******ASTEROID-SIZED SPOILERS!******

I’d like to reiterate my tremendous love for Ron Moore’s “For All Mankind”; it’s a brilliant alternate-reality series, which repeatedly demonstrates a healthy respect for authentic space science as well.  The characters (past and present) are deeply compelling, with issues of sexism and racism left largely in humanity’s rear-view mirror as it begins its painful transition into a spacefaring species. The show often leaves me with a powerful yearning to live in that ambitious, alternate-21st century instead of the one we’re locked into today; particularly with our current global shifts toward totalitarianism and fundamentalism.  

The defining event that set the show’s alternate history into motion is the United States missing the window to land humans on the moon in 1969 (S1’s “Red Moon”); an event which allows the Soviets to get there first, resulting in an ever-escalating Space Race (prolonging the Soviet Union’s existence, as well). This headier timeline leads to a lunar base by the end of Season 1 (“A City Upon the Hill”). The future of “For All Mankind” is similar to the dreams promised to my generation when I was a kid; with lunar colonies and Mars bases by the year 2000 (see: “Space: 1999”).  Still waiting on those robots in every kitchen, of course…

This fanciful dream universe of this series is made real through authentic science as well as relatable, fallible, all-too human characters and their struggles.  In the recently ended 4th season, these characters embark on a new challenge, as competition between world governments and the private sector over a mineral-rich asteroid dubbed “Goldilocks” enflames a populist uprising on Mars…

Core Characters

Eternally bitter, past-his-prime astronaut Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) is an antihero in every sense. This year he takes a hard right turn into full-on disgrace.  Ed has been at the top of the space pyramid for so long that he feels threatened whenever that status is challenged, even by longtime colleague and friend Danielle Poole, who’s forced to take command of Mars’ Happy Valley base after Ed spirals into a deep depression. Ed is also fighting hand tremors (possible early effects of Parkinson’s disease), which clearly impede his capability, as he uses junior officers to cover for him during missions.  Rule-breaker Ed has also taken to growing his own private marijuana stash (using the base’s resources), while entering into a relationship with a (very) junior Russian cosmonaut named Svetlana Sakharova (Masha Mashkova), who’s later sent back to Earth after a fight with a fellow cosmonaut nearly kills him (“House Divided”).

All the while, Ed dodges his granddaughter Kelly and grandson Alex, who’ve both returned to Mars to advance Kelly’s research into possible Martian life.  And what does “bad grandpa” Ed do when left alone with his grandson?  He uses the boy to crawl through an air duct to commit an act of sabotage (“Legacy”). Backed into a corner and facing a return to Earth, an angered Ed doesn’t do the honorable thing.  Instead he doubles down, locking horns with Commander Poole, and whipping up a populist frenzy of Happy Valley workers—at the urging of Dev—in order to illegally seize the earthbound Goldilocks asteroid and dethrone Poole (“Legacy,” “Brazil,” “Perestroika”).  I used to tolerate Ed’s darker side because his means was usually for a greater objective.  Now I simply can’t stand him. Ed Baldwin is a bitter, selfish old man who refuses to step aside with any grace or humility.

Note: I need to stress that my feelings for Ed as a character have nothing to do with my great respect for actor Joel Kinnaman, who does a remarkable job with the material he’s given. The Swedish-born actor thoroughly loses himself in “American-ness” when playing the part. The 43-year old Kinnaman is done no favors with his increasingly implausible age makeup, which is looking more and more like something out of 2013’s “Bad Grandpa.”

Retired astronaut and happy grandma Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) is pulled from retirement this season for the thankless job of taking command of the Happy Valley base on Mars, after current commander Ed Baldwin demonstrates increasing instability.  Once there, Poole attempts to address the inequity she sees between the command crew and the underpaid workers who keep the base running (“Have a Nice Sol”).  Poole tries a few morale-raising gestures which, unfortunately, do little to address the core issues at hand; namely low pay and poor working conditions.  Poole’s situation is made worse when she finds herself challenged by first officer, Ed, the man she was sent to relieve.  At nearly every turn, Ed challenges her orders and subverts her authority, sometimes in full view of other officers (“House Divided”).

When a critical retrieval mission to the Goldilocks asteroid is launched from Mars orbit, Poole works to send the asteroid to Earth, as intended.  Unfortunately for Poole, her executive officer Ed chooses to side with Dev.  Together, Ed and Dev—both men of privilege—whip up a frenzy with the exploited Mars workers (similar to how billionaire Donald Trump now pretends to champion the working class, which he’s long exploited). They then sabotage the Ranger’s flight program in order to send Goldilocks into Mars orbit, instead.  For her efforts to quell the uprising, Poole is shot and nearly killed, before she’s sent home to Earth (“Perestroika”).  Her mission to stabilize Happy Valley ends in failure because of her mutinous exec.  In what will sadly be a repeating pattern for this season, a strong woman is taken down, while powerful men get off scot-free.  

Note:  Actress Krys Marshall is simply amazing, and Danielle Poole is easily my favorite character of this series. I sincerely wish that the 4th season ended with Poole being served Ed and Dev’s heads on a silver platter.  Her character deserved so much better than being shot, nearly killed and sent home. As a longtime fan of this show, Poole’s fate left me feeling about as betrayed as the character.

Filthy-rich industrialist and Elon Musk stand-in Dev Ayesi (Edi Gathegi) rose from humble origins in Kenya to heading the Polaris aerospace company (with the late Karen Baldwin).  By season 4, Polaris easily rivals the capabilities of American, Soviet and other international space agencies. Beginning as a humbly democratic figure (S3’s “Polaris” “Game Changer”) to eventual megalomania, Dev was never a particularly likable character.  This season, Dev emerges from a self-induced exile at his beach house when he’s approached by ambitious space scientists Kelly Baldwin and Aleida Rosales, who convince him to get back in the game.  Eventually he journeys off to Mars himself, in a larger plot to steal the Goldilocks asteroid for Polaris’ own interests at Happy Valley.  He also uses the disgruntled Ed and the bitter workers of Happy Valley for his own ends.  

Note: Actor Edi Gathegi believably conveys Dev’s chameleonic ability to play the room, which is his greatest strength. That I have such strong feelings against this deeply unethical character means that the actor is clearly doing his job well. 

Disgraced, exiled former NASA flight controller Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) is given the most brutal arc of the season. Forced to commit espionage against NASA in order to save the life of her Soviet colleague and lover Sergei Nikulov (Piotr Adamczyk), Margo fakes her death in the aftermath of the Johnson Space Center’s destruction (S3’s “Stranger in a Strange Land”) and defects to Russia (as Canadian expat Margo Reynolds) to avoid prosecution in the US.  This year, we see an older, more infirm Margo living a lonely life in the Soviet Union, unable to fully connect with her suspicious colleagues in Moscow, after being brutally tortured by the KGB (“Glasnost” “Have a Nice Sol”).  Eventually, fate and her own talent bring her back into prominence, as she’s the only person qualified to act as liaison between the US and Soviet governments in their efforts to capture the mineral-rich Goldilocks asteroid (“Leningrad”).  It also reunites her with her ill-fated lover Sergei, who’s living anonymously as a Midwestern science teacher after defecting to the US (“Legacy”). 

Once again, Margo’s life begins to unravel in the US, after Sergei is killed by the KGB in a hotel room while arranging to meet her.  She then foolishly agrees to side with Dev and her former protégé Aleida’s plot to reroute the Goldilocks asteroid to Mars instead of Earth.  When it’s revealed that a mole inside of NASA’s Mission Control was working with saboteurs at Happy Valley, Margo chooses to take the fall, rather than ruin wife/mother Aleida’s life (“Perestroika”).  Margo’s professional life at NASA was destroyed because she chose to save Sergei’s life (S3’s “All In”).  The character, who was mentored by no less than Werner von Braun himself, goes from pioneering space engineer and mission controller to a bitter life in exile—choosing hardship rather than betraying those for whom she cares. Margo is one of the most noble characters on the show, despite her personal entanglements and misjudgments.

Note: Wrenn Schmidt gives what may well be the best performance in the entire series, as the disgraced Margo Madison.  Her age makeup also looks more natural than Ed’s ‘Bad Grandpa’ getup. Going from NASA’s first female flight director to the head of the former JSC itself before her eventual disgrace and exile to the Soviet Union.  Despite Schmidt’s terrific performance, I’m saddened that Margo Madison is yet another in an ongoing series of strong women of this series getting ‘put in their place’ so that men can fill the power void (see: Eli Hobson).  Given that Margo is taken into custody, who knows if we’ll even see her surviving into season 5. 

NASA Flight Controller Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña) finds herself awkwardly reunited with her former mentor Margo Madison, after believing Margo died in the JSC explosion (this universe’s 9/11). After forgiving Margo for lying to her, they learn to work together again (“Leningrad”), and later conspire to divert the Goldilocks asteroid; in accordance with the wishes of Dev Ayesi, who agrees to finance a private pet science project for Aleida and her new partner Kelly Baldwin, both of whom are on the outs with NASA (“Bear Hug”).  Once again, there is a trend this season with private enterprise ‘saving the day,’ even when it resorts to sabotage and espionage to do so.  In the end, Margo takes the fall for Aleida and is arrested before being returned to the Soviet Union.  Yes, Kelly and Aleida get their project funding, but arguably at the cost of their integrity, after partnering with the duplicitous Dev.

Note: The reunion between Aleida and Margo offer some of the most potent dramatic fireworks of the entire season, since Margo has always been more a maternal figure to Aleida than a simple mentor, and Aleida naturally feels red-hot betrayal upon learning the truth. Earlier in the series, it seemed that Aleida was being groomed to be the future head of NASA herself. Now she’s become another cog in the larger Helios machine.

After partnering with Aleida and Dev to co-finance a new Mars research project, Kelly Baldwin (Cynthi Wu) and her son Alex (Ezra Lin) are allowed to return to Mars together.  For Kelly, this is a twofold opportunity; she can keep her son close-by while she works, and she can reunite with her increasingly estranged father, Ed.  While looking after his grandson for a couple of days, ol’ grandpa Ed takes the boy into an air duct on a dangerous mission of sabotage for his new ‘business partner,’ Dev (“Legacy”).  Kelly is once again disappointed by her selfish old man, with whom she hoped to reconnect once she and her son returned to Mars (Alex was technically born on Mars, after all…).

Note:  Kelly played a significant role in last season’s race to Mars than in this year’s storyline. Here’s hoping her storyline is beefed up a bit next season. Maybe she can becomes this universe’s eventual discoverer of Martian life…?

NASA administrator Eli Hobson (Daniel Stern) is the former head of Chrysler and Lee Iacocca stand-in who is the new administrator of NASA this season. The character of Hobson is more in line with this season’s not-so-subtle mission to sing the praises of capitalism (in our own timeline, Chrysler was bailed out twice by the federal government, both in 1979 and 2008).  This year, the otherwise nice-guy Hobson puts the kibosh on Kelly’s Martian biology experiments (using innovative rover technology) in favor of a manned mission to capture the Goldilocks asteroid, which becomes a literal gold rush in space (“Goldilocks”).  The Goldilocks asteroid capture mission locks the American and Soviet governments on a collision course with the greed of Dev’s Helios corporation.  In the end, Hobson and his ruthless Soviet counterpart, Irina Morozova (Svetlana Efremova) are both betrayed by their own trusted government employees—another none-too-subtle rebuke of government in favor of unrestrained capitalism (“Perestroika”). 

Note: Daniel Stern is an actor I’ve admired for a long while, going back to his turn as the nice-guy observer (“JAFO”) in 1983’s “Blue Thunder,” as well as his roles in “City Slickers” (1991) and so many others. 

Blue collar worker Miles Dale (Toby Kebbell) is a new character who is perhaps my greatest disappointment of this season.  He began as an honest, hardworking air conditioning repairman (a much sought-after skill in our universe, particularly with escalating climate change), who chooses to seek a job on Mars in order to better provide for his family in Louisiana (“Glasnost,” “Have a Nice Sol”). He quickly realizes that the pay barely covers his personal expenses at Mars’ Happy Valley, let alone provide well for his family on Earth (“Bear Hug”). The awe and wonder of space travel quickly wear off for Miles (something the series itself has suffered from a bit this season), and he allies himself with the local black market, ran by the shady-yet-affable Russian, Ilya (Dimiter D. Marinov). 

Miles soon begins his own side hustle of illegally smuggling Mars rocks to Earth to make jewelry (“House Divided”), raking in an embarrassment of riches.  Soon, he butts heads with his less-ambitious former mentor Ilya, and goes to work for himself.  Miles’ greed kicks into overdrive after a workers’ strike on Mars (“Crossing the Line”). Soon, he falls under the sway of Dev Ayesi’s efforts to steal the Goldilocks asteroid (“Legacy,” “Brazil,” “Perestroika”). When cornered and interrogated by undercover intelligence agents on Mars, he’s beaten within an inch of his life, but he lives to scam and swindle another day.  

Note: At first, Miles was presented as an audience avatar; an everyman going into space to earn a living for his family.  However, he soon turned into an unethical black marketeer who usurps his friend and mentor Ilya, becoming a greedy cross between Gomer Pyle and The Godfather.  With all respect to Toby Kebbell (a fine actor), I can’t stand Miles Dale; and if he should crack his helmet faceplate while looking for more Mars rocks to smuggle, I won’t shed any tears.

Samantha Massing (Tyner Rushing) is the blue collar Mars worker and bunkmate of Miles who shows him the ropes after losing a friend in a failed Mars mission at the beginning of season 4 (“Glasnost”). Like many others working in the lower levels, she gets caught up in the workers’ strike (“Crossing the Line”) and eventually agrees to help capture the Goldilocks asteroid for Mars by sabotaging the computers aboard the Ranger with fake processors. When that plan fails, Massing does a spacewalk while the Ranger is at full thrust in order to stop the engine manually.  In the process, she is forced to kill a shipmate sent to stop her.

Note: All of this madness is fueled by Dev and Ed’s false rabble-rousing for Martian independence, which is only a front for their own personal ambitions and greed. 

Summing It Up

Season 4 began with a thriving Mars settlement ironically-named “Happy Valley,” which quickly saw itself drawn into a class war between the ‘elites’ of the colony (the astronaut administrators and scientists) and the grunts in the lower levels who keep the lights on and the toilets running.  This eventually boils down to an armed conflict, as workers led by ex-astronaut Ed Baldwin and Elon Musk stand-in Dev Ayesa, manage to derail an asteroid capture mission to claim the asteroid’s valuable minerals for Mars, instead of Earth (“Perestroika”).  

The Mars rebellion of this past season is, perhaps, loosely analogous to the United States’ January 6th 2021 coup attempt, only the coup on Mars is successful, leading to the near-death and expulsion of the colony’s administrator, Danielle Poole—a heroic character from previous seasons who’s given an indignant and thankless arc this year, as are most of the strong women characters of this show.  In fact, season 4 feels downright reactionary compared to previous seasons, particularly in its championing of unchained corporate and its depictions of powerful men continually usurping strong women characters (we barely hear a word about gay former astronaut and ex-US president Ellen Wilson, played by Jodi Balfour).

Meanwhile, aging Ed and greedy industrialist Dev have successfully weaponized the Mars working class. In essence, these two powerful men, through shameless populism, sabotage, violence and plotting, seize the day (and an asteroid).  Their illegal (and deadly) seizure of the asteroid originally bound for Earth leads to another time-jump coda at the end of the season to the year 2012, where the captured asteroid is now seen as a new moon of Mars, with a thriving mining settlement (“Perestroika”). Yeah, that’s great for Happy Valley, but it’s not exactly for “all” mankind, is it?  What about the billions of resource-hungry people still living on Earth? 

Granted, this season has been more ambitious than previous ones, with humanity on its way to becoming a true multi-world species, but to what end?  Many of the strong women characters of this series have been ‘put in their places’ while the clearly not-well Ed (who’s fighting early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease) is unjustly returned to the top of the space pyramid, along with newfound partner-in-crime Dev and shady repairman turned black-marketeer Miles.  Are these the characters we’re supposed to be rooting for this season? A threatened over-the-hill astronaut and two unethical-as-hell entrepreneurs?  No thanks.

This series is looking less like a mashup of “The Right Stuff” with “Star Trek” and more like a prequel to “The Expanse” (another brilliant show, but not necessarily a direction I’d like to see humanity headed). Then again, perhaps series’ co-creators Ron Moore (“Battlestar Galactica”), Matt Wolpert and  Ben Nedivi might simply be presenting that final obstacle in the road, a last gasp of human greed, before we finally embark on that quasi-utopian path “for all mankind.”  

Here’s hoping it’s not too late for a mid-flight course correction in season 5…

Where to Watch

“For All Mankind” is available to stream exclusively on AppleTV.