‘For All Mankind’ Returns to Soaring Heights in Season Four
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No current drama on television tries to cover as much ground, literally or figuratively, as For All Mankind. The fourth season of the Apple TV+ drama — set in an alternate version of history where the Soviets beat America to the moon, triggering a never-ending space race — splits its time between Houston, Moscow, and Mars. It is, at various points, a science-fiction epic, a political potboiler, a spy-thriller, and a workplace drama where one of the branch offices happens to be on the hostile surface of another planet.
Throughout the series, characters have debated whether the risk to the lives of people traveling in space is worth the potential scientific, political, and economic rewards of each journey. The sheer ambition of FAM has its own risk-reward calculus. When the series is executing at its highest level — say, when a trio of interconnected NASA missions averted nuclear armageddon on both Earth and the moon in the incredible second season finale — it can feel as engrossing as any series of recent vintage. But there are also times when FAM is trying to do so many things at once that something inevitably goes wrong with a cascading effect, like how a malfunction in one minor piece of a spacecraft can scuttle a whole mission. The third season did a lot of excellent work, yet the various miscues were so bad — particularly a prominent subplot involving Danny Stevens, a dangerously bitter second-generation astronaut — that it was hard to notice anything else.
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Early in this season, veteran astronaut Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) takes over as commander of Happy Valley, the Mars base jointly operated by the American, Soviet, and North Korean governments, along with the tech company Helios. Addressing her new troops, she says, “We need to learn from our past, all the while keeping our eyes focused on what’s ahead.”
The new episodes do their best to follow Dani’s advice. The creative team has very much internalized the lessons of Season Three. The kinds of characters and subplots that weren’t clicking before have been minimized or outright removed, and the show leans more into its biggest strengths. Through the first seven episodes(*), it’s more consistent and satisfying than Season Three. But when you try to do as many things simultaneously as FAM, it’s not all going to work.
(*) Because each season tends to be at its best in the concluding chapters that tie various threads together, it’s hard to make a full evaluation without screeners of the last three episodes. But the Season Three finale didn’t cure all of that year’s ills.
The story resumes in 2003(*), almost a decade after we last saw Dani, Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), and the other survivors of the first manned missions to Mars. Happy Valley has grown from a glorified trailer park into a sprawling complex with hundreds of staffers. The alliance between the three nations running the place, and between them and Helios, remains fragile. But space has become big business for all of them, particularly when an asteroid loaded with valuable minerals comes close enough to Mars for Ed to lead a mission to capture it for orbital mining purposes.
(*) If you came of age in this particular era of music, boy will this season’s soundtrack be for you, with choice cuts by The Strokes, Gorillaz, The New Pornographers, and DMX, among many others.
Space as a new frontier of capitalism is the season’s most prominent theme. New to the cast is Toby Kebbell as Miles, a former oil rig driller so desperate for cash that he signs up for a two-year Mars stint. He quickly discovers that life on another world is much less glamorous — and lucrative — for Helios’ blue-collar grunts than it is for a famous astronaut like Dani. In time, he gets tangled up in black market dealing, attempts to unionize the Martian workforce, and other conflicts where Dani finds herself acting more as a middle manager than an explorer. Meanwhile, NASA is now run by ex-Chrysler CEO Eli Hobson (Daniel Stern), who won’t shut up about his first glimpse of the assembly line in Detroit, nor about his dealings with the UAW.
There are lots of other things afoot on both planets. Season Three tried to largely ignore Ed’s advancing age. Here, it’s part of the text, as everyone is incredulous that this guy who flew combat missions in Korea 50 years earlier(*) is still piloting spacecraft. Ed’s refusal to let go of his glory days puts him into conflict with Dani, with his astronaut daughter Kelly (Cynthy Wu), and almost everyone else. Kinnaman’s most interesting in this role when Ed’s flaws are on display, which is almost all the time now.
(*) There’s definitely more of an attempt by the hair and makeup team to age up the remaining Season One characters, as opposed to Shantel VanSanten donning a silver wig last year and otherwise still looking like a woman in her 30s. Kinnaman doesn’t wholly transform into a septuagenarian Ed, but there’s enough of an effort that you just go along with it.
Meanwhile, we spend a lot of time in Russia, where former NASA boss Margo (Wrenn Schmidt) has been living in secret, ever since the KGB faked her death to conceal that she’d been feeding them classified information. (Even if she was coerced, it’s still treason.) Once upon a time, Schmidt played Philip and Elizabeth Jennings’ handler on The Americans, and this subplot feels very much like an extended version of that show’s story about Philip’s second wife Martha winding up in similar Russian exile. Still grieving what she thinks was the death of Margo, along with many real demises when domestic terrorists detonated a bomb at NASA HQ, flight controller Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña) is struggling with PTSD, and eventually winds up seeking help from ousted Helios boss Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi).
With so much going on, cuts had to be made. After a cameo in the season premiere, Jodi Balfour is no longer on the show as astronaut-turned-POTUS Ellen Waverly. On the one hand, it’s a loss of a good character. On the other, last season’s arc about Ellen coming out of the closet while serving in the Oval Office felt a bit disconnected from the rest of the series. Essentially swapping out that portion of screen time for the subplot about Miles and his co-workers puts the emphasis back on the complications of space, which is the show’s sweet spot.
Unfortunately, Toby Kebbell is largely a blank in this key new role, just as he was as the leading man on Apple’s Servant. He’s not charismatic enough to be the star of what’s essentially a show within the show. The ideas being presented with the Helios gang are interesting enough to mostly compensate for this, but not entirely.
Still, Miles is a vast improvement on Danny, where both the characters on the show and the people writing them seemed oblivious to how terrible he was for far too long. Danny is not present when Season Four begins, and the few references to him are both vague and ominous, as if everyone (again, both onscreen and off) would really prefer to never discuss him again.
While it can seem at times both implausible and somewhat incestuous that so many key players from the Apollo program are still important decades later, the remaining actors are pretty terrific. Marshall and Kinnaman are sensational whenever Dani and Ed come into direct conflict, while Schmidt more than ably carries the show’s new Russian section.
And more than anything else, For All Mankind remains great at simultaneously illustrating how beautiful and dangerous space exploration can be. Over time, it’s had varying degrees of success at dramatizing the geopolitical concerns surrounding the idea of sending people out into the void. This year is pretty strong on that front, but when all else fails, it’s still so palpable that we are watching people living and working on Mars, in a way that’s still exciting when combined with everything else.
Season Four of For All Mankind premieres November 10 on Apple TV+, with episodes releasing weekly.
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