Venera’s trajectory, setting the ship back on course for Earth, and in his final moments on the surface of Venus, he smiles, having briefly experienced the joy of being the first man there before the bathysphere succumbs to the planet’s extreme pressure.

This leaves Sasha and Lakshmi as the two returning home. However, landing back in the Soviet Union was never an option. The Chief Designer points out the obvious issue that the craft cannot land in Soviet territory since the crew would be immediately captured and executed as traitors, so the landing site is changed from Kazakhstan to Finland instead.

This adjustment sets up one of the finale’s more poignant emotional moments. The shift to a landing site outside the Iron Curtain leads to a touching farewell between Anastasia and Sasha, as saving him this way also means they will likely never be together. On the ground, Lyudmilla scrambles to manage the fallout, and the political ramifications ripple through Star City’s chain of command as season one concludes.

The show’s creators confirmed that the reveal was planned from the beginning rather than being a last-minute twist. According to ‘Star City’ co-creators Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert, speaking to Collider, the season was always building toward the revelation that the Venera 7 crew survived their ordeal, with the specifics of how they made it back to Earth gradually unfolding throughout the finale.

Wolpert elaborated on the writers’ approach to structuring the reveal itself. He explained that the team aimed to first convey the drama of the mission being lost and the characters being gone, before circling back with the revelation that they had survived and completed the mission in some form, working backward from that emotional beat to figure out the science.

The result is a finale that critics have warmly received, praised for delivering on its slow-burn tension without undermining the stakes of Valya’s sacrifice. With ‘Star City’ clearly setting up threads for a potential second season, from Lyudmilla’s power struggle with Petrovsky to the unresolved romance between Sasha and Anastasia, there’s plenty left to explore.

Now that ‘Venera’ has finally returned home, do you think Sasha and Lakshmi will ever face real accountability for what occurred aboard that ship, or will the Soviet cover-up conceal the truth forever?