“For All Mankind” Goes Full Science Fiction in Its Fifth Season

Cynthy Wu in For All Mankind, now streaming. Apple TV

Ronald D. Moore is one of Star Trek’s most prolific writers. He worked on more than 90 episodes across Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, as well as the screenplays for Generations and First Contact. Then he cemented his status as one of the genre’s most important voices when he created the 2004 remake of Battlestar Galactica, still one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen.

Star Trek is only mentioned a couple of times in For All Mankind, the alt-history space race show Moore co-created with Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert. In some ways, however, Star Trek—or at least the optimistic, adventurous spirit it drew from and fed back into the zeitgeist during the 1960s—is the show’s true protagonist. After five seasons spanning half a century of space travel, most of the show’s original ensemble have either died or retired from the narrative. Who does the story follow in their absence? Whoever is most committed to the dream of a better future achieved through space travel; whoever wants to boldly go where no one has gone before.

For All Mankind’s first season was set in 1969, with a minor historical revision: The Soviets beat America to the moon. The series has followed the ripple effects of that one change in history. As a result, the space race never ended. Also, the Soviet Union avoided collapse, Al Gore became president, and John Lennon survived his assassination attempt. It hasn’t always been clear why a continued space race would change each particular event, but the show has had a lot of fun speculating.

Mireille Enos. Apple TV

An Evolving Series

Over five seasons, For All Mankind has transitioned from being primarily an alt-history drama, like Mad Men with astronauts, to pure science fiction, a sort of semi-prequel to The Expanse. The first season’s 1970s moon base Jamestown at least looks like the familiar NASA technology we’ve all seen in textbooks and movies. The “futuristic” spacecraft of season 5 (set in 2012) are wholly unrecognizable; they might be ported over from Star Wars or Alien. It has also transitioned from a show set on Earth, about people who go to space, into a show about people who live in space and occasionally get messages from Earth. That transition has not always been smooth, but it’s never not been fascinating.

The earliest seasons explored some well-known dramas of recent history. The white men of NASA were protected in a bubble of privilege that demanded little emotional intelligence. Women and people of color had to struggle to make their way through that system. The implicit sexism of the show’s title was contextualized by the drama. While all of NASA’s men enjoyed rich social lives, Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), the first woman in mission control, secretly lived in her office, her social life reduced to reading the new Stephen King novel before bed. The series’ title is a direct pull from the plaque Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left behind after their famous moon landing: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

Because Neil and Buzz came in second in the show’s timeline, the plaque never got left on the moon. Instead, astronauts now carry it around with them on new, daring voyages to whatever space rock happens to be next farthest out. In season 5, it’s picking up dust on Mars. A half century of unbroken, fully funded space exploration and research has not only brought humanity to the red planet—the red planet now has a Domino’s. Space travel beyond the asteroid belt seems to have stalled out, with increasing costs and little obvious payoff. However, Kelly Baldwin (Cynthy Wu), daughter of Apollo 10 astronaut Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman), wants to take the plaque to Saturn’s moon Titan to search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Ruby Cruz, Barrett Carnahan, Yael Chanukov, and Sean Kaufman. Apple TV

The show’s main drama, however, remains on Mars. After more than a decade of profitable mining, Martian workers have invited their families to live with them, formed communities together, and developed intense social bonds. The first generation of Martian children are graduating from high school. Mars has transformed from a mission into a place people call home. But the nations and corporations that own all the equipment want to automate to minimize costs and maximize profits. The ensuing conflict, between the people who think they own Mars and the people who call themselves Martians, has reached a boiling point.

In its first season, For All Mankind zeroed in on the decade after the moon landing. Because so much media gets made about that era, it felt very familiar. But the show charted the evolution and importance of space travel, science, the Cold War, America, masculinity, and civil rights within the context of a thrilling speculative alt-history that felt like nothing I’d ever seen before. It explored history from the perspectives of everyone from President Richard Nixon to Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña), an undocumented teenager who snuck into mission control, where her father worked as a janitor. All the excitement, unfairness, contradictions, and possibilities of that era were dramatized in ways that felt less like mythologization than an exploration of possibility (and a condemnation of the present by comparison). What if our society tried a little harder to live up to its loftiest promises? What if astronauts and scientists still inspired the national imagination in ways that changed the direction of history?

Coral Peña. Apple TV

Human Progress and Human Challenges

Season 5 is probably the best since the first, and for completely opposite reasons. Our familiar Earth is now just one bright dot in a crowded sky. The show is focused on Martian citizens in Martian cities fighting Martian battles over Martian interests. It might be set in 2012, but it could just as easily be 2112. At last, the journey from pure history to pure science fiction is complete. And yet, humanity has brought all its problems with it. Nations have brought violence and coercion. Capital has brought exploitation and corruption. Human nature has brought fierce violence and generosity, community and prejudice, courage and stubbornness. The Free Mars coalition and the authorities tasked with keeping it in check can no longer look one another in the eyes. Both sides have their reasoned acolytes, zealots, and outright wildcards. Violence flares up, and reasonable (and unreasonable) people do what they can in response. Despite leaving Earth in the dust, the show feels more like life on present-day Earth than ever before.

In the real world, we live in an age where space exploration has more of a mixed reputation. Billionaires send privately owned rockets into the sky for dubious reasons. Mention space travel to a random person, and you’re likely to hear some very reasonable criticisms about how money spent on rockets could be better spent on the many deserving, needy people on Earth. For All Mankind doesn’t ignore these concerns, but its characters have overwhelmingly decided they don’t match the benefit of continued space exploration. You might disagree, but if it’s a dealbreaker, then why are you watching the TV show about forever space travel? Alternately, my mom, an elementary teacher, told me in April that the Artemis II mission was the most excited she’d seen her students in 30 years of teaching. I remember feeling a similar way about the International Space Station launches in the 1990s. That inherent fascination people have with the stars is the fuel on which For All Mankind runs.

Sean Kaufman. Apple TV

The show struggled occasionally in its middle seasons to maintain that spark while also shuffling through a soap opera involving dozens of characters. Sometimes the litany of shortsighted left-wing agitators and secret communist spies has also made it seem frustratingly conservative. It’s a hard show to pin down, ideologically, because it’s so committed to dramatizing every exception, every possible consequence of an action. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica did the same thing: “What if the very religious president were a liberal?” “What if someone were so open-minded they gave their enemy a nuclear bomb?” Sometimes it was brilliant. Sometimes it was a little contrived. Sometimes it was “Black Market.” The same is true of For All Mankind, although nothing has been as bad as “Black Market” yet (nothing has been as good as “33,” either, though the first season comes close).

But at its best, For All Mankind acknowledges and even harnesses its shortcomings. It upsets every easy interpretation. And now, with season 5, the show has pulled a kind of reversal. It used to be about people trying to leave their homes for space. Now it’s about people trying to protect their home in space. Whatever my complaints about individual moments, I admire how committed the creators are to making a show where every life matters, where every choice has weight, and where the ultimate loyalty remains with that original vision: a collective future built from science and cooperation. And now, having broken almost entirely free of Earth and its familiar history, For All Mankind can ask these questions and explore their complications through the smart, serious pure science fiction the show’s creators made a career out of perfecting—the kind that uses visions of a distant, unfamiliar future to hold a mirror to the present. Heading into the sixth and reportedly final season, I remain sold.