For All Mankind: Leningrad

December 14, 2023 7:39 PM - Season 4, Episode 6

Unlikely partnerships are formed at a high-stakes international conference.

Ed starts off by making his bed. Margo comes out from behind the Iron Curtain. Aleida negotiates her company out of a monopoly. Helios makes its workers regret clicking “accept” on their terms and conditions. Don Miles and the North Koreans make Ilya an offer he can’t refuse.
Danielle has a lot of work to do. Nobody considers the macroeconomic impact of 20 trillion USD of supply on a 40 trillion USD world economy. Elvis may not be dead. Kelly and son are in transit.

posted by cardboard (39 comments total)

This week on Space Mistakes!

- Letting the charismatic silverback make your case for you. Mariesa just got Trotsky’d.

- Several notable mispronunciations by Irina

- As pointed out, the deposit of 20 trillion tons of iridium in LEO would have some major impacts on ROI that went unconsidered

- Drinking like a Russian at 70
posted by sixswitch at 8:03 PM on December 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

One of the corporate world's craftiest schemes was to use their control of media to make common workers believe unions are the enemy. Perhaps the Mars strike will turn out to be the inflection point in this alt-history for a more constructive trajectory on that front.
posted by fairmettle at 10:20 PM on December 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

man, the difference between how miles thinks he's doing and how miles is doing is just delicious. my man all up there on mars, all thinking he's the new head of the mars mafia, meanwhile only thing standing between him and getting airlocked by the actual mars mafia is the goodwill of a *checks card* north korean goon squad? a north korean goon squad with infinite blackmail material on him?

i am loving the way that miles is each and every episode making things so much worse on himself and at no point does he allow himself to notice
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:26 PM on December 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

> Perhaps the Mars strike will turn out to be the inflection point in this alt-history for a more constructive trajectory on that front.

i mean i'm hoping for a rosy outcome too but also i feel like they're telegraphing that the labor action on mars is gonna, uh, send things on a certain, uh, trajectory.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:31 PM on December 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

So, the Molly Cobb Revolutionary Navy is going to launch a mission to redirect an asteroid. I see where this is going.
posted by ewan at 2:26 AM on December 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Teared up at the Margo and Aleida hug. I really like the Soviet Union stuff this season and so much of that is because of the characters and actors for Margo and Irina (the head of Roscosmos).
posted by adrianhon at 6:53 AM on December 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

so what i think is that either worker exhaustion or the ineptitude of hastily-recruited scabs is going to lead to a colossal fuckup, and that as a result of that colossal fuckup the last two episodes are going to be about aleida, margo, and whatshername the creepy roscosmos lady blasting it to bits with the nuclear weapons plan that creepy roscosmos lady immediately rejected, not to retrieve it but just to keep it from don’t-look-upping earth.

like they’ve done a lot of planting by talking at length about dart. the scene with whatshername the creepy roscosmos lady fucking up the acronym served the immediate narrative requirement of showing that whatshername the creepy roscosmos lady doesn’t actually know her stuff, but also serves the longer-term narrative purpose of priming viewers to think about why nasa (in both timelines) does asteroid redirection tests.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 6:54 AM on December 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

"Cinnamon mouse-ass?"

"Loading dock is now closed to you and your rocks."

"Yeah, I guess I'm just a lazy fuck." -I note that yeah, apparently Ed is still somewhat employed and thus not being kicked off Mars.

I just went OH NOOOOOOOOOOOO when Margo suggested working with Aleida.
"So you're ready to be the most hated woman in America?"
"My drug is the work."
OMG AND THEN SHE JUST BARGES INTO ALEIDA'S ROOM WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK MARGO.
I...did not expect hugging.

Miles is the new Danny. I mean, he's not totally disgusting like Danny yet, but he thinks he's smart and he is not. Also, you kicked a man out of his own bar?

To be fair, I'm utterly stumped as to how rando dudes on Mars would be able to get a woman OUT OF NORTH KOREA. With like, no contacts there, no advantages, nothing.

Poor Bill. He was lucky.

"I am an old pot stirrer from way back then, but this is shaken, not stirred...Never mind."

5000 points vs 500?! Jeebus Christ.

Samantha's the brain power around here, for what that's worth.

WTF is this propaganda statement from Margo.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:01 AM on December 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

i'm really vibing on miles's storyline in precisely the way i didn't vibe on danny's, because "i am a dumb dude in over his head with reach that way exceeds his grasp! watch me fuck up everything i touch!" is a more interesting storyline than "i'm craaaazy! i'm super fuckin' craaaazy!! i'm gonna blow up everyone on mars!"
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:35 AM on December 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Danielle said "...or die trying." so I guess she's gonna die at the end of the season.

I suspect things will go wrong with the asteroid deflection, it will be on a collision course with Earth, and someone will sacrifice themselves to save everyone.

This show has always suffered from this thing where there are only like three people at NASA who do everything. What's-his-name the head of NASA suddenly says "wait... why don't we send Goldilocks to Earth!" as if there wasn't already a giant team of engineers in a room somewhere who had thought of doing exactly that.

It's still better than last season though. I'm actually liking how this is going, rather than hate watching like I did through all the Danny nonsense.

I also can't believe Margo was alive all this time and nobody in the USA knew it. Unless the CIA knew about her but never made it public to avoid embarrassment or for some strategic purpose.

Wondering if next season (if there is one) will jump ahead to a time after Goldilocks is mined and humans are living in some lithium-rich utopia on Europa.
posted by bondcliff at 8:26 AM on December 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Whenever the last season is, the epilogue of the last episode should do some sort of ludicrous massive time jump, 500 years later. Mars is an Earth suburb, there are vacation spas on Europa, NASA is managing a network of wormholes, etc. Somehow Ed Baldwin is still walking around talking about Moon bases. "Hibob" has replaced "Hello" as the standard greeting, but no one knows why.
posted by mikepop at 9:04 AM on December 15, 2023 [7 favorites]

Hibob!

I wonder if, in the original long term schema for the show, Miles was supposed to be Danny, disgraced and bumped down to fuel tech but still around, and getting into conflict with Ed.

Space Mistakes, addendum:

- not replacing the filter valves above the condenser tubing
posted by sixswitch at 9:23 AM on December 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

> Danielle said "...or die trying." so I guess she's gonna die at the end of the season.

no you are lying danielle is elected president in 2008 michelle obama is her running mate
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:37 AM on December 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Scene 1: Bosmang Ed goes to the Space Bar and makes friends with the owner, Ilya.

Scene 2: Miles and his fellow chimps from North Korea muscle Ilya out of his space bar.

Scene 3: Writes itself. Presumably next week.
posted by Nelson at 3:53 PM on December 15, 2023 [5 favorites]

WTF is this propaganda statement from Margo.

Obviously, she doesn't believe what she says. If the head shaking body language of her prepared statement wasn't enough, we had the "who exactly is she addressing" exchange over the earpiece where Margo said Star City was run like a spy agency rather than a science program.

Her press conference was exactly what you'd expect: a coerced statement from the defector declaring their new benefactor's ideals trumps the West. Capitalism bad, democracy bad, noble Soviets elevate mankind. It serves three purposes:

1. It's a commitment device, it makes her weak locally and unable to return to the US without facing treason charges
2. It makes the West look weak, and the Soviets look strong, in the brutal sense of coercing people into confessing things they don't believe
3. It can be used for internal propaganda, though it would be better if delivered in Russian.
posted by pwnguin at 5:47 PM on December 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Is Iridium all that useful? How many fountain pen nibs does Earth really need?

I love how everyone's talking about the asteroid being worth 20 trillion dollars when they haven't considered that part of the value of Iridium is its rarity. If there was suddenly a few hundred percent more Iridium on earth wouldn't it lose its value?

I mean, if an asteroid made of 100 times the Gold that exists on Earth landed here, the very first thing that would happen is a huge drop in the price of Gold.

And with the tiny quantities of Iridium we currently need, can we scale everything else to make that amount useful anytime soon?

Also I don't think a 10:1 ROI is all that great when you're talking about something that has huge risks of (a) not working out, and (b) catastrophically colliding into Earth killing millions of people.

Miles is totally the likable version of Danny. I mean, he's incompetent and wildly overconfident and will probably get some people killed, but he's not doing his job on drugs or bragging about sleeping with anyone's wife... so far.

I do think Ilya has more connections than Miles thinks (including the un-corked Ed) and I'm worried he'll be wandering out of an airlock with no spacesuit soon. At the very least Ed has the power to fire Miles and send him home...

I'm glad Sam is leading the union/revolution because she's way smarter than Miles.

Ira continues to get amazing amounts of Old White Guy credits for stating the obvious. Last week it was remembering that India exists, this time it was... remembering that Earth exists?

And why isn't there a room full of scientists at NASA or the White House "working the problem"?

I did like Aleida and Margo's reunion though.
posted by mmoncur at 11:58 PM on December 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

Is Iridium all that useful? How many fountain pen nibs does Earth really need?

Perhaps unobtanium might have been better suited the story, but otherwise the science checks out.

The first impact tracer linked to a severe mass extinction was an unearthly concentration of iridium, an element that is rare in rocks on our planet’s surface but abundant in many meteorites. In 1980 a team from the University of California at Berkeley - led by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez and his son, geologist Walter Alvarez - reported a surprisingly high concentration of this element within a centimeter-thick layer of clay exposed near Gubbio, Italy. The Berkeley team calculated that the average daily delivery of cosmic dust could not account for the amount of iridium it measured. Based on these findings, the scientists hypothesized that it was fallout from a blast created when an asteroid, some 10 to 14 kilometers (six to nine miles) across, collided with the earth.

Even more fascinating, the clay layer had been dated to 65 million years ago, the end of the Cretaceous period. From this iridium discovery came the landmark hypothesis that a giant impact ended the reign of the dinosaurs—and that such events may well be associated with other severe mass extinctions over the past 600 million years. - via

posted by fairmettle at 12:21 AM on December 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

> And why isn't there a room full of scientists at NASA or the White House "working the problem"?

basically the show leans pretty hard into the paired tropes of depicting

1. what would in the real world be large teams of scientists as if they're one or two super-competent people
2. what in the real world would be worked out behind the scenes over the course of weeks, months, or years as if they were ideas that just suddenly came to the principals during a meeting or summit.

which on the one hand i really wish more shows/works of fiction wouldn't do that, but on the other hand the "here's something complicated involving a ton of people acting over a long period of time but we're gonna make it human-scale relatable by saying it was all done by like four dudes who just happened to be way smart and have superpowers" narrative convention runs deep, like i was going to say it goes back to homer but really it goes back to gilgamesh or before.

there's probably some words from the field of "how do people write a fiction tho?" that i don't know for this, but i don't know them.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 6:38 AM on December 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, that makes sense. I would have just liked to see a couple more people involved. As it is we ended up with "Only one person on earth was able to figure this out, but thankfully another person who everyone thought was dead who was in this field 10 years ago is here to help!"

I guess the M7 conference was just the beginning of the process and rooms full of people probably worked on it for a while after that. It's the fast-forward nature of this show that gets me sometimes.

I am very happy we got a scene where two women were the only ones who could solve a highly technical problem by doing science though. Also loved Irina trying to "Connecticut" the dots with Margo in her ear.
posted by mmoncur at 6:45 AM on December 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Why would you try to move a 1.1km asteroid into Earth orbit? Any mistakes and it would be devastating for Earth. At least put it instead into lunar orbit so its in a much safer position if things go wrong.
posted by ShooBoo at 6:48 AM on December 16, 2023 [5 favorites]

I mean, if an asteroid made of 100 times the Gold that exists on Earth landed here, the very first thing that would happen is a huge drop in the price of Gold.

This is basically the story of the Spanish adventure in the New World: they imported so much silver it caused massive inflation in all of Europe. And heck, it largely came from one specific rock / mountain, and we've only gotten about half the silver out. So there's definitely historical precedent everyone in charge should be aware of, or be made aware of by their staff.

But also: it sounds like brining Goldilocks closer to Earth would be faster but also cheaper. And if both are true, is the m7 really required to do this? Or can a sufficiently well capitalized and prepared actor like Helios bring it to earth now on its own and figure out the mining logistics later, confident that the market will find a way? Dev seems in a position to either ship the rock back home himself, or ship it to mars to sustain Happy Valley and martian trade. If they yeet it into the surface of Mars to simplify the mining, would anyone even notice or would it just be a particularly angry dust storm?
posted by pwnguin at 11:58 AM on December 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

Not only did Potosi cause global inflation from the silver glut, it also wreaked an absolutely hideous human toll on the people (mostly indigenous, some imported from Africa) that the Spanish enslaved to work the mine. That mine is still killing people today. Let's hope that Helios doesn't follow Spanish labor practices.

The other problem with the 10x return is that it only comes after 20 years. I doubt the marketing folks properly discounted that return by the time value of money. For comparison over 20 years you get a 2.7 x return investing money safely and easily at a 5% interest rate. No asteroid capture, market speculation, or slave labor required.
posted by Nelson at 12:49 PM on December 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Surely the whole iridium thing is just setting up an earlier transition to oled screens. But seriously, even if a sudden glut of iridium changed pricing, it could also enable things that weren’t possible before because no one would have considered iridium alloys due to cost.
posted by snofoam at 4:24 PM on December 16, 2023 [6 favorites]

Nitpicking from first principles, how do they even know it’s $20 trillion of iridium by looking at it through a telescope? Sure, they could figure out if it’s ice, rock, or metal from size and gravitational influence, but I’ve worked in mineral exploration and you need to get remote sensors into orbit to get a good enough read on things to figure out specifics.

ideas that just suddenly came to the principals during a meeting or summit.

It streamlines the story, but writers also think the world operates like a writers’ room.
posted by cardboard at 6:19 PM on December 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

I kind of miss having a character (rather than Al Gore) in the White House. I feel like if we still had Ellen or someone else as President they would have had a meeting with economists and accountants and someone in THAT room would have raised all of these ROI questions.

Also they definitely would have someone who would raise the issue of sending a very heavy 1.1km missile plummeting toward a random location on Earth...
posted by mmoncur at 10:59 PM on December 16, 2023

Wild card prediction: the mission not only does not succeed but they lose the asteroid completely - taking Danielle and others along with it to deep space.
posted by azpenguin at 12:23 PM on December 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Miles the boss is one of the most hilarious things this show has ever done. He has simply done one misstep after another since his introduction:

1. Signed up with Helios, only to discover he's making less than he was on Earth.

2. "If It Ain't Broken, Don't Fix It" the still, which resulted in him sneaking into NK compound and working out a deal that ends poorly for Ilya (and probably Miles).

3. Decides to go on his own rock collecting Mars walk, nearly dies but for one person caring to look for him.

4. Went behind Ilya to get moon rocks, threatened and kicked out of the money making venture.

5. Kicked Ilya out of his black market scheme (and bar) .... we know something is coming.

I like Miles, but gawd, the odds of him getting back to see his girls again is diminishing rapidly.

Margot's statement was everything I expected of someone making a statement as a defector to the USSR. Which is to say, no one out of the USSR should take it at face value if they grew up during the Cold War (wait, is that still going - reignited?) I think they handled Aleida's reaction pretty perfectly. I have the impression this season will either end with Margot taking over RosComos or somehow getting back to the US.

Ed, stirring up the crap, Baldwin. Taking the petty "I'll throw a wrench in your gears and bring Happy Valley to a screaming halt" revenge against Danielle. What a jerk, but totally Ed.
posted by Atreides at 8:48 AM on December 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

add to the list of miles missteps his obvious and very checkable lie about having a degree that he 100% doesn't have. i'm guessing that that original sin gives helios an excuse to ship him home at his own expense whensoever they please. and, given what we know about how helios writes contracts, it also most likely gives them grounds to request that he pay back every penny they've ever paid him.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:05 AM on December 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

If a mission critical Mars-based corporation doesn't fact-check Miles' resume, it's likely not coming up until well into his Senatorial campaign.
posted by fairmettle at 7:05 AM on December 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'd wager with Mile's weird momentum, it'd be after the Senate victory, but during the presidential campaign.
posted by Atreides at 7:17 AM on December 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

> If a mission critical Mars-based corporation doesn't fact-check Miles' resume, it's likely not coming up until well into his Senatorial campaign.

hypothesis: they've known from the start — the helios way is to get labor out of him and then take back all the money because whoopsie looks like you told a porky pie on your application lol
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:33 AM on December 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'd wager with Mile's weird momentum, it'd be after the Senate victory

Wait, was Miles not on the volleyball team?
posted by pwnguin at 8:58 AM on December 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

Wouldn't be surprised to Miles dig himself in so deep he defects to North Korea to escape prosecution.
posted by mikepop at 10:39 AM on December 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

why would north korea let him in? he's consistently failed to deliver on what the big boss wants, he helped ilya string said big boss along, and has at this point no plausible path forward for ever actually delivering?
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:20 AM on December 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I assume that guy wants his wife so they can defect away from North Korea. He's not exactly in a position to veto a defector because they haven't aided his request to betray his own country.
posted by pwnguin at 12:06 PM on December 19, 2023

Is Iridium all that useful? How many fountain pen nibs does Earth really need?

Been thinking about how useful it would be and where. Wikipedia says it withstands high temperatures and resists corrosion. You could make boats out of it, but that's not useful on Mars, and only a marginal gain on Earth.

You know what else is hot and acidic?
posted by pwnguin at 12:13 PM on December 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

If they yeet it into the surface of Mars to simplify the mining, would anyone even notice or would it just be a particularly angry dust storm?

I suggested they crash it into the moon, pretty sure even a 1km asteroid isn't going to do much there, plus faster/cheaper shipping.
posted by Sparx at 1:33 PM on December 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

For anyone who got curious like I did: the scenes set in the Soviet Union were filmed in Sofia, Bulgaria.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 5:07 PM on December 19, 2023 [4 favorites]

> You know what else is hot and acidic?

me.

this has been your bombastic lowercase pronouncement for the day
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:09 PM on December 19, 2023 [3 favorites]