For All Mankind has always been a show deeply obsessed with cause and effect, with action and reaction, with decisions made and the consequences that follow. It’s baked into its alternate history premise for God’s sake: What would’ve happened if the Soviets beat the Americans to the Moon? What would be the ramifications, big and small, of that moment in history, of an extended space race and the Cold War being fought on an interstellar front? Sure, all good storytelling should be about building on what’s come before it, that’s the basics of plot and character development, but because of For All Mankind‘s epic scale and the bold decision of its creative team — the show was created by Ron Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Bedivi — to jump into a new decade each season, the audience gets to see just how sprawling those effects and those consequences are. 

Season 2 is the gold standard of how effective this can be, not only in the way it built upon the rising tensions in Season 1, but in the way it so clearly had a plan of how to get from A to B, even if it didn’t always look like it. It slowly set up markers along the way to a finale in which so many disparate elements came together in surprising and moving ways, and “The Grey” wound up easily being one of the best episodes of television last year. It stuck the landing in every way possible. It’s hard to say if history will repeat itself in Season 3 since critics weren’t given the final two episodes of the new 10-episode season (and those final two episodes of Season 2 were where things really got cooking), but here’s hoping For All Mankind has another fully-realized plan to reveal because Season 3 feels even more ambitious, and at times more meandering, than the two that came before it. For most shows, the race to Mars would be the entire season, but for one as bold as For All Mankind, getting to the Red Planet is only half the drama. 

7.3

For All Mankind

Like

• The action sequences remain as intense and gasp-worthy as ever
• The show continues to make bold storytelling choices
• The choice to get people on Mars by mid-season is smart and gives the story momentum

Dislike

• Danny’s storyline is hard to buy into
• Some interpersonal storylines feel like the show is stalling for time mid-season

The season kicks off in 1992, almost 10 years after our beloved Tracy and Gordo Stevens (Sarah Jones and Michael Dorman) duct-taped themselves up and ran across the surface of the Moon to stop a nuclear meltdown, Danielle Poole (Krys Marshall) bucked protocol to offer a handshake that cooled U.S./Soviet tensions, and Director of NASA Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt) had unwittingly become a Soviet asset. Now, Tracy and Gordo have become immortalized not only in a statue that sits outside JSC but in the hit romance movie Love in the Skies starring Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, Dani is waiting to hear whether she or Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) will be selected to command NASA’s first mission to Mars, and Margo, well, Margo has shared a whole lot of intel with her Soviet counterpart Sergei (Piotr Adamczyk) over the past 10 years. 

With the space program only getting larger and more powerful in the past decade, other things have changed too: Karen Baldwin (Shantel VanSanten) has become a pioneer in the space tourism industry, Ellen Wilson (Jodi Balfour) has left NASA behind for a quickly rising political career, and the discovery of an element called Helium-3 on the Moon has changed the clean energy game and catapulted engineer Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi), a major new addition to Season 3 and a nod to today’s space-obsessed tech billionaires, to the top of the power list as he tosses his company Helios into the space race in hopes of making Mars a “free enterprise zone” rather than letting two world superpowers split it amongst themselves like they did the Moon. Not even The Outpost, god bless it, remains untouched by time — I’m sorry to say it’s been franchised and turned into a space-themed Hard Rock Cafe. Ed and Dani don’t even want to “Hi, Bob” anymore, and you know those two will “Hi, Bob” just about anywhere.

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But all of these new developments don’t mean that the past doesn’t loom large this season — after all this is a show that, for better or worse, doesn’t forget. The biggest example of this, not surprisingly, is the fallout from Tracy and Gordo’s tragic deaths. Their sons Danny (Casey W. Johnson), now a rising NASA star, and Jimmy (David Chandler), who is getting deep into conspiracy theories, are both grieving in different but unhealthy ways, and there’s a complicated dynamic between Danny and Ed as Ed alternates between seeing Danny as a stand-in for his late-son Shane and his late best friend. That relationship is, unbeknownst to Ed (but very knownst to us!!), already complicated with that polarizing turn of events in Season 2 in which Karen made a colossally bad decision and slept with an infatuated Danny. 

If you wanted to forget that ever happened, there’s bad news: It plays a major role in the events of Season 3. In fact, this season puts a lot of the dramatic crux on Danny and his relationship with the Baldwins and in doing so, offers up the downside of For All Mankind‘s decision to jump forward in time. We hear about Danny’s dark time with alcohol and drugs before he got sober and settled down and we learn about how far his obsession with Karen went, but never seeing those things and not getting fuller, richer character development makes it much harder to buy Danny’s actions in Season 3. This show is no stranger to melodrama, but typically its soapier aspects work so well because they’re grounded in well-developed motivations — those are a little shakier in this specific storyline. It wouldn’t have been impossible to have shown us a glimpse of Danny’s life in the interim between Seasons 2 and 3 — the show proves that itself by recapping the relationship between two other characters in a gorgeous sequence at the top of Episode 3, all through sparse but deeply revealing scenes set in an elevator. I haven’t stopped thinking about that elevator sequence since the moment I saw it!

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Danny’s not the only one holding on to a secret that is most definitely going to come out by season’s end. There are powder kegs on the brink everywhere you turn, and yet somehow, their big reveals keep getting pushed off. Some are able to stall much more successfully than others, yet even when things might begin to sag you can tell this is all part of a plan to set up what could be a truly explosive finale. The storytelling is just so confident on this show (who else would make the first steps on Mars a laugh out loud moment?). 

Speaking of confidence, while some of the narrative choices remain confusing without the final two episodes to put them all in context, For All Mankind’s ability to create thrilling, intense action sequences remains wholly intact. From a space wedding (!!) gone terribly wrong to obstacles on the perilous road to Mars and yes, of course, problems once on the planet’s surface (oh you thought colonizing a new planet was going to be easy? That’s so cute), the action remains as relentlessly heart-pounding as ever, and it’s made all the more potent by the care the show takes to build intimate connections between characters. Space is a dizzying and dangerous place and For All Mankind never lets its characters or its audience forget it.

Premieres: Friday, June 10 on Apple TV+ (one episode, new episodes weekly)
Who’s in it: Joel Kinneman, Shantel VanSanten, Jodi Balfour, Wrenn Schmidt, Krys Marshall
Who’s behind it: Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, Ben Nedivi (creators)
For fans of: Spaaaaaaaace!, alternate history, The Right Stuff
How many episodes we watched: 8 out of 10

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