‘For All Mankind’ Season 4 review: Life on Mars can’t escape Earthly problems
Meet the new planet, same as the old planet.
In Season 4 of “For All Mankind,” Apple TV+’s alternate history series about space exploration, the year is 2003 and there’s a multinational colony on Mars. Would it surprise you to learn all the fractious class issues on Earth are being replicated on Mars?
The astronauts and scientists are on top (literally living on the planet’s surface) whereas the grunts who do all the dirty work are underpaid, poorly treated and relegated to dark, subterranean dorms — and they’re not gonna take it. Finally, a recent TV show to depict labor organizing!
The series picks up eight years after NASA’s headquarters was bombed in last season’s finale. Both Stevens brothers are gone from the narrative and I couldn’t be happier. NASA still has a presence in the story, with Daniel Stern as the new administrator, who says things like “I’m not going to be the guy that authorizes the CIA to implement martial law on Mars!” But the space agency’s importance as a primary setting has been downgraded entirely.
The focus now is Mars. And Russia.
The former is where we find Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) stubborn as ever, now in silver fox mode and making eyes at a comely cosmonaut with whom he works.
His daughter Kelly (Cynthy Wu) and her Mars baby are back on Earth and baffled why Ed keeps putting off his return date. Face it, the man’s a lifer! Soon he’s joined on Mars by his old friend Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) — their “Hi, Bob” inside joke makes a reappearance — and it’s a lovely reunion. But Ed being Ed, the good vibes do not last for long.
Some of that is due to the aforementioned labor issues on the colony. The outpost is called Happy Valley, ironically enough. But the colony exists for mercenary purposes (they don’t call it a colony for nothing!) and everyone is focused on capturing asteroids to mine for lucrative minerals. One asteroid could be worth $20 billion. Actually harnessing it is more complicated than anyone anticipated. That leaves would-be miners stuck cooling their heels and working on HVAC instead — and not earning the rates they were promised.
Meanwhile, Kelly is frustrated with political and budgeting issues that have relegated her scientific research to the back burner. So she and engineer Aledia Rosales (Coral Peña) ditch their jobs at NASA to branch out on their own, hoping the private sector can fast-track funding for Kelly’s experiments on Mars.
Then there’s Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), the former head of NASA who was slipping info to the Soviets. The bombing at NASA was a convenient distraction, allowing her to escape unnoticed and defect to Russia, but she’s finding it a difficult adjustment, living a drab life under a new name. Things take a turn for the worse when there’s a power grab in the government but it just might get her closer to working with Russia’s space agency, which is her primary aim. That analytical mind wants to work.
Those are the three narrative threads of the season, which is less about space exploration or marriages gone to hell or even contemplating how different daily life might be when you’re on another planet. (Apparently it’s a lot like living on a submarine?)
Everyone is more or less in a state of deep annoyance. That’s not a bad storytelling device and I’ve always appreciated the show’s interest in showing what problem-solving can actually look like. The Happy Valley portions are richly detailed. There’s a black market on Mars. There’s pot on Mars. As with previous seasons, the geopolitical tensions are compellingly fraught. Throughout its run, “For All Mankind” has been a blend of the intriguing and the frustrating. There’s enough of the former to keep watching.
Toby Kebbell joins the cast as a guy who takes one of those crappy jobs on Mars and show creators Ronald D. Moore, Ben Nedivi and Matt Wolpert take the time to consider what might happen if a workforce on another planet threatens to go on strike. They organize but don’t formally form a union. (Surely some have been in unions previously and have some idea how this works?) It’s not perfect. But I’m not asking for perfect. I’m asking for these stories to exist in TV and film, because they exist in the real world right now. More than half of NASA’s workforce is union. It’s about time this show (or any show) considered why that is.
Earlier this year, Fox aired a reality series called “Stars on Mars,” which the physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein deemed “an incredibly well-done piece of propaganda” that normalized the idea of space commercialization. Most space propaganda would have us believe going to space will solve our problems. That’s a fantasy. “One of the points that many of us have been making,” said Prescod-Weinstein, “is that we take our problems with us when we go to space.”
The inhabitants of Happy Valley might agree.
In the real world, it’s unlikely space research will see funding unless there’s also a financial incentive in the form of extracting untapped resources.
To its credit, “For All Mankind” doesn’t run from that inevitability. The season’s overriding theme: Space is a business.
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'FOR ALL MANKIND' SEASON 4
3 stars (out of 4)
Rating: TV-MA
How to watch: On Apple TV+ Friday
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