The fourth episode of For All Mankind’s fifth season, “Open Source,” resets the table after an emotional installment that bid goodbye to one of the show’s longest-serving characters. But Earth, Mars, and the universe keep turning, even without Ed Baldwin. Kelly and Alex spend the top of the episode wistfully remembering the Grouchy Old Man of Mars, and the people of Happy Valley turn out in force to commemorate him, but the show has too much business to linger.
And in “Open Source,” that business is mostly setup. On Earth, we’re introduced to a new character, or at least, a new version of a character we barely knew before: Avery Stevens/Jarrett, daughter of epic screw-up Danny Stevens, grandchild of heroes Gordo and Tracy Stevens, now in the military and hoping to join a mission to the Moon. The problem is that she was raised in the shadow of her father’s deadly mistakes on Mars, which has not been good for her. She was mocked for it her whole life and is carrying a massive chip on her shoulder. Worse, she’s in denial about it. “I don’t do depression, sir. I leave that to the philosophy majors,” she tells an officer assessing her fitness for the mission. She’s fine, everybody, not dangerously repressed at all.
Avery’s reintroduction gives the show an excuse to bring back Danielle Poole, who cast some doubt on Avery’s fitness by honestly telling the military about some of her struggles growing up. Avery goes to Danielle’s house to confront her but gets a double dose of kindly wisdom instead, and goes back for her second interview ready to be honest. She passes, which means she’s bound for the Moon.
Avery is a bit of an X-factor this season. The show seems to be saying goodbye to a lot of its legacy characters — I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the last we see of Danielle Poole, who the show didn’t bother to make up like an old lady despite her now being in her 70s, by the way; they must have spent the old person makeup budget on Joel Kinnaman — and moving everyone else to Mars. What’s happening on the Moon that could affect the wider plot, and will Avery be able to fight through her maladjustment long enough for it to matter? Stay tuned.
Speaking of characters moving to Mars, Aleida arrives in this episode, which means Mars is about to get a lot more fun. Aleida immediately starts swearing, giving herself hangovers, and reconnecting with Kelly. Her say-whatever-comes-to-mind energy is always appreciated, although it was surprising to see her be so hard-nosed with her assistant. She must have picked that up from Margo.
Aleida and Kelly are going to work together to pull off a mission to the moon of Titan, with Aleida in mission control and Kelly on the crew. Seeing them paired up is another one of those moments where you realize how far this show has come. In season 1, Margo was part of mission control and Kelly wasn’t even on the show yet. Now Margo’s protégé and Ed Baldwin’s daughter are doing it for themselves, and on Mars, no less. It’ll be fun to have more of these kinds of scenes, but with different characters in a new environment.
That is, if they still have jobs after Dev puts his plan into motion.
Even in the Future Past of ‘For All Mankind,’ Everyone’s Worried About AI
The most important (and strangest) storyline in “Source Code” involves Alex, who gets a low-level data entry job at Helios. At one point, he’s trying to open a file on a Helios server but finds he doesn’t have security clearance. Convinced it could be important, he later hacks into the system with the hacking skills he apparently has, and then he finds the truth.
According to this file, Dev is putting into motion a plan where the great majority of workers on Mars will be replaced by automated systems within five years, and most people who live there now will be sent back to Earth. We don’t know all the details yet, but it looks like this is a joint venture between Helios, its Soviet competitor Kuragin, and the M-6 nations, so all the powers that be are conspiring to end the dream of a free and independent Martian people.
This also means that the specter of AI automation, such a huge talking point in our world, has come to For All Mankind. And sure, season 5 takes place in 2012, years before generative AI was dominating headlines in our reality, but technology in the world of For All Mankind has developed faster, pushed along by the space race. They’re facing the problem earlier.
The revelation that Helios plans to use AI to replace workers is treated as a sinister revelation, complete with ominous music cues. And it is a serious situation, but the presentation also feels a little naive. Alex is shocked, shocked that a billionaire tech oligarch like Dev might consider automating away jobs, but isn’t that more or less what we’ve come to expect of our own tech oligarchs? The portrayal of Dev in general has always felt a bit behind the times. He feels like a take on Elon Musk’s public persona as it existed 10 years ago, back when Musk was widely seen as a technological visionary helping move humanity forward, before he started running around with chainsaws on stage and buying Twitter so he could boost his own posts. It’s much harder than it would have been even a few years ago to accept that a guy like Dev would be a cool, calculating mastermind, not after Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his company to Meta and then shut down the metaverse.
To be fair, we don’t know the whole story yet. As Alex points out, why would Dev labor to build a city on Mars if he were planning to ship all the people back to Earth? Sometimes it’s hard to tell if For All Mankind is worshiping Dev as an Ayn Rand-esque ubermensch or painting him as an egotistical confidence man. There’s a weird moment where Aleida calls him out for not communicating with her, the CEO of his company, about his ambitious and expensive plans for Mars, a lapse that led to a ton of blowback. “I haven’t always been the most communicative person, but in my life I’ve lost trust in people, been stabbed in the back by those closest to me,” he replies. How is that an excuse for being unprofessional and doing a bad job of running your business, which is what Aleida was complaining about? But again, it’s not clear whether the show is highlighting his hypocrisy or agreeing with him.
In any case, it’s clear that Dev doesn’t intend to send everyone back to Earth. He says that he’s been “waiting” for Aleida to arrive on Mars, and he obviously wants Alex to stick around. Is he being pressured into using automation by Kuragin and the M-6, or is this all part of his plan to send the rabble back to Earth and popular his brave new world with only the most superior of beings?
We’ll have to wait to be sure. For now, Alex and Lily leak the file to the press, so now everyone knows of the plan. There’s never a dull moment on Mars.
- 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
