For All Mankind

[libra]

Re: president Ellen. I definitely get they feel that they are heading for an alternate Lewinsky scandal, after the “don’t ask, don’t tell” by a different name. But maybe that is too obvious and they will surprise. And I hope too much focus is not put on it… I am here for alternate space drama, not earth scandal politics.

They do seem willing to zig when we expect them to zag. That final scene (with the guy in the car saying he had a big story) could lead nowhere. Or it could be the cliff-hanger at the end of the season.

I agree that I'm more interested in the space drama, not the Earth drama. I also wish that there was more focus on the problems of living on Mars rather than the interpersonal stuff (compare it to National Geographic's "Mars" from a few years ago). But by now we know that the personal drama is a big part of the show.

Yup, personal drama with the mandatory 2022 social issues - minorities rights and the whole enchillada (I won't use the word "woke" because it is presently deeply poisoned by both sides, and I say that, but I'm not even American in the first place, although such debates also happen in my country of course.)   

[Lars-J]

Re: president Ellen. I definitely get they feel that they are heading for an alternate Lewinsky scandal, after the “don’t ask, don’t tell” by a different name. But maybe that is too obvious and they will surprise. And I hope too much focus is not put on it… I am here for alternate space drama, not earth scandal politics.

They do seem willing to zig when we expect them to zag. That final scene (with the guy in the car saying he had a big story) could lead nowhere. Or it could be the cliff-hanger at the end of the season.

I agree that I'm more interested in the space drama, not the Earth drama. I also wish that there was more focus on the problems of living on Mars rather than the interpersonal stuff (compare it to National Geographic's "Mars" from a few years ago). But by now we know that the personal drama is a big part of the show.

Yup, personal drama with the mandatory 2022 social issues - minorities rights and the whole enchillada (I won't use the word "woke" because it is presently deeply poisoned by both sides, and I say that, but I'm not even American in the first place, although such debates also happen in my country of course.)

Maybe you are young, but those issues are not "2022 social issues". And they have been issues for decades, and certainly also in our "prime" '90s timeline. 

[Blackstar]

Maybe you are young, but those issues are not "2022 social issues". And they have been issues for decades, and certainly also in our "prime" '90s timeline. 

Yeah. One of the themes of the show has been how some events may change, but the bigger cultural issues of the time often did not move much. So there were different presidents, and in somewhat different order in the "For All Mankind" timeline, but many of the cultural and social issues were the same.

[Lars-J]

Well sadly they did not zag in this case, and it is indeed turning into “alt Lewinsky scandal”, with “bonus” supporting character Karl Rove, even. Maybe it will end differently, but yikes, I could really do without any of the Earth plots at this time. None of them interest me, at least the way they are doing it.

The Mars stuff is at least interesting, but the way they are turning Danny into a pantomime villain is a bit misplayed. Can they course correct and end it in an interesting way? I doubt it, but I have to hope.

The whole episode should have been about the Russo-Helios drilling operation instead.

[zack]

Danny needs to be thrown out the airlock. He and Jimmy joined the Joffrey Baratheon club.

[EE Scott]

Well sadly they did not zag in this case, and it is indeed turning into “alt Lewinsky scandal”, with “bonus” supporting character Karl Rove, even. Maybe it will end differently, but yikes, I could really do without any of the Earth plots at this time. None of them interest me, at least the way they are doing it.

The Mars stuff is at least interesting, but the way they are turning Danny into a pantomime villain is a bit misplayed. Can they course correct and end it in an interesting way? I doubt it, but I have to hope.

The whole episode should have been about the Russo-Helios drilling operation instead.

I have to agree about Danny - he doesn't seem to be struggling against his problem (he's just sort of marinating in his obsession as far as I can tell), which would have made him more of an interesting and sympathetic character. I do have hope that he'll be more than just a plot bomb that could go off at any time. My hope comes from the fact that up to this point these writers have provided us with so many wonderfully nuanced interpersonal scenes that I could seem them somehow pulling back from the brink with Danny's outcome.

[old_geez]

Well sadly they did not zag in this case, and it is indeed turning into “alt Lewinsky scandal”, with “bonus” supporting character Karl Rove, even. Maybe it will end differently, but yikes, I could really do without any of the Earth plots at this time. None of them interest me, at least the way they are doing it.

The Mars stuff is at least interesting, but the way they are turning Danny into a pantomime villain is a bit misplayed. Can they course correct and end it in an interesting way? I doubt it, but I have to hope.

The whole episode should have been about the Russo-Helios drilling operation instead.

I have to agree about Danny - he doesn't seem to be struggling against his problem (he's just sort of marinating in his obsession as far as I can tell), which would have made him more of an interesting and sympathetic character. I do have hope that he'll be more than just a plot bomb that could go off at any time. My hope comes from the fact that up to this point these writers have provided us with so many wonderfully nuanced interpersonal scenes that I could seem them somehow pulling back from the brink with Danny's outcome.

Well, Danny the plot bomb certainly went off in the latest episode…

[EE Scott]

Well sadly they did not zag in this case, and it is indeed turning into “alt Lewinsky scandal”, with “bonus” supporting character Karl Rove, even. Maybe it will end differently, but yikes, I could really do without any of the Earth plots at this time. None of them interest me, at least the way they are doing it.

The Mars stuff is at least interesting, but the way they are turning Danny into a pantomime villain is a bit misplayed. Can they course correct and end it in an interesting way? I doubt it, but I have to hope.

The whole episode should have been about the Russo-Helios drilling operation instead.

I have to agree about Danny - he doesn't seem to be struggling against his problem (he's just sort of marinating in his obsession as far as I can tell), which would have made him more of an interesting and sympathetic character. I do have hope that he'll be more than just a plot bomb that could go off at any time. My hope comes from the fact that up to this point these writers have provided us with so many wonderfully nuanced interpersonal scenes that I could seem them somehow pulling back from the brink with Danny's outcome.

Well, Danny the plot bomb certainly went off in the latest episode…

Just watched...he sure did, but not 100%. Of course we'll need to tune in next week to see how things go.

I'm also wondering about next week with respect to Pres. Helen Wilson. Quite the set up for next Friday.

[FutureSpaceTourist]

https://www.apple.com/tv-pr/news/2022/07/apple-tv-announces-liftoff-for-season-four-of-broadly-acclaimed-space-drama-for-all-mankind/

Press Release
July 22, 2022

Apple TV+ announces liftoff for season four of broadly acclaimed space drama “For All Mankind”

Apple TV+ today announced a season four renewal for “For All Mankind,” the hit, critically acclaimed space drama series from Golden Globe nominee and Emmy Award winner Ronald D. Moore and Emmy Award nominees Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert. The series is set to begin production on the new season of the alternate reality series next month. The news was announced during the show’s panel at San Diego Comic-Con, featuring series stars Joel Kinnaman, Shantel VanSanten, Jodi Balfour, Sonya Walger, Krys Marshall, Cynthy Wu, Casey Johnson, Coral Peña, Wrenn Schmidt and Edi Gathegi, along with executive producers Moore, Nedivi, Wolpert and Maril Davis.

Described by critics as “one of the best shows currently on TV,” “For All Mankind” explores what would have happened if the global space race had never ended. The series presents an aspirational world where NASA astronauts, engineers and their families find themselves in the center of extraordinary events seen through the prism of an alternate history timeline — a world in which the USSR beats the US to the moon.

The propulsive third season of the alternate reality series, which premiered to rave reviews on Friday, June 10, takes viewers to a new decade, moving into the early ’90s with a high-octane race to a new planetary frontier: Mars. The Red Planet becomes the new front in the Space Race not only for the US and the Soviet Union, but also an unexpected new entrant with a lot to prove and even more at stake. Our characters find themselves going head-to-head as their ambitions for Mars come into conflict and their loyalties are tested, creating a pressure cooker that builds to a climactic conclusion.

“For All Mankind” is created by Emmy Award winner Moore, and Emmy Award nominees Nedivi and Wolpert. Nedivi and Wolpert serve as showrunners, and executive produce alongside Moore and Davis of Tall Ship Productions, as well as David Weddle, Bradley Thompson and Nichole Beattie. “For All Mankind” is produced by Sony Pictures Television.
Season four of “For All Mankind” will join an expanding offering of global hit Apple Originals that have been recently renewed, including “Loot,” “Schmigadoon!,” “Severance,” “Pachinko,” “The Afterparty” and “Slow Horses,” as well as award-winning comedies “Ted Lasso,” “Mythic Quest," “Dickinson” and more.

Apple TV+ offers premium, compelling drama and comedy series, feature films, groundbreaking documentaries, and kids and family entertainment, and is available to watch across all your favorite screens. After its launch on November 1, 2019, Apple TV+ became the first all-original streaming service to launch around the world, and has premiered more original hits and received more award recognitions faster than any other streaming service in its debut. To date, Apple Original films, documentaries and series have earned 250 wins and 1,115 award nominations and counting

[Blackstar]

Well, new episode.





Spoilers









More spoilers.









You have been warned.







So that Mars slide was... bad. 

We start out with a lone cosmonaut wandering in the dust. It's Kelly's secret boyfriend. He wanders and wanders and finds one of the Helios people dead (turns out it's the beardo who turned his back on Danny in the hab, and Danny then screwed everything up). He finds another live Helios astronaut, and they find another dead cosmonaut. So that's two dead. Thanks, Danny!

Ed and Danny made it to the second rover, but it got buried. We find out that it is upside down under 20 meters of dirt. That's a lot of dirt.

The NASA people head over on a rescue mission, teaming up with the remaining Helios people and the cosmonauts. They set out to look for Ed and Danny. Kelly and her secret boyfriend go out in a rover looking for the buried rover. Oh, secret boyfriend is in bad condition and the audience is the only one to know this--when he vomited in his suit at the beginning of the episode I instantly thought "bad concussion." Yup. Kelly and secret boyfriend find the buried rover, then they go back to the hab. And then he dies. Kelly is distraught. Thanks, Danny!

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Back on Earth there's a bunch of stuff happening. President Ellen has gone to meet up with her past girlfriend, Pam. It's a pretty good scene as Pam explains that she dumped Ellen because she knew that Ellen wanted more, and she wanted Ellen to achieve more. And she knew that if Ellen stayed, she would eventually resent her. Also, Pam's disappointed that Ellen has not done more for gay people. That whole sequence was really well written. But it was a distraction from the much more interesting stuff going on at Mars.

Meanwhile, Karen has dropped in on Danny's wife Amber and Danny's morose brother Jimmy. Jimmy believes that the news from Mars is fake, just as he believed the news from the Moon about his parents was fake. He probably believes that spaceflight is fake too, even though he's been in Earth orbit. It's all a conspiracy! Anyways, Karen is supportive of Amber, who just cries. Jimmy tells Karen that he knows about her and Danny, and then he asks her why she did it. Karen says that she was angry at Ed, the space program, and herself, and she wanted to do something bad. When he asks why she picked Danny, she gives him an answer that he doesn't believe. Then he tells her that she took advantage of Danny, and she concedes that was true. I never accepted the Danny/Karen thing, and I think this sequence was the writers' attempt to explain it. But I always thought they just made up that affair because they were out of ideas, not because it made any sense (she's 30 years older than Danny). The scene ends with Danny and Karen admitting that they hate space exploration because of all that it has cost them--Jimmy's parents, Karen's marriage, and Danny's psyche.

Pause. Okay, both the Ellen/Pam scene and the Karen/Jimmy scene were nice. But they brought the story to a screeching halt. And they also would have been better if they had occurred several episodes ago to help explain these characters. Instead, they felt like they were shoved into this episode because the writers realized that we didn't know anything about Ellen and Karen's past motivations (decades ago!) and we needed to know them, now. Similarly, in Danny's confession scene he revealed a lot about his character, but it would have been better to know that a few episodes earlier instead of just thinking that he's a crappy human being for the entire season.

Back to the show...

In Houston, the Russians, NASA, and Helios people are all working on rescue plans. Billionaire Dev is morose because he thinks he has failed. Margo gives him a pep talk. He walks into the planning room with a plan--instead of trying to drill down to the rover, they are going to go into a lava tube beneath it, set off explosives, and the dirt will drain out and expose the rover. Blah blah blah equations, somebody says, and Dev shoots back that these are engineering details, and they're a bunch of engineers and should engineer the bleep out of the problem.

Back on Mars two of the NASA guys go into the lava tube, set up the explosives, and then solve the problem. I felt like there were a couple of deleted scenes here, because it seemed to jump around a bit.

During all of this time, we've had several scenes of Ed and Danny in the rover. Ed is badly wounded, Danny is a jerk. And Danny makes some confessions. He says that Ed's son Shane was always scared of Ed. He also says that Danny caused all the trouble when he was a kid and Shane simply went along with it, he was never the initiator. It was all Danny's fault, and he clearly blames himself for Shane getting grounded, then riding his bike and getting hit by a car and dying. Danny is harboring a lot of guilt.

And then, thinking that they are both about to die, Danny decides to tell Ed that he slept with Karen...

Just then the explosives go off, everything goes dark. Eventually Ed wakes up in the Helios hab/rover and he's recovering from having a piece of shrapnel removed. Kelly is crying over her secret boyfriend. Ed comforts her. Danny looks morose. Of course, Danny always looks morose.

And then the final reveal: Kelly is pregnant. Are we surprised? Given that we've had multiple scenes of those two doing the rumpy-bumpy, we are not surprised.



In case you're keeping count, we have three dead people (two cosmonauts and one astronaut) and a totally wrecked Mars colony mission, all thanks to Danny. Thanks, Danny!

I like this show, but the soap opera elements get a bit thick at times. Worse, it strikes me that they could keep many of these elements and simply better distribute them and the show would be better. But I'm no TV writer.

Two more episodes left. More than enough time to kill Danny. Who's going to do it? Ed, or Kelly?

Place your bets.

[ccdengr]

Two more episodes left. More than enough time to kill Danny. Who's going to do it? Ed, or Kelly?

I was thinking Danny was just going to walk out the airlock without a suit at the end of the ep.

[libra]

the soap opera elements get a bit thick at times. Worse, it strikes me that they could keep many of these elements and simply better distribute them and the show would be better.

You nailed it. Had Battlestar galactica, by the same Ron Moore, similar "soap opera" vibes ? I don't think so. Or at least they were kept under tight control. Never head similar critics about BSG, at least.

[EE Scott]

the soap opera elements get a bit thick at times. Worse, it strikes me that they could keep many of these elements and simply better distribute them and the show would be better.

You nailed it. Had Battlestar galactica, by the same Ron Moore, similar "soap opera" vibes ? I don't think so. Or at least they were kept under tight control. Never head similar critics about BSG, at least.

[spoilers below]




Yes, agreed. The high percentage of characters that have impending crap/doom is just a bit too much for me. That being said, when this show nails a scene, it nails a scene. The thoughtful dialogue, along with the fact that I've bonded with many of the characters will keep me watching until the end. For example, the quality of Ed and Danny's scene prior to them being rescued blew me away. After giving Danny almost no dialogue for a long time, he finally gets to express himself beyond brooding, and it was worth the wait. Still, the timing of the blast, right before Danny gets to his confession, had me rolling my eyes.

[Blackstar]

Like me, this guy did not like the design of the Soviet Mars-94 spacecraft in "For All Mankind," so he improved it:

https://twitter.com/WhaleOil2/status/1553200669867347968

[Blackstar]

FYI, for that artwork that WhaleOil2 did for his version of the Mars-94 mission, he modeled the lander on an actual Soviet Mars lander proposal.

It's still not a practical design for the overall architecture, but what are you going to do?


Update: some images of the Helios ship.

[Blackstar]

Episode 9 appeared today.







Spoilers.






Some spoilers.






You have been warned...









Okay, what the hell?! Did this show finally jump the Space Shark at the end?

The writers really like their time jumps, don't they?

The episode starts 5 months after the last episode. That skips over some issues, essentially presenting us with a fait accompli. Kelly is very pregnant. So there was no drama about whether she was going to have an abortion or anything, it's just going to happen. But the plan is to get her up to Phoenix in Mars orbit ASAP so that the baby can be born in one gravity. (Somebody has probably done the calculations for Phoenix, but that's not one gravity. You cannot realistically get to one gravity without a big radius.)

There's a neat time-lapse showing them uncovering the MAV (or is it MSAM?) and pulling it out of the dirt. They have to fix it. But it turns out that their rendezvous radar is smashed and they need a new circuit board. Where are they going to get one? It was manufactured in Kyiv (yeah, that place), and the Soviet Union sold them to a bunch of other countries, including North Korea. Remember them? There was a North Korean launch to Mars several episodes ago. That was foreshadowing right? You bet your sweet butt it was.

Oh, Danny has apparently stopped being a weenie and gotten off the drugs and now he's working hard to be a good astronaut. Do we expect that to last? Nope.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Aleida is still doing her investigation and she even has one of those giant clue boards like serial killers and obsessed detectives and Fox Mulder have in their garage. The only thing she is missing is the bits of colored string connecting names to events and a blurry picture of Bigfoot. All the clues lead to Margo. She tells Bill, who agrees that she is right and tells her she has to go to the FBI. She says no, she won't do that. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, Aleida. So Bill goes to the FBI and brings an agent to talk to Aleida, who is not happy and tells him that she will never talk to him again. She goes home and has a breakdown, which is not helped when her father shows up and confuses her with her long-dead mother--he's not in a good way, which is probably why she is divorced now.

Meanwhile, back at Helios... oh, I don't care.

At the White House, Ellen is dealing with her husband's infidelity and perjury. He is going to go and confess and throw himself to the wolves. But Ellen finally gets to the point that we knew she was going to get to--she goes on national television and declares that she is gay.

Back on Mars, the results of the accident investigation come in and they pin the Marslide that killed three people on the bearded guy who walked away from the console and left Danny in charge to screw everything up. Pinning the accident on the dead man. Danny doesn't like that and thinks it isn't fair. But he doesn't exactly confess his sins at that point.

They need a circuit board for their rendezvous radar and the nearest spacecraft is a North Korean lander. Danielle and the Soviet commander take a rover over there. As they're heading over, Kelly has a problem and she's dying or something. Danielle says they'll get the circuit board and head right back. She and the cosmonaut get to the North Korean lander and as they approach it they see footprints in the sand. Uh oh! They look up and there's a North Korean cosmonaut pointing a gun at them.

Oooooooohhhhh...

I thought that reveal at the end was rather stupid.

[Tywin]

SPOILER...







STARSHIP...Muskiana jajaja...

[sanman]

Actually, it's Nuclear Starship -- because Helios invented Fusion

I'm really not getting how a North Korean astronaut is hiding on Mars without the rest of the world knowing. How could he have made it all the way there without a much larger spacecraft like the other teams have?

Does this mean the North Koreans were really the ones who landed on Mars first?

[Blackstar]

I'm really not getting how a North Korean astronaut is hiding on Mars without the rest of the world knowing. How could he have made it all the way there without a much larger spacecraft like the other teams have?

Does this mean the North Koreans were really the ones who landed on Mars first?

Yeah, my reaction to that was a WTAF? Not in a good way. I respected that the show seemed grounded, but if they're just going to make stuff up out of thin air, then I'll lose interest.

[libra]

What a plot twist, really. Now somebody explains me how the NK guy survived for 6 months, stuffed in a tiny Soyuz.

Maybe North Korea invented hypersleep ? Or they just put the guy in coma and then loaded him into the capsule.