Full spoilers follow for For All Mankind Season 5, Episode 2, which is streaming on Apple TV now.
Given Ed Baldwin’s penchant for risky moves, it was inevitable he’d go and do something bold for his old pal Lee Jung-gil, now in MPK custody for allegedly committing murder. The natural endpoint for the natural troublemaker is organizing a mission to bust Lee out of the M-6 jail in order to keep him from being extradited back to Earth for a trial that would, no doubt, lead to a conviction. The build-up, execution, and fallout from the slow-speed Hopper chase — give the guy a break, he’s in his 80s! — is just the kind of stuff For All Mankind does so well, and gives the necessary jolt to a season that struggled a bit out of the gate. Are we so back, FAM fam? I think we’re kinda back.
The episode opens minutes after the premiere left off, with Lee in handcuffs being perp-walked through the Happy Valley food court. It spends plenty of time dropping into pockets of conversations among the residents who don’t believe Lee could have killed a guy. As we’re reminded when Ed (Joel Kinnaman) tries to appeal to Governor Lenya Polivanov (Costa Ronin) to try Lee (C.S. Lee) on Mars, Lee was the one who saved the American crew’s life support systems all those years ago; without him, there would be no colony now.
But something fishy is obviously happening: Polivanov is insistent on Lee leaving Mars, and a concurrent investigation by lower-ranking MPK officer Celia Boyd (new cast member Mireille Enos) starts to surface that the Russian company/Helios analogue Kuragin is doing something unsavory and unsanctioned on the Martian surface at night. Whatever it is that they’re up to, it involves exploiting “Crater” labor, aka undocumented people who have made their way to Mars, and the murdered North Korean man, Yoon Tae-min, was one of those people. (At least no one can accuse For All Mankind for ever being too subtle in making connections to our real present day.)
Meanwhile, the other major thread in “The Hard Six” is that the search for life has gotten a major breakthrough via a Helios SEEKER probe sent to Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon: something’s creating proteins out there. The annoying engineer Walt Griebel (Christopher Denham) makes his smarmy return here, insisting on an emotionless by-the-book further exploration of arguably one of the biggest scientific discoveries ever – that life exists beyond Earth – by sending more “glitchy” probes. Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) insists on a manned mission, not wanting to give any other company an opening to make the actual discovery of extraterrestrial life before them. (Of course it’s NOT because she really, REALLY wants to go to Saturn. Nah, it’s proper science and a capitalistic boon that she cares about. Obviously, she does, and everyone else around her knows it. It’s quite funny to watch Kelly doing the song and dance for others around the conflict of acting like her stance is strictly for the Greater Scientific Good and completely unmotivated by her personal and professional excitement. How couldn’t she be!)
It’s at Baldwin family dinner where the two main narrative arteries reconnect. Kelly’s talked into fighting for her manned mission — and succeeds! — and Ed and his grandson Alex (Sean Kaufman) have it out. Lee’s arrest, which was speculated as being a romantic dispute (??) on the news, lit a fire in Alex and he wants to help Ed fight back. Ed gives a surly response: Alex never showed up for a Sons and Daughters of Mars meeting despite multiple invites and he should stick to running around his beach in his “little video games.” Though the rebuff seems meant to mark Alex safe from getting involved in the dicey plot he was hatching to save Lee, it was of course not a very nice thing to say, especially given Alex’s own health issues and the reasons why he was indulging in the VR beach at all. But Alex storms off, and he’ll almost definitely be laden with guilt over where he left things with Ed’s life in limbo at the episode’s close.
And back to the jailbreak: The last third of this episode is great, delivering the season’s first breath-holding flight action sequences – even if, like I already mentioned, the rovers are nowhere near as speedy as the kind of planes and ships Ed used to fly in his prime. But it’s the spirit that counts! Ed’s not even supposed to be flying, as we learned in Episode 1 during his check-up. But of course he would defy that mandate for one more major act of bravery to save (and repay) his friend from a worse fate, even if that means putting his own health on the line. Is he still alive when the MPK agents find him slouching in the seat of the Hopper? We’ll find out next week! Hang in there, buddy!
Transmissions from Happy Valley:
- A Starbucks in the Happy Valley food court… at this rate, we’ll be getting a new chain reveal an episode.
- Related thought: If Mars is growing its own food now, did they hack the right climate for coffee beans, too? Frankly, I’m very hung up on this supply chain.
- There will always be something entirely uncanny about the weird Mars/Baldwin spaghetti.
- Apparently, Lee and Ed are the only two jailed people in Happy Valley, going off their cell numbers (A001 and A002).
- I’m acknowledging Miles Dale’s (Toby Kebbell) suspicious meeting with Palmer James (Myk Watford) where Palmer tries to get Miles to turn informant since that will definitely be a relationship that blows up at some point this season.
- Fun fact: Battlestar Galactica writer/producer vets Bradley Thompson and David Weddle wrote this episode. The fellas sure do love a heroic captain type talking about rolling some unlikely dice!
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