For All Mankind: Season 4

2003. Happy Valley has expanded into a full-scale colony on Mars, where technology is being developed to allow humans to capture asteroids and swing them into Mars or Earth orbit to exploit their resources. The United States and Soviet Union are now full-blown allies, marching jointly into the exploration of space. The many workers who lost their livelihoods with the collapse of the oil industry are now finding fresh employment on the Moon and Mars, but the same problems of low pay and class divides follow them. The discovery of a metal-rich asteroid which can solve Earth's shortages in a single swoop spurs a dangerous mission, but political turmoil in Moscow and growing discontent at Happy Valley make the mission anything but straightforward.

For All Mankind's first two seasons staked a claim for the show to be the best slice of science fiction on television at the moment (certainly following the wrapping up of The Expanse). A cool alt-history take on the space race, fantastic visuals and pretty good writing all made for a compelling drama. Season 3 abruptly reversed that course, with hackneyed love triangles and tedious personal drama threatening to undo all the good work achieved in worldbuilding (not the first time this has happened on a Ron Moore-produced show, to be fair).

Season 4 occupies a ground much closer to the former than the latter. Thankfully, it stops and reverses the rot from Season 3. The story is much better, the aggravating love triangle story from Season 3 has been fully exorcised from the show and we're back to the interesting mix of science and alt-reality politics that made the first two seasons compelling. However, the show hasn't fully swung back to that level of quality. There's still some rather far-fetched plotting, and the show's failure to commit to getting rid of its increasingly ancient central character is quite daft.

The season divides its plot between several character arcs. Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) is a reluctant political refugee in the Soviet Union, where her space knowledge is being wasted, until a political realignment brings her to the attention of a new regime. Aleida (Coral Peña), still suffering traumatic after-effects from the bombing of NASA at the end of Season 3, decides on a new career path. Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), now in his seventies, is comically squatting on Mars and refusing to leave, so NASA has left him in a command position (and, although it's under-explored, possibly studying the impact of low-gravity existence on his ageing body). Newcomer Miles Dale (Toby Kebbell) is a redundant oil worker who gets a new job on Mars, but finds the job isn't all that he thought it might be.

Season 4 balances these storylines well and ties them together nicely at the end of the season, creating a much more cohesive storyline than the spotty third season. This is no mean feat with multiple groups of characters active in the United States, Soviet Union, on Mars and on various spacecraft. The interaction of the storylines is pretty good.

However, the show continues to mix cool realism (the long travel times to Mars and the inability to engage in real-time conversation with Earth) with decidedly bonkers speculative elements (gigantic giga-engines that can steer asteroids). This mix was odd in Season 2 but has become de rigour for the show by this point, and does give us some cool visuals and awesome vfx sequences, so fair enough.

Anyone who's read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy can probably see some of the plot twists coming a mile off, with musings on capitalism-in-spaaaace and how it leads to the predictable repeating of patterns we see on Earth. So the Happy Valley colony quickly becomes a stratified society between the above-deckers and the maintenance workers belowdecks, complete with a black market and secret bars. We're not quite at the point of full independence (I suspect that will rear its head several seasons down the line) but this is a clear transitional story. It's not that original, to be honest, but Kebbell's solid performance as Miles Dale and fellow newcomer Tyner Rushing's great turn as Samantha Massey both help sell it.

On the negative side, the lengths the show goes to in order to keep previous main characters in the frame remains quite implausible. Ed should have been retired at least one season ago, and Kelly has relatively little to do. At least Margo gets a meaty storyline with some intriguing twists. And I'll forgive a lot of these problems for keeping Danny out of the picture this season. On another flipside, the absence of former-President Ellen feels jarringly abrupt, but I suppose her story purpose has been fulfilled.

Season 4 of For All Mankind (****) splendidly improves on the tedious third season and brings us back much closer to the quality of the first two. We're still not back to the show at its best, but this season is a big improvement over last year and opens the story up for a very interesting fifth season.

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For All Mankind: Season 3

1992. The United States and the Soviet Union are preparing for a new phase in their rivalry: a race to get the first people onto the surface of Mars. But they are joined in the fight by Helios, an independent company run by a charismatic, visionary founder who wants in on the action. The three-horse race to Mars gets underway, but political expediency may compromise the integrity of the mission.

Fifteen years ago, Ronald D. Moore had just delivered the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, arguably the two greatest seasons of science fiction television in genre history. Brilliant vfx, fantastic acting and strong writing had combined to deliver a show that could very comfortably go head-to-head with any of the A-tier "prestige dramas" airing on the likes of HBO. Season 3 started the same way, but quickly fell of a cliff: imaginative writing and storylines had been replaced by lowest-common-denominator soap opera drama (such as an overreliance on love triangles), the formerly well-thought-out worldbuilding had developed cracks through which you could fly a Mercury-class battlestar, and contrivance and convenience had replaced intelligent plotting.

Unbelievably, the same thing has happened again. The first two seasons of Ronald D. Moore's For All Mankind are brilliant, with superb writing helping deliver fantastic performances and clever storytelling, all supported by some of the best vfx ever seen on the small screen. Season 1 was excellent; Season 2 was better, by a hair.

Season 3 starts off in exactly the same vein with what might be one of its strongest hours. Polaris is a fantastic, self-contained disaster movie with several regular characters stuck on the world's first orbital hotel, which soon develops a fault. Unfolding like a cross between Apollo 13 and one of the best episodes of Thunderbirds, the episode delivers fantastic spectacle rooted in interesting ideas. The next couple of episodes speculate intriguingly on the politics and science behind an increasingly dangerous space race as NASA, the Soviet Space Agency and Helios all compete to get to Mars first, rather than safely. We get one more great episode out of this, Happy Valley, as the race turns dangerous with one of the ships developing a fault, forcing the others to argue about who is going to go back and rescue them.

However, there is a ticking time bomb in For All Mankind that was planted back in Season 2 which explodes with full force in Season 3. Back in Season 2 we got a brief burst of tedious melodrama with a spectacularly unconvincing love triangle subplot that was mind-numbingly dull and unconvincing, but at least was dealt with briefly. In Season 3 this plot is inexplicably brought back, even more inexplicably given massive prominence and then turns into some kind of surreal satire of itself as the season goes on, resulting in deaths, mayhem and explosions in a manner so contrived and unbelievable as to verge on the comical. Episode after episode, you just hope this storyline and the character it centres on, the selfish and utterly unsympathetic Danny, will just end and instead the writers double down on it. It's like watching a football team that's heading to win the World Cup but the coach benches all of his star players to focus on the least-talented players ever to set foot on the pitch.

Although this storyline is the most egregious example of the declining in both writing and plotting this season, it is not the only victim. Another storyline about a character being compromised by Russia ends with them being whisked off to the Soviet Union, presumably by the same teleporter used to capture Jim Hopper in Stranger Things. In another storyline, a character is swept up by a cult-like group who think that NASA is hiding...something. Their bananas ideology is never really explained and their goals and objectives are obtuse, so it's kind of hard to invest in this story or what's going on, especially as the ramping-up of their status from "minor annoyance" to "massive national security threat" takes place so jarringly abruptly that it, again, verges on being silly rather than dramatic. The worldbuilding is also iffy: the United States now has limitless energy thanks to the advent of fusion power, meaning some of the economic issues the country is reported as facing should be non-existent instead of major problems. It's also questionable if the Soviet Union should still be around and if North Korea should be as advanced in this timeline as it appears to be. 

Other problems are perhaps a bit too pedantic. This season mostly takes place in 1995, a full twenty-six years after Season 1, but very little effort has been made to make any of the characters look their age. Joel Kinnaman and Shantel VanSanten look amazing for playing people well into their sixties, whilst Nate Corddry is given some very unconvincing aging makeup (made worse by him having much better aging make up over on Amazon's excellent Paper Girls). It's one of those things you can forget about in a show that's otherwise firing on all cylinders, but here it accentuates the feeling of the wheels coming off the wagon whilst it's rolling downhill.

There are still flashes of greatness. The actors do their solid best with increasingly risible material and newcomer Lev Gorn has a great arc as the Soviet mission commander Grigory Kuznetsov, a hard-wired martinet who cracks (just slightly) to become an effective partner to Danielle Poole on the Mars mission. The political storyline revolving around Ellen Wilson (Jodi Balfour) becoming the first female President of the United States and facing a crisis when her sexuality (and her efforts to hide it) comes to the fore has a lot of legs to it, but is undercooked (and I'm not sure her resolution would really save her career). The show's energy and momentum lifts whenever Sonya Walger returns as Molly Cobb, making it a shame she's is so little of the season. Robert Bailey Jr. has a great subplot as Will Tyler, NASA's first openly gay astronaut, but again this is a story that's shunted to one side with almost indecent haste. There's also some excellent vfx, if not as flawlessly brilliant as in the first two seasons. 

For All Mankind's third season (**½, but ****½ for Polaris and Happy Valley) has some individually great episodes, especially early on, and some great performances, effects and ideas. But it also has some agonisingly painful dumbness in its worldbuilding, its plotting and its characterisation that drags what was one a fantastic show down to mediocrity. The finale does resolve some of the stupider storylines, hopefully permanently, and we can hope that the already-commissioned Season 4 will be a return to form. The season is streaming worldwide right now on Apple TV+.

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For All Mankind: Season 2

1983. NASA is running away with the Space Race. It has a permanently-manned lunar outpost, Jamestown, and an entire fleet of space shuttles to service installations in orbit. It is already developing a second-generation, nuclear-powered shuttle called Pathfinder and has its eyes set firmly on Mars. However, mixed support in Congress threatens to derail its Martian ambitions and escalating tensions with the Soviet Union, including armed confrontations over contested lithium mining sites on the moon, put the safety of the entire world in doubt. The astronauts of NASA and their families find themselves on the front line of what could be the start of World War III, or the beginning of a new, peaceful age of cooperation.

For All Mankind's journey through an alternate history of the 20th and 21st centuries continues in the second of seven planned seasons (a third has already wrapped filming and should air in 2022). A ten-year time jump between seasons brings us almost to a Utopian view of the 1980s, where technology is more advanced than it really was thanks to the advances of America's hyper-charged space programme. Electric cars are becoming commonplace, the Columbia-class space shuttle has already been in service for years, and a combination of extremely lucrative patents and the heartfelt support of President Reagan means NASA has funds and resources it couldn't even dream of in reality. It's a giddy view of the Space Race which masks deeper problems.

As in reality, the growing gulf in technology and capability between the rapidly-advancing United States and the stagnating Soviet Union is creating renewed, dangerous tensions on Earth, in orbit and on the moon. The US military is getting more and more involved with the space programme, advocating putting weapons on shuttles and on the moon, and using the "high ground" of orbital space to overcome the USSR's ability to launch a nuclear first strike or respond in kind to one. Like Battlestar Galactica before it, For All Mankind dips into an interesting place where the military, ethical, scientific and political ramifications of events overlap, throwing up thorny dilemmas where each perspective makes valid points so it's hard to entirely come down on one side or another. For All Mankind also introduces more Russian characters and has the USA making some horrendous misjudgements, meaning the Soviet perspective is also more readily understood.

As with the first year, For All Mankind roots the fascination of its alternate history (where John Lennon survived his assassination attempt, but Pope John Paul II did not) in compelling character arcs. Our primary POV characters are once again the Baldwin family, astronaut Ed now working as the head of the astronaut programme at NASA and his wife Karen having taken over the Outpost, the old astronaut drinking ground which has now become a tourist trap. Recovering from their death of their son Shane in the first season, they have adopted a Vietnamese orphan, Kelly. During the season Ed makes the decision to return to space and Kelly decides to apply to join the US Navy and find her birth parents, all decisions which stress out Karen, leading her to make some questionable choices.

A second major story arc follows the ongoing issues of the family Stevens. Gordo has left front-line space service after his mini-breakdown in Season 1, and now works as a public speaker and in the back office. An opportunity to return to Jamestown forces him to confront his demons. His now ex-wife Tracy has become the public face of the space programme, to the consternation of fellow astronauts who think she's putting more effort into appearing on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show than on her actual job. Their sons have taken dramatically differing career paths, one living at home with his father and the other joining the US military.

Further storylines follow retiring astronaut Ellen, who takes over as a senior administrator at NASA and quickly wins the admiration and wholehearted political support of President Reagan and the Republican Party, to her consternation as a closeted lesbian. However, she also believes her growing political profile will help get NASA and humanity to Mars. Margo continues in her role as a senior NASA figure, but her loneliness leads her to making some potentially dangerous decisions. Subplots follow Aleida, the young girl dreaming of the stars in the first season, as she joins NASA as an engineer; Molly Cobb's health after she ill-advisedly sustains a massive dose of radiation during a solar storm; and a Russian cosmonaut trying to defect to the United States via their moonbase.

The second season is more serialised than the first, which at times felt almost like an anthology series as it spanned four years and various topics including the recruitment of female astronauts, the intersection of civil rights and the space programme, and the psychological impact of space travel. The second season is instead focused around a pivotal period of a few months. This is good in that the season feels more of a piece and more epic, but it also strains the show's ability to give everyone a compelling story arc. In particular, Karen feels a little lost in the mix and Aleida's thread starts and stops a lot, in contrast to the much meatier and more satisfying storyline for the Stevens, Ed and the crew of Jamestown.

The series also feels like it's lost its scientific credentials, or at least strained them. In real life, the space shuttle could not fly to the moon and certainly couldn't land after returning (the shuttle would not survive re-entry at the speeds reached on lunar return mission). Given there's only a couple of shots of the shuttle flying to the moon and other spacecraft are available (including upgraded Apollos and the spectacular Sea Dragon seen in the Season 1 finale and throughout Season 2), it's odd why they insist on depicting it as a lunar return vehicle.

Season 2 also deals with the realities of characters ageing by...not bothering to depict them. The characters were already older than the actors playing them by some years in Season 1, so extending that by another decade in Season 2 with no effort to make up the actors is sometimes distractingly weird (with a 35-year-old actress playing a 53-year old character supposedly having an affair with a 20-ish-year-old played by an actor in his mid-twenties, making that storyline not land at all the way it was supposed to). It's only a few cases of child actors being swapped out for newcomers where it feels that any time has passed at all. I'm assuming that for Season 3, which picks up twelve years after the end of Season 2, they'll have no choice but to age up the characters more convincingly.

Season 2 also has a bit of a mid-season dip into melodrama. Kelly looking for her birth parents, the Stevens' marriage woes and Karen's business and personal decisions aren't bad storylines per se, but they feel a bit too soap-opera-ish and divorced from the big-picture storylines elsewhere, in contrast to say Ellen's personal storyline which dovetails superbly into the grander political picture.

Still, if things dip a little in the middle, they pick up momentum towards the end. The final two episodes form a season finale as outrageously good as any other show's in the last decade, packed with human drama, heroism and political brinksmanship, although we could have maybe done without the BSG trope of allies aiming handguns at one another whilst making speeches, and everyone being just fine with that five minutes later. The finale transitions us, via a surprisingly well-judged use of Nirvana, into the 1990s and another shift in geopolitical fortunes which should give us a very interesting third season.

For All Mankind's (****½) second season starts well, dips in the middle, but roars back strong at the end with an outstanding run of episodes that make the wait for Season 3 feel very interminable indeed. The season is available now worldwide on Apple TV.

For All Mankind: Season 1

June, 1969. The world watches with bated breath as the first manned mission to the moon touches down. The mission is a success, and cosmonaut Alexei Leonov makes his name in history as the first human to successfully land on another astronomical body. American President Nixon is utterly furious and extols NASA to greater lengths to catch up to the Soviet Union and overtake it. When the Soviets land a woman on the moon, NASA is forced to dust off the Mercury 13 proposal to send female astronauts into space. When the Soviets begin prospecting for water, the organisation is told to go one better and land the first-ever permanantly-manned base on the surface.

For All Mankind is a counterfactual or alt-history SF story, taking as the point of divergence the premature death of Sergei Korolev in 1966. Korolev was a prime mover in the Soviet space programme and helped push the USSR into putting the first satellite and the first man in space, ahead of the Americans. His death and the resulting infighting to succeed him delayed Soviet plans for their own lunar programme. With him surviving in this alternate timeline, the USA and USSR remain locked in the space programme for many more years, trading "firsts" as they seek to outdo one another.

The idea of an alternate history is intriguing, but the show - spearheaded by Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek: The Next Generation veteran Ronald D. Moore - recognises that that is not enough by itself. The story needs to be rooted in its characters and their lives. The story pursues several story arcs across the first season to this end. In one, Edward Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) strives to overcome his inability to keep his mouth shut and his lack of confidence in being a father to win the manned moonflight mission he craves. His friend and colleague Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman) enjoys the rock star elements of being a hotshot test pilot and astronaut a little too much, to the despair of his wife Tracy (Sarah Jones), herself a skilled pilot. Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) is trying to become a NASA flight controller, but is held back by her lack of political acumen and her close association with Saturn V designer Wernher Von Braun (Colm Feore), whose brilliance has helped America get into space but whose Nazi affiliations during WWII continue to undermine public confidence.

Subplots follow the formation of a new training programme for female astronauts, including Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger), Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) and Ellen Wilson (Jodi Baldfour), along with Tracy Stevens. Spanning as it does the late 1960s and early 1970s, the show touches base with the civil rights movement, with Danielle serving as the first African-American trainee astronaut, and lesbian Ellen trying to keep the details of her love life a secret.

The show is exacting in its commitment to real science and technology of the period, including some very clever ideas such as repurposing Skylab into a lunar base module when the President decides they need a moonbase yesterday. The early missions, using the actual Apollo technology of the day, are recreated in impressive detail, with some intriguing variances from the norm: Apollo 11 has such a rough landing (Neil Armstrong picking a different and more difficult landing spot than he did in reality) that later missions are checked over in greater detail, leading to Apollo 13 flying without a hitch. The show's absolute high point in terms of visual effects is the landing of Apollo 15 at the edge of Shackleton Crater in the fifth episode, which is just a jaw-dropping moment.

The first half of the season spans two years and takes in a lot of plot points and ideas, making the most of its long episodes (several top an hour) to tell almost self-contained stories about training, politics and the scientific challenges of space travel, not to mention the danger. In a clever move, although actors play key real NASA figures such as Von Braun and Armstrong, all the footage of politicians use real archival footage, sometimes slightly tweaked with effects, with sound-alike actors giving an air of authenticity to proceedings. This is particularly impressive when Ted Kennedy (who in this timeline misses a certain party because of Senate hearings on the greatly expanded space programme and thus avoids the major scandal that derailed his career) becomes President, since obviously there's no archival footage of him as President to use, so the vfx crew get pretty creative in how they sell that.

The second half of the season focuses onto a period of several months and kicks off with a major catastrophe which destroys a relief mission to the moon, leaving three astronauts stranded at their base without hope of relief in the near future. They struggle to deal with being stuck in close confines with one another, with mental health problems being compounded by evidence that a rival Soviet base is up to no good. This story becomes more epic, with family crises back on Earth and a second relief mission which also runs into trouble, in an Apollo 13-on-steroids kind of way, which requires some ingenious solutions. The shift in gears sees the show come into its own, and become a triumph of modern science fiction screen storytelling.

For All Mankind's first season (****½) is a success, with some outstanding writing, acting and extremely impressive effects (the odd ropy explosion here and there excepted). The show's alternate history is sold so convincingly that it's easy to forget that this never happened, and in real life we may be lucky to get back to the moon this decade, sixty years on. But the show does feel like a vindication of science fiction. The premise is similar to Stephen Baxter's novel Voyage, whilst a lot of it feels like it draws on Arthur C. Clarke's assertion that the Vietnam War would have paid for everything he and Stanley Kubrick depicted on screen in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Vietnam still happens, but ends much earlier in the show's timeline). It's a show that feels simultaneously nostalgic but forwards-thinking, and it always compelling to watch. The show is available worldwide now on Apple+.