Full spoilers follow for For All Mankind Season 5, Episode 8, which is streaming on Apple TV now.
It’s kind of late in the game for For All Mankind Season 5 to finally be throwing straight heaters like it’s Season 1 or 2, but better late than never! Rolling with the momentum from the particularly strong episode before it, Episode 8 is easily the high point as we near the end of the season. “Brave New World” has all the hallmarks of For All Mankind at its best: political wheeling and dealing, nailbiting and dangerous flight action, gorgeous shots of outer space (for a show predominantly set on Mars, we’ve been treated to remarkably few of these!), meaty interpersonal drama (replete with, finally, some consistently decent acting), a couple of funny in-universe cultural signifiers sprinkled in that feel meaningful to the era the show is representing, and – last but not least – a big explosion with disastrous consequences.
Despite the collective relief of watching Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu) and the Sojourner crew land on Titan, Happy Valley is feeling the squeeze on its food supply after Dev’s faction blew up the crop domes and the storage silos. But the jailed Russians, Kuragin delegate Irina Morozova (Svetlana Efremova) and Happy Valley governor Lenya Polivanov (Costa Ronin), have it on good authority that the M-6 is weeks away from dissolving, the result of the USSR and U.S. economies being in free fall due to the halted iridium shipments from Mars. With the alliance, and the Russian President Korzhenko, on the way out, Irina and Lenya can all but guarantee a more favorable outcome for the Marsies — if they can hold out for a few more weeks and the SDM agrees to surrender. Big decisions!
Another wrinkle complicating things: Irina has also learned that, in a last-ditch effort to strong-arm Happy Valley into submission, Earth has secretly sent a multinational military crew to the Goldilocks asteroid to retake Kuznetsov Station. On that ship is none other than new OPEF recruit Avery “AJ” Jarrett (Ines Asserson). (Not to mention Connor Storrie doing a Russian accent for five seconds!? What in the Heated Rivalry crossover event is happening?)
The SDM council’s chess move against the incoming force is to destroy the dock at the station with unstable, Anarchist Cookbook-style fertilizer bombs, given their limited resources. Celia Boyd (Mireille Enos) and Lenya do the coolest thing either of them have done all season and volunteer to fly a hopper – with a cargo full of volatile explosives in a raging dust and thunder storm – out from Mars and up to Goldilocks. It’s a truly thrilling sequence that also leads us to some of the nicest space eye candy we’ve been treated to in a minute, as that hopper punches through a sea of rust-colored dust and the camera pulls back to a full shot of Mars before moving off to a thoroughly pock-marked Goldilocks dotted with flood lights and mining infrastructure. A lovely bit of emotional (and certainly expensive) visual storytelling.
And indeed, it’s a pivotal episode for AJ, whose attempts at keeping it together while being haunted by the big red dot of Mars — and her biological dad — are altogether shattered by the explosion on Kuznetsov Station that kills Sergeant Ruiz. It’s like the moment she left Earth’s atmosphere, that woman was destined to face unfathomably awful things – the curse of being a Stevens.
Elsewhere on Happy Valley, Alex (Sean Kaufman) and Lily’s (Ruby Cruz) honeymoon phase is waning as they weather the fallout of the agri-dome explosion and the death of their close friend Gulsora “Gully” Akilmatova. Alex has gone the route of joining the new law enforcement services under Boyd as a medic, which Lily hates. And Lily is roiling, swearing off ever going back to Earth (what about journalism school at Tulane?!). Instead, she channels her anger into finishing Gully’s black-and-white student thesis film, “Astéroïde, Mon Amour” — I’m sorry, but lmao — with her own documentarian bent, filming a Marsie worker who writes protest folk songs. Pretty good tune, though!
Meanwhile on Titan, Kelly is trying to keep the crew on track with troubleshooting the real problems at hand. They’ve landed just a little too far from the initial survey area, making on-the-ground exploring with their oxygen reserves potentially risky. While Kelly and the others attempt to hack out a solution, Walt (Christopher Denham) is spiraling out over where he went wrong when trying to avoid landing on Titan. Kelly very nearly comes clean about her sabotage — until he hands her the reins to the mission. Let’s see if she can throw enough compliments and jangle metaphorical keys long enough to keep Walt from losing it while they’re on the very important quest for life on Saturn’s moon.
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