All season long, For All Mankind has been building up to some kind of Martian independence movement, for the people who live on the Red Planet to stand up and declare that this is their home and they deserve to run it, rather than be dictated to by bureaucrats back on Earth. One of the things that’s been irritating me about this season is how the show has been stacking the deck in favor of their perspective. The cause of Martian separatism has champions like Ed Baldwin, who died nobly a couple episodes back; and his brave grandson Alex, who uncovered information about the M-6’s plan to replace most human workers on Mars with automation. Meanwhile, one of the only people arguing that we should prioritize life on Earth is Palmer James, the smug head of the Mars Peacekeepers (MPK) whose interests include blackmail and police brutality.
For All Mankind is usually more nuanced than that, and I wanted to see it explore the other side of this debate. That said, once the revolution actually got underway at the end of this week’s episode, “Svoboda,” I stopped caring about that stuff.
In the final scene, the MPK cracks down on protesters who are understandably upset about the M-6’s plan to replace them all with robots and send them back to Earth. Beforehand, Mayor Costa Ronin tries the barest bit to smooth things over by walking through the crowd and saying hello to people, but when they don’t stop protesting, he implements a curfew and orders the MPK to enforce it. He doesn’t even try to persuade any of the protesters before concluding they can’t be reasoned with, so it doesn’t seem like his heart was in it.
The riot scene itself is very exciting. It’s wonderfully filmed, with the waves of protesters and MPK officers pushing and breaking against each other like waves. Once flashbangs are deployed, shots fired, and people hurt (including Alex and Lily), we know there’s no going back. The status quo has shifted in a way that sets up a very interesting back half of the season. And despite my personal misgivings about how For All Mankind is biased in favor of the protesters, it was easy to ride this scene into sympathy for them. Now I just want to see what happens next. Viva Mars!
Space Morality, Space Murder, and the KGB
Apart from the riot, the best scene of the episode comes right at the beginning, when we catch up with former Roscosmos director Irina Morozova. After she was disgraced at the end of Season 4, she spent months in a Soviet gulag where the guards tried to starve, freeze, and beat a favorable confession out of her. Irina toughs it out long enough to reach her contacts, who give her information she can use to threaten the guards. She turns the tables and eventually gets herself released.
I didn’t expect to spend so much time with a relatively minor character from Season 4 at this point in the game, but it’s an absorbing, elliptical sequence. And Irina does reenter the story in the present as a security consultant working for Kuragin. She’s part of the delegation the company sends to Mars, which means she’s now in Happy Valley in the midst of this riot. As a former KGB operative, she’ll surely be able to make a horrible contribution or two.
Meanwhile, it doesn’t take long for a few important people to figure out that Alex and Lily were the ones who leaked the information about the automation plan, which is the reason everyone is protesting in the first place. Miles is afraid that Lily might go to jail for it and wants her to rat out Alex, but she refuses.
As for Alex, Dev immediately deduces that he’s the one who leaked the files and confronts him about it in a scene that feels a tad underwritten. They both accuse each other of being selfish, and while Alex definitely has the better case, it’s hard to get a handle on what Dev’s plan is. We know he’s been bending all of his energy towards designing and building a self-sustaining city on Mars, called Meru, which he hopes will house a million people. In order to do that, he needs to cooperate at least to some extent with the M-6 nations, which means going along with their automation plans…but if he goes along with their automation plans, almost everyone currently living on Mars will be sent back to Earth, which means there’ll be no one around to live in the glorious city of the future he’s building.
I was waiting for someone to point out this self-defeating irony, but no one did. This might track if the show portrayed Dev as a mercurial loony (perhaps taking inspiration from a real-life billionaire who’s obsessed with Mars), but he’s generally depicted as a world-weary super-genius, so it just seems like he’s failed to notice this giant flaw in his plan. Or maybe there’s more to his plan we don’t know yet.
Aleida also confronts Dev about the automation plan, which she calls “a bad idea.” That said, she seems more upset that he didn’t tell her about it sooner, since keeping her in the dark makes it all the harder to do her job as the CEO of his company. We’ll see what side of the line she eventually lands on. I’m glad she’s on Mars for this crisis, because Aleida’s foul-mouthed, cut-to-the-chase energy always makes for good TV.
First Look at ‘For All Mankind’ Spin-off Brings Us Behind the Iron Curtain
Sci-fi fans will soon be able to embark on a new mission, as Apple TV’s companion thriller has officially set a date for launch.
Finally, we get a big update on Celia Boyd’s ongoing investigation into the murder of Yoon Tae-Min, a plotline that’s on the verge of getting drowned out by everything else that’s going on. It ends up that Celia’s friend and MPK partner Fred Stanislaus was involved in the killing. Yoon, an illegal immigrant on Mars, found out about the automation plans while working for Kuragin and was threatening to go public unless he got paid off. Fred and another officer were ordered to rough him up a little bit to scare him into silence. But things got out of hand and Yoon ended up dead on the surface of the Red Planet.
Also, Fred was the one who beaned Celia on the head with a pipe when she started making inquiries into this stuff, all in an effort to “help” her. These are major revelations, and it would have been nice to fully explore how Celia feels about them, especially since actor Mireille Enos does such a great job walking through Celia’s emotions. But there’s no time because Celia and Fred have to go confront the protesters immediately after their talk, and then the episode is over.
And have we forgotten that Kelly and a bunch of other Helios astronauts are currently flying to the moon of Titan? How is the riot (and whatever comes after) going to affect those plans? How will the mission go when mission control is in chaos? As always, For All Mankind has a lot of balls up in the air at once. Now that the season is really picking up steam, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
- Release Date
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2019 – 2027-00-00
- Network
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Apple TV
- Directors
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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
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Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, Ben Nedivi, Bradley Thompson, David Weddle, Nichole Beattie, Joe Menosky
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
