For All Mankind: The Bleeding Edge

February 26, 2021 4:42 AM - Season 2, Episode 2

Margo must lead a seemingly impossible mission. Danielle wants to return to the moon. Gordo grapples with life on Earth.
posted by ellieBOA (22 comments total)

Gordo going back! That will be interesting.

What time does this air in the US (and the city you're in)?
posted by ellieBOA at 5:56 AM on February 26, 2021

Seeing Wayne & Karen hanging out in the golf cart was great but it didn't last long enough.
posted by kingless at 6:32 AM on February 26, 2021 [8 favorites]

Larry is going to be affected by either outing or AIDS, I predict. Hopefully it will have a fresh take on it.

The video phone in the conference room had a pretty good picture relative to the unit Ellen was using at Jamestown. Was that supposed to reflect rapid improvement in tech and delays in qualifying the latest tech for space use, or radiation damage to the moon equipment?
posted by cardboard at 7:26 AM on February 26, 2021

New episodes are supposed to drop at midnight EST, or UTC +5.
posted by cardboard at 7:28 AM on February 26, 2021

This episode (and the season finale of Dickinson) appeared on my Apple TV set-top box Thursday evening at 7:30 PM PDT.

Loved the Ed/Gordo/Dani reunion scene at the bar. #HiBob
posted by HillbillyInBC at 8:10 AM on February 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

Thanks both.
posted by ellieBOA at 8:47 AM on February 26, 2021

hey danielle you can go back but I’m gonna send the guy who went crazy on you last time up with you kthx
posted by sixswitch at 9:26 AM on February 26, 2021 [17 favorites]

And he doesn't even want to go - I just think spending millions of dollars sending him to the Moon instead of to therapy might do him some good.
posted by cardboard at 10:07 AM on February 26, 2021 [10 favorites]

Like ok I recognize Ed and Karen as them-but-older, and I'm not convinced that Margo and Ellen really changed at all, but maybe that's because Gordo and Tracy are at 200% different from where we left them and they wanted to keep some continuity.

Like, I honestly barely recognize Gordo. That's some commitment. If they have the actor slim back down from post-astronaut schlub back to his fighting weight, that's more than I expect from a premium TV series, y'know?

(Tracy.. Uh. It's the hair, I think. Lord, that hair.)

I'm looking forward to seeing how they're using the Shuttle on the moon. Is it just an orbital rendezvous and return vehicle, or are they going full on engine braking and Kerballing the shit out of it?

Any y'all real space nerds (I just play one in KSP, see) know what the Pathfinder they're referring to might be? Googling just gets me the Mars Pathfinder Sojurner mission and the solar powered flying wing from a few years back.
posted by Kyol at 7:38 PM on February 26, 2021

Gordo is a guy whose life had been dominated by luck, and good ole boy's club privilege, and led to believe it was all due to merit and hard work. When it came down to it, the fate of the crew, possibly the whole space program was put in jeopardy by Gordo's cracking, ultimately saved by the sacrifice of a woman, a black woman no less. And nobody's more aware of this than he is.

Ed thinking that Gordo just needs to get back in the game seems to clueless and patronizing, still not recognizing just how fucked in the head he is. I'm not sure even Danielle can see this, and she certainly has to harbor some resent for taking the fall over his failure. I think the story would done a great disservice if it makes Gordo get redemption by successfully jumping back on the horse.

Really curious to see what's up with young Aledia. I'm probably biased, but I really liked her storyline.

Margo cracks me up. My recollection was that there was a good deal of thought about how women could (or could not) "have it all". Whether or not true, she certainly doesn't. She wants what she wants, no more, no less. How pathetic to see someone living on PBJs, out of a vending machine, no less. For most people, that is. That sad state of affairs doesn't seem to register with her, though, which I find funny and kind of endearing. Maybe not so much was how she treated Aledia, who was almost positioned to be a kind of surrogate daughter, or at least a warm human connection, and yet treated more like a puppy.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:25 AM on February 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

IIRC, there was dialog in S2E1 referring to Pathfinder as a (3x?) more powerful Shuttle, of which there were many concepts. Maybe it's their Mars vehicle? Or just a version that can go straight to the Moon without refueling in LEO?

Scott Manley has a video about sending Shuttles to lunar orbit (contains discussion based on the S2 trailer, which I think counts as spoilers under fanfare rules).
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 11:17 AM on March 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

Pathfinder might be a nod to the Shuttle II concept. It was on the drawing board until the Challenger disaster shelved manned space flight for over 2.5 years.
posted by nathan_teske at 2:54 PM on March 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

I was a bit disappointed that even in this alternate history NASA still went down the path of a compromised space plane instead of focusing on more robust designs.
posted by jedicus at 5:35 PM on March 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

Oh yeah, I think Shuttle II came up in that Scott Manley video, and someone quipped "you thought closing the shuttle bay doors was hard? Lemme show you our next design where we split the spacecraft in half!"

And I wonder what the ratio of sea dragon to shuttle launches is like. I mean I guess the rocket that can huck a half-megaton into orbit isn't the answer for everything, but I suppose the 12-30 ton capacity of the shuttle doesn't get you new plutonium fuel rods on the moon either, apparently.
posted by Kyol at 7:08 PM on March 1, 2021

Half a megaton? Damn, forget about the Moon, they’d be on their way to Saturn with that kind of payload ;)
posted by adrianhon at 10:55 AM on March 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

Megaton, kiloton, whatever it takes. :)
posted by Kyol at 8:40 AM on March 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

I was a bit disappointed that even in this alternate history NASA still went down the path of a compromised space plane instead of focusing on more robust designs.

But there are more of them, the design is somewhat different—but they made a point of talking about heat shield close inspection.
posted by tilde at 8:14 AM on March 24, 2021

How is this space race/rivalry not completely bankrupting both the US and USSR?

The IRL Cold War became an economic and cultural war of attrition. Russia spent money that it didn’t have on Buran. We all know how that worked out.

In this universe, the US is not only invested in Shuttle, it’s built a ton of them while also still sending up Saturn-class vehicles (and bigger!), and is investing in an even larger iteration of the same fundamentally-unscalable platform. SeaDragon is even bigger, and can launch nuclear payloads. That might be fine, but apparently the reactors are easily damaged during a SCRAM, which means they constantly need to launch new ones! Who’s paying for this???

This is Reagan’s Star Wars delusion x1000. I can’t see how there isn’t eventual political blowback from the astronomical (no pun intended) cost of this program.

This show has shown shockingly little restraint in terms of its portrayal of real people (unlike literally anything else I’ve seen). Is Reagan’s dementia going to become an issue? Will his handling of the AIDS epidemic?
posted by schmod at 7:33 PM on January 11, 2022

Also, we should just put Margo’s assistant in charge of everything.
posted by schmod at 7:34 PM on January 11, 2022 [5 favorites]

The in-show handwavey explanation is something along the lines that NASA was able to patent space-age discoveries and sell them rather than just acting as a research branch for Ma Bell. Whether that holds up any better to scrutiny, ehhh? More handwaveyness.
posted by Kyol at 6:05 AM on January 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

I love that Karen and Wayne are still smokin' doobies together. And that Ed's cool with being a landlubber. He's so chill now you'd think he smokes up.

Gordo doing the Rotary Club circuit seems about right for him. He's looking like Nick Offerman and Tracy's looking like Meg Ryan.

Redhead is Not Happy to hear the oldsters jumped the line to the next flight. Um...I'm kind of confused as to why Gordo wanted back up and then is backing out? Also, he....does not look like he should be on a space flight any time soon. Like, I'd give him a few years to shape up/sober up first.

"hey danielle you can go back but I’m gonna send the guy who went crazy on you last time up with you kthx"

(Yeah, obviously she gotta keep an eye on him.)

I think Wubbo made the right call to spend his last few years at home with the family. Poor guy.

I reasonably assume Aleida ended up homeless for years. Am kinda concerned. But Margo probably doesn't even GO home and seriously wasn't gonna be a fake parent, so.

Larry and Ellen do have a nice friendship.

I'm sad to hear that after all this space progress we're gonna be laggy-ass on Mars like our reality (hahahahah like we'll ever make it to Mars even Elon won't make it to Mars).
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:00 PM on February 21, 2023

What an incidental FU to Dani. Ugh. But Gordo, you are a grown man, no one can make you go to space if you don't want to!
posted by tofu_crouton at 4:14 PM on November 5, 2023 [1 favorite]