Full spoilers follow for For All Mankind Season 5, Episode 9, which is streaming on Apple TV now.
Just when it seemed like For All Mankind had found a groove this season, “Sons and Daughter” barrel-rolled in to bump it off track. Two-thirds botched military invasion of Happy Valley, one-third science lab procedural on Titan, the two parts come together to make a sloppy whole that serves neither particularly well.
The M-6’s Marines, undeterred by the disaster at Kuznetsov Station, have touched down on Mars. What starts as promising — a pan over to Avery “AJ” Jarrett (Ines Asserson) looking like she’s doing her best to avoid a breakdown after watching her superior die last episode — gives way to a relatively unsophisticated showdown between the holed-up Marsies and trigger-happy Marines. Worse, these scenes are laden with cliche-filled dialogue that narrates exactly what’s happening on screen. You don’t need to tell me the M-6 ships are here, man, I just watched a whole fleet of them fly in and land among Happy Valley’s HABs and next to the decimated silos 10 seconds ago.
Despite these scenes feeling muddled, it is still sad to see the halls of Happy Valley fill up with dead bodies as OPEF shoots its way through the base, even recklessly turning their guns against the pro-Earth MPK squad which included Palmer and others who had defected to Helios. Like a Marine says, the whole thing is FUBAR.
As part of the chaos, Lily (Ruby Cruz) and Alex (Sean Kaufman) are forced into taking their first big steps into adulthood. For Lily, it’s a crash course in war photojournalism and choosing whether or not to accept the truth about her dad’s role in the ‘03 riots. For Alex, it’s applying his Happy Valley Corps training in real-deal field medic scenarios; to his credit, he was pretty damn calm for his first brush at emergency medicine being a bullet wound. And despite the straightforward shoot-em-up that makes up most of the Happy Valley invasion, Alex did get the one major cat-and-mouse scene – hiding in the ducts – that added some tension to the melee. It’s a shame, then, that he was the one who fired first on his old pal Haskell in their shared shortcuts, but it did get him his direct path back to Dev’s doorstep.
If the action on Happy Valley showed too little restraint, the secondary plot on Titan didn’t go far enough — and I mostly mean that in a literal, time progression sense. I have absolutely no issue watching machines whirr (cool) and scientists carefully collecting samples (mossy) before fretting over lab results (they’re inconclusive!). In fact, I thought the developments on Titan largely saved the episode, down to the attention to detail of their field equipment and the coral-like matter they collect from their SEEKER probe. Unfortunately, it felt like an arc split in half for the sake of having a big cliffhanger to save something for the finale next week. “Sons and Daughters” was a relatively short episode as it is, clocking in at less than 45 minutes. There was plenty of time to close the loop on what happens with the puncture in Elena’s suit AND set up enough intrigue about what is (or isn’t) on Titan to carry us through to the finale.
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