For All Mankind, one of Apple TV’s many compelling sci-fi shows, got through four seasons by asking a big question: What would our world be like if the space race never ended? In its fifth season, which premiered Friday, the show is starting to hint at its answer: It’s the same as our actual world, only with some of humanity’s biggest problems on Earth relocated to outer space.
The season starts the way every Mankind season starts, with a world-building montage of news clips that would seem like lazy exposition if it weren’t such pure fun, and frankly necessary, given the show’s labyrinthine universe. Season 4, which aired its finale just over two years ago, took place in 2003, when a rebel band of Martian heroes (in this case, actual humans living and working on Mars) “stole” a valuable asteroid by directing it into Mars’ orbit, thus forcing the United States and the still-existing Soviet Union to continue investing in the Red Planet so they could mine the asteroid. Now, with the fifth season, the show picks up in 2012, and all is not well. The asteroid is barely returning any valuable materials to Earth, where there’s a global populist backlash against the money-grubbing, elitist humans who are draining government coffers on Mars. (Sound familiar?) President Al Gore lost the 2004 election to a Mars-bashing Republican. Meanwhile, the Martian law enforcement appointed by the big world powers is acting awfully ICE-like toward the citizens living at Happy Valley base.
For All Mankind spent four seasons getting humans to Mars and showing how they might build a thriving colony there. This fifth season will still have strains of exploration in it, we learn, as the hunt for life heats up. But now the show’s characters are the dog that caught the planet, and they’re grappling with all that entails. What happens when Mars stops being aspirational and becomes a place where people have to live? And, heavens forbid, where they have obligations not just to each other, but to their species back on Earth? Most terrifying of all, what if people on Mars are just people who happen to live on Mars, with the same deficiencies as their former neighbors on Earth?
These are salient questions, considering their real-world parallels. Take a tech billionaire like Elon Musk, whose now-deprioritized SpaceX plan once promised to send a million people to Mars and establish a self-sustaining settlement sometime over the next few decades. Musk put forward the planet as a potential refuge for humans as we destroy our own, placing us at the center of Mars colonization pipe dreams. For All Mankind has never questioned that exploration of the heavens is extremely cool, but in this season, the show is clear-eyed about how ugly it might look in practice. The risk is especially acute if the wrong people take charge up there.
Not that everything on Mars seems so bad this season. The life our Martian friends have built looks neat, at first glance. The Mars base has a dive bar owned by a nice Russian named Ilya. It has street vendors who sell their wares in the galactic town square. There’s a small high school whose graduating class includes the grandson of the legendary and not-dead-yet astronaut Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman, in tons of old-guy makeup). There’s even a Domino’s. It’s a little dystopian in that humans still die in seconds if they go outside without a spacesuit, but there’s a real society here.
Also included in that society: a permanent underclass of exploited illegal immigrants called “craters,” because they snuck into crates for their journey to Mars. An awfully jumpy law enforcement force, unsubtly called the Peacekeepers. A duopoly of aerospace companies competing with each other for the right to plunder more of the universe. Deep political unrest, highlighted by anti-government graffiti that keeps popping up around the base. A murder mystery that closes the episode, as it turns out that a North Korean man didn’t take his own life by “pulling a Gordo,” the local term for running outside. (May the Martian pioneers Tracy and Gordon Stevens rest in peace.) Right-wing media back on Earth seizing on the murder as proof that the people on Mars cannot govern themselves. Billionaire space man Dev Ayesa (Edi Gathegi) angling to build a self-sufficient Martian city but realizing, much like his real-world counterpart Musk, that you can’t just vibe your way to human success on Mars.
The episode all but screams at us that being on Mars is not an escape from the difficulties of being human, a lesson that more should probably heed. Ed’s scientist daughter Kelly (Cynthy Wu) is trying to connect with her son, high-school grad Alex (Sean Kaufman), and having as much success doing it as most earthbound parents do in breaking through to 18-year-olds. It is Alex who discovers the North Korean man’s dead body after riding his space motorcycle off a jump and faceplanting. Martian rebel Miles Dale (Toby Kebbell) has settled down a bit, but now his daughter, Lily (Ruby Cruz), is spray-painting revolutionary graffiti like a little Martian Banksy. The grown-ups on Mars are split-screened with Aleida Rosales (Coral Peña), the brilliant aerospace engineer now running the business on Earth for Dev’s space company, Helios. Neither her boss nor own teen daughter will give her the time of day, or a break. One of the only characters who appears to be at peace is Aleida’s mentor, Margo Madison (Wrenn Schmidt), who sits in a box in a federal penitentiary for treason against the United States. One wonders if any of these characters might use deeper space exploration as a way to flee their problems, and how that might go for them as our season progresses.
Meanwhile, the last vestiges of Mars’ early promise are almost gone, but not quite. An elderly and sick Ed Baldwin wears an ankle monitor, a consequence of his role in the 2003 asteroid heist. The Mars authorities don’t send him back to Earth, instead letting him roam the base as a deanlike figure. No person on any planet has poured more of himself into the cause of a thriving Mars than Ed, but now he’s rabble-rousing at rebel meetings of the “Sons and Daughters of Mars,” urging a more militant response to the overbearing government on the base. He yearns to take another space flight, even though doing it could kill him. He wants his aloof teenage grandson, Alex, to take up his own revolutionary mantle, but the kid isn’t biting. The show treats Ed’s story with more gravity than Mars’ planetary environment does. Whenever Ed is gone, Mars will be light on leaders who had to fight for it back when it was just an idea.
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By the time this first episode ends, the fifth season of For All Mankind feels like it could be happening anywhere in the solar system. We have a murder, a refugee crisis, a reactionary political movement, a billionaire with a huge ego, high school grads amid an identity crisis, parents who can’t quite get through to them, and an authoritarian-looking police force keeping tabs on all of them. The series has always been good at serving up alternate-history parallels to what is actually happening in our world, but this season really hits us over the head with them: unsavory alliances between capital and overzealous law enforcement, anti-science populism on Earth, and the use of a society’s poorest members to do the bidding of its richest, just to name a few. The show sometimes feels less like a sci-fi show than a list of newspaper headlines you could find in the real world on any given Wednesday.
Speaking of newspapers, Margo reads them all day in prison as she ponders how she got there. But the most touching scene in the Season 5 premiere is the one where Aleida visits her incarcerated teacher. Both of these women have spent their lives figuring out how humans might live in space. One is now in a cell after getting played by Soviet intelligence, and the other has a big job and a long list of accomplishments but isn’t happy. Some 40 years after the series’ events began, this dalliance with outer space has not done either of them much good, to say nothing of the rest of humanity. Does that mean it was a multitrillion-dollar waste, or does Mars still have something worth finding? Our characters on Mars need to find out, but maybe the rest of us should spend some time contemplating it too.
