Full spoilers follow for For All Mankind Season 5, Episode 10, which is streaming on Apple TV now.
Season 5 has not been For All Mankind’s strongest outing. The Apple TV series has had a rough go at it shepherding in the next generation of space explorers, mostly because they’re not expeditionary. They’re teenagers (Lily and Alex), cops (Celia Boyd, Avery “AJ” “Tabasco” Jarrett), and regular guys who are medium-bad negotiators (Miles Dale). In saying goodbye to Ed Baldwin, the show lost its beating heart (even if Joel Kinnaman was five layers deep in old man prosthetics), passing on that burden to two of the remaining true blue believers in the possibilities of space: his daughter Kelly (Cynthy Wu) and Helios CEO Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña), who remained the best parts of this season through the bitter end.
After an uneven trajectory in the nine previous episodes, Episode 10 finally steadies the ship to adequately bring the series into its next and final round, Season 6 set in the 2020s. I won’t get too carried away in giving the Season 5 finale its flowers: “This Land Is Our Land” mostly sprints through its bloated hour and 10 minutes — the longest episode of the season — to at least attempt to button up its many open holes, particularly the drawn-out mess on Mars. The conflict does have a resolution, and it’s Alex (Sean Kaufman) and AJ (Ines Asserson) who bridge the divide between the Marsies and Marines and deliver the crucial message that a ceasefire has been called before a violent showdown on Main Street.
The bonding moments between Alex and AJ, particularly over shooting a human for the first time after learning that their mutual buddy Haskell will survive, is poignant, but not every development and tete-a-tete lands with the same force. In particular, Alex and Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi) finally having it out reeked of “no other choice” syndrome to set up key points in the plot, including making Dev the one to climb to the top of the space elevator and manually hold up the comms antenna after his push for automation. His “the right people were here all along” monologue was corny, for sure, but I can’t say that him looking out over the sunrise on Mars after helping to heal a divide wasn’t at least a little moving.
What’s most suspicious about how Happy Valley plays out is how kumbaya it ends. There seem to be no consequences for anyone whatsoever, besides the Russian president Korzhenko disappearing to Crimea. The people who died at Happy Valley are honored with a proper and permanent memorial site; Miles (barf) is sworn in as the new governor and the SDM members who staged the rebellion are at the ceremony; and Dev helps replant the agridomes with Lee. I suppose the writers are waiting for the Season 6 opening newsreel to go over any of the negative fallout from the uprising and military operation.
The show had far less cleanup to do with the Sojourner crew stranded on Titan. The questions needing answered were far more simple: Will they find signs of life, and how will they possibly make it back to Mars facing an oxygen shortage and no comms with Aleida in the midst of the fighting on Happy Valley? The straightforward, if trope-y, beats on Saturn’s moon make what happens all the more impactful against the endless chaos on Mars. They find methane-based cells, literally a second form of life! But the only way the expedition crew would even be able to take that information back to the rest of humanity is if one of the three of them stays behind. Kelly demands it be her, fully owning her role as commander and taking the karmic payback on the chin for secretly overwriting Sojournor’s route to Titan. The speech in the video she made for Alex about enemies and unlikely friends felt… detached, even for the emotionally guarded Kelly. Mostly it scanned like it was written this way expressly for the purpose of foregrounding a montage of the feuding Marsies rebuilding Happy Valley together. (“This Land Is OUR Land,” indeed!) Regardless, a Baldwin is a Baldwin to the end, and it’s a real shame to lose two of the clan within the same season. Her final moments wading into a newly discovered bioluminescent lake (or however that phenomenon occurs on Titan) are beautifully melancholy.
That, however, is interrupted by a “Blinding Lights” needle drop (boo) and a zooming pan out into deep space. It’s officially 2020, baby! We’re left with a message in Russian (translated here via Google) on the screen of an ominously destroyed ship, MAP CP94: “D:/ Detection of GV 3.06.0451 // Nikulov, Loading…..,” if anyone would like to start theorizing what this could mean for next season! (“Nikulov” could be Sergei Nikolov, the head of Roscosmos who commits the USSR going to Mars and had a weird semi-romantic thing with Margo back in Seasons 2 and 3 before he was assassinated by Irina and the KGB in Season 4.) With the wrecked ship, will For All Mankind go full Alien in Season 6? Doubtful, but it never hurts to have a little fun killing time dreaming silly thoughts in the yearslong wait before it comes out; until then!
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