The previous episode of For All Mankind, “The Hard Six,” ended with Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) passed out at the controls of a Hopper after mounting a daring rescue mission to spring Lee Jung-Gil from jail after Lee is accused of murder. We knew Ed has Stage 3 cancer and shouldn’t fly, and the episode left us with the impression that he might have died, but I didn’t expect that to happen quite yet.
And I was right. Instead, this is the episode where Ed Baldwin dies. “Home” serves as a eulogy of sorts for him, as he digs in and goes out on his own terms.
Kelly (Cynthy Wu) finally finds out about Ed’s condition and starts arranging for her dad to get the best oncology care in the solar system, but Ed is having none of it. He’s a wounded animal under a porch, and refuses treatment. He wanders into Ilya’s Bar & Restaurant wearing a hospital gown and forces Ilya to pour drinks not just for him, but also for Kelly and Alex (Sean Kaufman), who are there to get him to go back to his room, but who ultimately have little choice but to accede to his wishes. So three generations of Baldwins have a drink together, all of them probably accepting that this is the end.
As Ed’s mind starts to slip, he flashes back to his time in the Korean War and finally to himself and Gordo Stevens (Michael Dorman) walking down a hallway at NASA about to take their first spaceflight. Karen (Shantel VanSanten) is there to see him off, along with their young son Shane, who died all the way back in Season 1. Bringing back these long-dead characters is a nice way to say goodbye to Ed, who was one of the only original members of the cast left. In the final moment of the episode, a close-up of Ed’s mouth — probably breathing his last breath — fades into a shot of his spacecraft gliding over the curve of the Earth. It’s contemplative and beautiful. It recalls the famous shot from 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a gorilla throws a bone into the air only for it to fade into an image of a space station. Most shows couldn’t get away with that kind of comparison, but For All Mankind has put in the work.
It’s true that we don’t actually see Ed’s cold and lifeless body, but it would feel like a cheat for the show to let him live after this eloquent send-off. Joel Kinnaman gets one last chance to shine in the part, and as nostalgic as it is to see him play young Ed once again during the Korean War sections, I think grumpy old man Ed is my favorite version of Ed, with his wheezing and his cackling and his moans and groans. He plays Ed’s wide-eyed senility exceptionally well in this episode.
It’s unofficial, but only barely.
Part of me wonders if this is also the last we’ll see of Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), another of the OG characters. True, she’s alive at the end of the episode, but in prison and unlikely to ever get out. Aleida (Coral Peña) visits to tell Margo about the latest goings-on at Helios. Kuragin, the Soviet company competing with Helios, also knows that there may be life on the moon of Titan, and is making plans to send a team there to investigate. They may even be able to do it faster than Helios. Margo points out that Kuragin probably has a spy within Helios (my money’s on Walt, Kelly’s persnickety boss from the previous episode) and suggests a way that Helios could beat Kuragin to the punch: by retrofitting Sojourner-1, the very first ship to land on Mars back in Season 3, for the trip.
The rub is that no one knows Sojourner-1 better than Aleida, so she’ll have to leave her family on Earth to go supervise the mission personally (hilariously, Aleida’s teenage daughter is borderline thrilled about this news). The Margo-Aleida scenes were the highlight of the season premiere, and their (almost) teary goodbye here is also fantastic.
It’s hard to imagine what else Margo could contribute to the story, and while the idea of soldiering on without her and Ed is sad, For All Mankind deserves a lot of credit for always being willing to push the narrative where it needs to go, even if that means shedding characters along the way. In the first season, setting foot on the Moon felt like a big deal. Now there’s a budding Martian separatist movement, and it doesn’t feel absurd because the show earned every step of the journey. At this point, it’s looking like Aleida will be the only OG character to make it to Season 6, which will be the show’s last. And that’ll be okay so long as For All Mankind keeps delivering like it always has.
Martian Murder Mystery
Margo, Aleida, and the Baldwins leave the biggest impressions in this episode, but For All Mankind always has multiple irons in the fire. MPK officer Celia Boyd (Mireille Enos) continues to look into the situation surrounding Lee Jung-Gil, becoming increasingly convinced that he didn’t commit the murder he’s been accused of. She thinks Kuragin is somehow involved, but her superior officer is in no mood to hear about her hunches, which is kind of understandable given how much dust the incident has kicked up. Celia visits a lower level of Happy Valley to ask some of the illegal immigrants working for Kuragin what they know, and someone beans her with a pipe. She survives but is put on paid leave, although I think we can expect her to keep sniffing around.
In light of the murder, the MPK is stepping up law enforcement on Mars, and not everyone in Happy Valley is happy about it. Miles’ daughter Lily (Ruby Cruz) gets arrested for tagging, and the MPK is not amused by her insistence that she has a right to protest under the First Amendment. “This isn’t America,” one officer replies. “There is no First Amendment.”
MIles (Toby Kebbell) pulls a few strings to get Lily released, but she is in a very fight-the-power kind of mood and intends to keep pushing back. “What if John Adams had been like…’Let’s not rile up the king’?” she asks. She also name-checks Maximilien Robespierre as a revolutionary worth emulating, which is a little alarming since Robespierre is best remembered as the guy who followed up the French Revolution with the “Reign of Terror,” which was about as fun as it sounds.
It’s hard to tell if For All Mankind is gently mocking Lily’s teenage idealism or agreeing with her, although my money’s on the latter. The show has always sided with characters who work outside the rules in the name of pushing humanity forward, and that’s a nice thought, but it’s sometimes hard to square with reality. For instance, tech billionaire Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi) comforts Alex, then worries about Ed’s deteriorating condition, with a very wise speech about the importance of making the most of whatever time you have left. And it would be great if the richest people in our world were that empathetic and insightful, but they seem more apt to spend millions of dollars doing freaky things to their bodies in an attempt to become immortal. In the age of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, we could probably use more hard-and-fast rules designed to curb the excesses of the rich and powerful, and For All Mankind’s steadfast belief in dogged individualism feels a bit naive.
But we’ll see how that ideological battle plays out over the rest of the season, which is looking up.
- Release Date
-
November 1, 2019
- Network
-
Apple TV
- Directors
-
Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, Andrew Stanton, Meera Menon, Dan Liu, Allen Coulter, Craig Zisk, Dennie Gordon, John Dahl, Lukas Ettlin, Wendey Stanzler, Seth Gordon, Sylvain White, Michael Morris, Maja Vrvilo, Sarah Boyd
- Writers
-
Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, Ben Nedivi, Bradley Thompson, David Weddle, Nichole Beattie, Joe Menosky
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
